I found a great article in the Spectator, usually a pretty squishy outlet, about the laundry list of “puzzling” occurences in the 2020 election:
We are told that Biden won more votes nationally than any presidential candidate in history. But he won a record low of 17 percent of counties; he only won 524 counties, as opposed to the 873 counties Obama won in 2008. Yet, Biden somehow outdid Obama in total votes.
Outdid him by almost 11 million votes.
He also supposedly received nearly 15 million more votes than Hillary did in 2016.
Readers of this site know I go to great efforts to try to present the opposing side’s arguments as honestly and accurately as possible. I prefer spirited and challenging debate to knocking down flimsy strawmen.
I go out of my way to expose myself to Democrat talking points and arguments, because how can we know our side is right if we don’t even really know what the other side is truly saying?
But even the left’s strongest arguments on why it’s perfectly believable that Joe Biden got 80 million votes do not pass the smell test. Suburban backlash to Trump? Not that much. Trump voter regret? If that’s the case then why did Trump get 10 million more votes than he got in 2016?
Only in media world could they believe that Trump was such a mortal threat to mankind that his unique awfulness compelled 15 million people who didn’t vote against him in 2016 to vote against him in 2020. In pushing these narratives that anti-Trump energy is far stronger in 2020 than it was in 2016, the media acts like these people didn’t know who Trump was in 2016. Do these media “journalists” not remember 2016? They were already at DEFCON-1 over Trump in 2016. They could not have been much more alarmist about him and biased against him than they were in 2016. They were already calling him a white supremacist and Literally Hitler and a mortal threat to mankind in 2016. They have had the hyperbole and hysteria over Trump cranked to 11 since basically the day he announced he was running for President.
For someone to believe that the anti-Trump movement only began in the past year or so, they’d have to believe that the media treated Trump in 2016 basically the same as it treated Mitt Romney and John McCain–which is to say, badly and unfairly, but merely due to partisan differences, and not because he was a Literal Genocidal Megalomaniac. But that’s not true at all: the media was far more hysterical about Trump in 2016 than they were Romney and McCain. And that’s no small feat.
The media’s anti-Trump hysteria was already pretty much maxed-out in 2016. If the media’s coverage of him in the 2016 campaign didn’t make you hate him, it’s likely that nothing since then really would or could. There are very, very few people who supported Trump in 2016 but turned on him in 2020. You can’t un-redpill someone.
Voting for Trump in 2016 was basically a last resort for tens of millions of Americans. It was an acknowledgement that the whole system in this country was deeply, overwhelmingly, thoroughly and hopelessly corrupt beyond all recognition, and that the only way to fix it would be to elect a complete outsider who would take a wrecking ball to the whole thing.
People who voted for Trump in 2016 were basically saying, “Look, I’m at the end of my rope here. We’ve gone from Democrat to Republican back to Democrat again and nothing ever changes, nothing ever gets better. The political class clearly could not possibly give any less of a fuck about us regular Americans. We have been sold-out and left behind. We have no voice. The system is completely broken and needs to be completely burned to the ground.”
You don’t just do a complete 180 on that position, even over a span of four years. Again, one cannot be un-redpilled. Once your eyes have been opened to the way things truly are in this country–the corruption, the cronyism, the fakeness of politics; the incestuousness of Washington, the media and all our major power centers; the complete lack of accountability for the elites–you cannot just go back to being blissfully unaware of it all and thinking things don’t need to change.
When you truly understand why someone would vote for Trump in 2016, it just doesn’t make sense that any meaningful number of 2016 Trump voters would say in 2020, “You know what? I’m voting for Biden. What we really need right now is the Establishment back in power. We need a man who’s been in Washington for 50 years.”
I’m not denying that there were some people out there who voted for Trump in 2016 but voted Biden in 2020. There are certainly a number of those people out there. But I’m confident it was a very small number, and that it was completely dwarfed by the number of people who got red-pilled after Trump became President. I would be willing to bet that the number of people who weren’t Trump supporters in 2016 but voted for him in 2020 is far, far greater than the number of people who voted for Trump in 2016 but abandoned him in 2020.
Again, Trump got 10 million more votes in 2020 than he did in 2016. That, to me, is way more believable than Joe Biden getting 15 million more votes than HIllary Clinton got in 2016.
You can say the media brainwashed a lot of people to hate Trump. And that’s true. But those people were already brainwashed in 2016. It did not happen after the 2016 election.
And, once again, Trump got 10 million more votes than he did in 2016.
You mean to tell me that 15 million people who sat out 2016–who on election day four years ago thought to themselves, “Yeah, I can’t really be bothered to vote”–were somehow motivated by Trump’s sheer Hitler-ness and awfulness and Fascist-ness to say, “I must vote this man out of office if it’s the last thing I do”?
I just don’t buy it.
At a time when barely 4 in 10 Americans say they trust the media, you mean to tell me the media was able to brainwash 15 million low-engagement voters to become rabid Trump haters in just four years?
