Posted on 11/13/2016 11:44:29 AM PST by LS
Boy was I wrong. All along I had Trump at between 62 and 64 million votes. Our overly optimistic friend "Sundance" at www.conservativetreehouse.com was completely off the charts unrealistic, with a projection of 73 million.
Yes, Trump won the electoral college---as I predicted---big. As of today I think he is at 304. Another 720,000 votes in seven states would have given him an additional 43 electoral votes.
But unfortunately I was right in another prediction: the margin would be large, but each state would be decided by a small fraction of voters. Pennsylvania, Michigan, North Carolina, and Florida all hinged on fewer than 180,000 votes. To appreciate how close that is, Obama won reelection in 2008 by under 480,000 votes, and I thought that was very close. I did correctly predict that the dominoes would all fall in the same direction, and, more or less, they did. We lost VA and NH in the east, and NV and CO by larger margins in the west, but the battleground tier of OH, WI, MI, PA, IA, NC, and FL all fell to Trump.
So it's time to put good feelings aside for just a moment---we'll have plenty more in the coming months---and appreciate just how close . . . how MIRACULOUS . . . this election was.
You begin with Hillary Clinton, the equivalent of a new coach being given a Super Bowl team with All Stars at every position and a free agent budget the size of Jupiter (less the emigrating Cher). Cankles had 90% name recognition, a sitting president more or less behind her, a docile party obedient to her whims, and a fawning media such that Saddam Hussein or Napoleon would have been fortunate to have.
And with all that she got six million fewer votes than Zero in his second election (where he got millions fewer than in 2008). It's darn near unfathomable, looking at it objectively, to figure out how she lost, given the numbers.
She'll likely end up winning the popular vote by 500,000 to 1 million, held the expected liberal vote treasures of New York, Illinois, and California, held Obama's western states without exception, eked out a narrow win in New Hampshire, and got Virginia as expected.
Yet she was crushed in the electoral college by a guy who spent HALF as much as she did. How?
*She didn't make any inroads at all with females---supposedly Cankles' calling card. White women went for Trump. There was no big "gender gap," except with men, who couldn't stand her.
*She lost millions of black and hispanic votes. Pew's research is unreliable---these guys did polls, remember? ---but they say Trump only got 8% of blacks. (I find that very unlikely, especially when every other poll was showing him at nearly double that.) But if blacks didn't vote for Trump, they sure didn't vote for Cankles. In FL and NC, when all is said and done she probably lost several hundred thousand African-American votes.
*"Da Yuts" were repelled by her. They stayed home.
*She lost the northern tier of rust belt states because she just didn't care. Cankles made NO visits to Wisconsin, only a couple of desperation trips to Michigan and Pennsylvania in the end. That message got out.
*Trump was indeed hurt by the tape, and vote counters in Ohio found that erstwhile R absentees dated right after the tape release suddenly had a very high percentage of Johnson votes. I'm guessing the tape cost Trump NH, possibly MN.
Still, the tape cannot account for the lack of turnout for Trump. NeverTrumpers? Some. For whatever reason, though, Trump did not turn out the large number of new voters that was expected by his supporters such as myself. (The limited data we have says that 90% of Republicans voted for him).
That leaves us with one explanation: Trump's election was a miracle. Some 60,000-70,000 voters in MI and PA saved the country. WI was a nice addition, but without one more state, WI's 10 electoral votes wouldn't have put Trump over. No, this was divine intervention.
And, in a way, it is perfectly in keeping with the Bible, for it was Gideon who prepared to go to war with 30,000 men . . . "the old fashioned way." God told him many were not committed, and to winnow them out. When only 3,000 remained, Gideon was told to cut the number further. Finally only 300 fully committed men remained. The message was that God wanted Gideon to know that it was His power, not numbers or the skill of the troops, that would bring victory.
So in the end, our "monster vote" never materialized. God cut the number down to under 180,000 in five states so that no one could doubt Who really won this one.
Along with the tape, I think Comey’s closure of the second emails investigation in Hillary’s favor just 9 days after opening it hurt Trump, too.
Having cleared her a second time should have galvanized Clinton voters (”See? She’s innocent, dambit! Vote!”) and depressed the Trump vote (”Cleared again. The fix really is in! Why bother?”). But Hillary insists it’s the other way around—which I don’t believe.
My son leaves early december
but there was a massive turnout for Trump...perhaps not reflected in the numbers but with the fraud, that was absolutely evident, with votes "changing" to Clintoon, I believe Trumps overall numbers were very high....
another thing that to me is a great possibility...that wikileaks was right, the latest info they had would destroy her, and she was given an option....withdraw your Soros attack on our election and loose gracefully....
I thought it was 311 after Arizona finally came through a few days after the election.
There is still like 8 milliom votes to be counted so I’ve read!
I think the Trump victory was a big stronger than you make it out to be. We will probably never know the full extent of the fraud (i.e. ineligible voters voting; people voting more than once; dead or non-participants having their ballots cast by others, etc.) but you can bet that it is substantial.
Even that aside, a margin of 306-232 EVs is a pretty solid win. When a team wins the Super Bowl by a score of say 31-21, nobody tries to minimize the victory because the other team scored 21 points. A win is a win. And this was a solid win.
Even in football, the game can turn on just a play or two. Trump won this with a strong ground offensive in the Rust Belt and a very strong defense overall! A successful Hail Mary to MN or VA would have run up the score nicely but the TDs in WI, MI and PA put the game away.
I don’t think the closing of it hurt anything... The re opening certainly forced the press to finally start talking about emails and wikileaks, something they largely had ignored.... Whether it had any impact of changing votes, not sure, but it certainly helped psychologically to help reinvigorate existing Trump supporters.
