I’ve pointed out the difference between the two elections in which Trump ran for President. 136,000,000 people voted in 2016 and Trump won. 158,000,000 people voted in 2020 and Trump lost. If those missing twenty million people had showed up in 2016, Trump would never have been President. If Trump had never been President, the Roe decision would still stand and the Obergefell decision would not be in danger.
I realize the people who voted for Trump helped put him in power. But those people wanted Trump to be President, however foolish that desire is. So I am more annoyed at the people who didn’t want Trump to be President but didn’t bother to vote to stop it from happening.
…if those missing twenty million people had shown up to vote in 2016 in the wrong states, then Trump would still be President. The margin of victory in the three states that mattered was just 79,316 votes.
Right. And, just to keep the emphasis where it belongs, if twenty million fewer people had voted for Trump in the right states, well… we’d be living in an alternate reality.
The people who are responsible for voting Trump into office are the people who voted for Trump.
Whether people stayed home because they couldn’t stomach the idea of another famous name getting elected to office on account of said name and not much else, because they could not abide Hillary Clinton or her policies specifically, or because they were in the midst of an unrelated and emotionally crippling mental health crisis and so could neither find the time nor the will to jump through all the hoops to vote in a state that was going to go for Trump anyway (which describes my situation by the way), such people are not responsible for voting Trump into office.
…chaos trumps everything when it comes to wondering what “might have happened.” A butterfly flapping it’s wings might cause a storm in another country a thousand miles away.
And if the Democrats somehow did manage to get twenty million people extra out-to-vote in 2016, the Republicans might just have been able to match them because things don’t work in a vacuum. We can’t know what would have happened if things were different: especially when the margins were so tight.
Wow, election analysis is simple!
You just look at the turnout (not even the margin of victory), then just make lots of assumptions and guesses.
If it were my own money, I would bet that “apathetic left-leaning voters” would have far outnumbered “Dems who hated Clinton and refused to vote”, and that the latter would be unlikely to have changed the outcome. But I would never make either claim absent data.
And not only this, but most of that 4.4% margin in favor of Biden was meaningless in terms of the Electoral College, because it came from blue states which Biden won by huge margins. Of 11M Californians who actually did vote for Biden, five million of them could have stayed home, and their state would still have gone to him.
This is as pointless and irrelevant an observation as noting that millions of Trump voters could have stayed home, if divided properly, based on the margins by which he won in very red states, without affecting the EC.
I think most people can following the argument. It’s based on the idea that 158,000,000 is bigger than 136,000,000. If you’re disputing that, go ahead and present your counterargument.
Just trying to support what @Chad_Sudan said. If you find it isn’t worth being posted, so be it. As I may have mentioned before, I don’t think any of the professional analysts and journalists who cover these things brought that fact out as much as they should have. Thanks to our uniquely arcane system of electing our national leaders, Trump really only lost by barely a whisker.
It’s a repeated observation that provides no insight except for disrespect towards the people of California, as if their votes matter less than those of other states. Some states had big margins, in either direction, and some states did not. Why would this be notable when it’s true for every election?
Californians’ votes do mean less than those of other states, as do those of other large and consistently Democratic voting states; it’s not an “as if”.
Great. So you agree that all this “If only more people had voted for Clinton, she’d have won…” line of argument is pointless, except to the extent it is used to unfairly smear anyone to the left of center who, for reasons satisfactory to them and largely unknowable by you, did not vote for Clinton?
If more people had voted for Clinton, then more people would have voted for Clinton. But then we still don’t know what the election outcome would have been because that would put us in an alternate reality.
I’m terms of moral blame for Trump’s victory, in this reality that so far as I can tell we are both cursed to live within, I place that squarely at the feet of people who affirmatively voted for Trump.
Yeah that is called doubling down when I have explained why your reasoning is flawed.
The fact that turnout was significantly higher in 2020 than 2016 cannot itself be offered as evidence of why. You have presented precisely zero evidence of Clinton-hating dems / Bernie bros being the cause.
The burden of proof is on you. If you can’t support your claim, you should admit it, to yourself as much as anyone else.
The closest states that Hillary lost in 2016: (All pulled from Wikipedia)
Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Florida, Arizona, North Carolina (all under 4% margins)
Bernie won Michigan with 49.7% to 48.3%
Hillary won Pennsylvania 55.6 to 43.5
Bernie won Wisconsin 56.6 to 43.1
Hillary won Florida 64.4 to 33.3
Hillary won Arizona 56.3 to 41.4
Hillary won North Carolina 54.5 to 40.9
States Bernie won the most in? Vermont, Alaska, North Dakota. The largest state? Michigan.
I think primary results can be tricky because there’s some level of game theory going on. With a press and punditry saying that Sanders can’t win in the general, or making voters pick more for that magical “electability” than actual preference. If there was a system of rank choice or such there would be more evidence that a candidate was more appealing on the issues/positions they took.
Turnout in 2016 was affected by the overall enthusiasm for Clinton and Trump, and the seemingly foregone conclusion that Trump was not going to win. Even he and his campaign seemed to believe he was going to lose.
The strategy by Clinton and the DNCC and other leadership groups of the Democratic party seems to have made mistakes/misjudgements on how effective Republican media in all forms has reached and influenced people -especially low information ones- the shifting demographics and (in hindsight at least) put too many resources into unwinnable places and not enough into places it was needed or could have done more good.
Since the 2020 election season, the strategy doesn’t seem so pointless in retrospect as it appeared after the 2016 election. Trump stated that he would not accept the results of an election he lost, which made Hillary pour resources into getting the most votes to make sure that no shenanigans would take place. The events of 2020 and 1/6 prove that this wasn’t just bluster. If she had won a state by a handful of votes, Trump would certainly have leaned on the republican leadership of that state to “find” the right amount of votes for him, or even fomented a violent attack.
I’m not saying that it was the right thing to do - even from my knowledge in 2016 it was obvious that she should have concentrated on the northern midwest states - but it looks a lot more logical in hindsight than it did back then.