I mean, there is a case to be made for this if you go by the ratings between 2016-2020:
But if your argument is that CNN and MSNBC have seen their primetime ratings more than double since 2016, the same can be said about Fox News (at least prior to Election Night, when Fox basically doused itself in gasoline and set itself on fire by pissing off its core audience). Throughout 2020, Fox was pulling in a larger primetime audience than both CNN and MSNBC combined. For the whole month of October in the run-up to the election Tucker Carlson was routinely pulling in over 5 million viewers a night. Those numbers are unheard of. He broke cable news records and became the highest-rated cable news show ever.
If CNN and MSNBC really did brainwash millions of people into hating Trump, then over the past four years we would expect to see their ratings to have shot higher while Fox’s ratings cratered.
If you didn’t already believe Trump was a mortal threat to mankind before the 2016 election, it’s unlikely you’d come to believe that since he took office. Most of the media’s negative coverage of him during his first term centered on the completely discredited Russian Collusion nonsense, and then the phony impeachment that most people knew was a political stunt.
Could Covid have turned people against Trump? I guess it’s possible, but as I wrote yesterday, there’s little real world evidence of and impact from Covid. Most Americans probably don’t even know a single person that has been hospitalized due to Covid, much less died from it. If anything, the Average American is more pissed about the lockdowns, which have had far more of an impact on his life than the virus itself has had. These people would be more likely to support Trump, not Biden, as Trump was the candidate against the lockdowns. The only people who voted based on Covid Fear are the people who sit in front of the TV all day mainlining fear porn and obsessing over the fake Covid death numbers–which is to say, brainwashed libs who have hated Trump since 2015.
George Floyd and BLM? I doubt that, too. There were plenty of race riots and civil unrest during Obama’s second term, and the end result of that was Trump winning. Plus, only the hardest-core of the hardcore Trump haters could do the mental gymnastics necessary to convince themselves that Donald Trump is the reason black people are killed by the police. That has been going on for decades now. Nobody in their right mind believes it’s Trump’s fault that George Floyd and Breonna Taylor were killed by the police.
And, if anything, the rioting and chaos turned more people into Trump supporters and against the Democrats.
I’m just not seeing how this surge of Biden support materialized. Even if we grant that Covid and George Floyd caused a lot of it, the opposite sides of those issues (anti-lockdowns and anti-riots) probably created as many Trump supporters as they created Biden supporters.
There’s just nothing that has happened over the past 4 years that you can point to and convince me that it was the reason Biden got 15 million more votes than Hillary did in 2016.
And all the things libs could point to have had equal (or greater) opposite reactions that pushed people to Trump:
- Fear of Covid pushing people towards Biden? Hatred of the lockdowns pushes others to Trump.
- Social unrest in the name of racial equality pushes people to Biden? Desire for law and order pushes others to Trump.
- Media brainwashing turns people in to Trump haters? Observing blatant and obvious media bias and lying turns others into Trump supporters.
- Covid-induced economic recession turns people against Trump? Others realize it wasn’t a Covid-caused recession but instead a lockdown-caused recession, and they resolve to vote against the party of the lockdowns.
See? Just about anything they can point to as an explanation for why Trump lost support, there’s another side of the coin that caused Trump to gain support.
Now, the final argument for why Biden’s 80 million vote total is legit is one we haven’t covered in this post yet: mass mail-in voting caused a massive spike in voter turnout.
The one argument I can actually believe is that Biden’s 15 million vote surge over Hillary came from low-engagement voters who normally don’t turn out to vote in normal election years, but given the ease and convenience of mail-in ballots enabling them to vote without even leaving the house, they voted this year and broke heavily for Biden.
But this also undermines the idea that Biden won support based on the issues. Low-engagement voters don’t really know or care about the issues. It’s why they don’t vote in the first place: they’re not politically engaged. I’m not going to say the statements “Biden won based off the issues,” and “Biden won because a lot of low-engagement voters voted this year due to the ease and convenience of mail-in balloting” are completely mutually exclusive, but they’re close to it.
Did these people vote because of the issues, or because they just happened to get a ballot in the mail which made voting easy and convenient? In my view it’s one or the other. If you can only be bothered to vote when it doesn’t require any real effort on your part, then you don’t really care about the issues all that much, do you? If you really did care about the issues, then nothing would stop you from voting.
So basically the argument is that Biden got 15 million more votes than Hillary did due to an unprecedented surge of the least politically engaged and low-motivation voters in the country, enabled by mass mail-in voting–which also happens to be the method of voting most vulnerable to vote fraud, but I’m sure that’s just a coincidence.
Right.
The one point I keep going back to is this: they say that Trump lost because of a tidal wave of anti-Trump outrage.
But if that’s the case, then how did he get 10 million more votes than he got in 2016?
This election was stolen. The only question is whether Trump can prove it.