The bus tape, CLEARLY put the brakes on Trumps momentum... without that, Trump was on his way to 350+/- EC vote win IMHO.
I think the overall lesson from this election is, if you can engage the disenfranchised, you win... I don’t know how much Trump engaged it, given overall turnout wasn’t much different from 12, when all the provisional ballots are cast.. it may actually end up down.
I’d like to see someone do some analysis on new voters, and voters who had not voted in more than 2 elections that showed up this time... what those numbers look like will tell the real story of the tape.
This is the most DUH article of the post election so far:
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/voter-turnout-fell-especially-in-states-that-clinton-won/
It was obvious that Clinton would not get the same turnout as OBama or Kerry, but they all worked off the assumption she would from day one which was laughable.
The reality is that every election huge number of folks just don’t vote... reaching out to them, and getting them to engage may be how you change the system... how do you do it? That’s the $64k question.
I agree many illegals/fraudulent votes added to Cankles' total.
But what no one yet seems willing to come to grips with is that for whatever reason there was NO huge Trump turnout. He will be lucky to match Romney's in 2012, let alone come anywhere close to Sundance's 73 million.
While I thought he might get 62m, I couldn't get him there based on GOP turnout (85% of 31m, x 2 for each primary voter bringing one more, plus a +10 with indies and a +5 net D/R crossover). The best I got was 60m in a four way race.
So when the dust settles, regardless of where the illegal/fraud stuff comes out, Republicans simply must do a better job of turnout next time. We won't have a Cankles to run against again.
If you think 170,000 votes in four or five states means they were “in play,” then we have serious vote analysis to do.
These states can all be “had”-—including MN, VA, NH, and, I think, even NJ and DE next time. But we cannot hide our heads in the sand and pretend this was a massive Trump turnout.
This was a “Let’s give him a shot” election. You can bet when election day MN voters went 2:1 Trump, they weren’t died-in-the-wool Republicans. They were indies and Ds who just had had enough of Obama.
We should all celebrate the victory, but in doing so PLEASE don’t delude yourselves into thinking this was some sort of mandate, except for change. It was Americans agreeing to try something else. Trump can change that to “We like what Trump is doing” in four years, but we won’t do so if we pretend that overwhelming numbers of voters put him in office. Realism is your friend.
Yes, but the media is a reality.
Here in AZ, which was closer than it should have been, I repeatedly tried to get Trump bumperstickers, signs, to no avail. I contacted the AZ GOP to offer to be a “poll flusher” on election day. No call back. I wasn’t asked one time by ANYONE other than Kelli Ward to help.
We didn’t see one door knocker, one walker, or get one Trump/GOP phone call. Understand this wouldn’t have changed our votes, but it was interesting NEITHER campaign seemed well set in “traditional” ground game. Trump’s proved just barely enough. We HAVE to do better in 2020.
I’ve read a couple of things about Trump’s ground game, but the interesting was that his ground game by design was not a door-to-door campaign but a cyber campaign. I think they said this was Priebus’ design. Do you know anything about that? I got tons of emails and tweets from the campaign.
I feel we won’t really know until we get a better sense of what the illegal vote did to things. Same with fraud. I think the next four years has to be spent cleaning up the voting system in the US, from the states upward.
I can only surmise that many voters were indeed turned off by Trump for one reason or another. I know the MSM hammered Trump 24/7 through the entire general election campaign and made him look to be just an awful person. Some of this was self-inflicted on Trump's part but the MSM went all out to destroy the man and for those who only get their info from MSM, I'm sure some damage was done.
The positive side of this is that Trump is elected anyhow and now has four years to turn those perceptions around. Once those people turned off by Trump see he's not the bogeyman the MSM made him out to be and they start seeing some results, we should be able to generate that monster vote in 2020.
And we'll probably need it then because as you point out, we likely won't have Crooked Hillary to run against next time.
I'm not sure what you're saying here. I suggested that Wisconsin, PA, MI, and Minn. hadn't been in play in decades. I believe I was correct in saying that. Not only were they "in play", he won them, MI being the closest of the votes, less than 13,000.
I agree with your assessment in your last post: This was a “Let’s give him a shot” election. I would add, it was a revulsion with Clinton and her party election as well.
I'll add one more thing: My guess is she had close to 5% votes from the democrat fraud express, and if you discount this ugly fact, it's as big a landslide as Reagan in 1980.
No. Not close. And to continue this line of analysis is as bad as what the pollsters are doing.
There are still massive D registration advantages to overcome, but they will not and cannot be overcome if this is viewed as a giant “mandate” for Trump.
This comes from one who anticipated his victory a year ago and predicted he would win a half dozen blue states by VERY narrow margins. A “give ‘em a chance” vote is not an “I believe in what you’re doing vote.” And turnout levels FOR Reagan were massively higher than for Trump. Once we understand the nature of the victory, we can build on it.
Folks, stop beating the fraud/illegal vote thing.
THAT DOESN’T CHANGE TRUMP’S VOTES. It only changes Cankles’ votes. What people are apparently afraid to address here is that Trump underperformed in all but a few (thankfully, key) states. Saying “there was fraud” doesn’t give him more votes.
This is what must be addressed in 2020: R/conservative turnout, not D turnout. We will get our share of indies and crossovers, but we simply must build a bigger base so we don’t have to rely on indies and crossovers, and we won’t do it by denying that a problem exists.
You are right. It was an e-mail, text game. Obviously, we still need more, right? 59-60million ain’t gonna cut it.
I understand your point, but auditing voter rolls and reforming the vote process in the US is still a priority.
Fraud may not have altered turn out, but it most certainly impacted margin of victory.
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