I’ve been trying to ration my news watching. I’d prefer to process my grief and anger, and get my gumption back up to where it damn well needs to be. I’ve written about that elsewhere already and probably will again. However, I’ve heard and seen a word in the news in recent days that makes my blood boil. “Landslide.” Say what? Not only no but HELL NO! Trump won. Much as it hurts to say it or write it that’s a fact I can’t deny. But NOT by all that much. To listen to some, whether journalists/pundits or on some blogs or on social media it was to paraphrase Sadaam ‘The mother of all landslides.’ It wasn’t. Nor will it turn out to be a landslide. Not even close to being in landslide territory!
So any such thinking or talk needs to get flushed right down Trump’s fake gold toilet with the rest of his sh*t. Oh, he’s already crowing and it’s only going to get louder and more frequent. “Landslide.’ ‘Mandate.’ I’m calling bullshite and here’s why. I checked before I started writing. Currently the popular vote tally shows Trump having 74.3 million votes and Harris with 70.3 million. In the Electoral College if Arizona goes for Trump he’ll have 312 votes, not much more than the margins in 2016 and 2020. The EC might look like a “mandate” but it’s not. Not really. However let’s focus on two things. First, Trump has about 50.5 percent of the popular vote with as noted over 74 million votes, and Harris 47.9 percent with 70 million votes. The second thing to keep in mind is that Trump’s margin will almost certainly go DOWN.
In an article from CNN explaining Trump’s win is no landslide they make note of something important. There are millions of votes yet to be counted. California is notorious for taking for-freaking-ever to count their ballots. Why this is the case election after election, why they haven’ fixed their system is a subject that would take up an entire article. But there are millions of votes from that state yet to be counted and we won’t have a real idea of the tally until into December. There are other, states which are mostly blue ones still counting what will be lots of votes too. Utah isn’t done and will help Trump but they don’t have as many people as California, Washington and Oregon to begin with. Then there’s Pennsylvania which still is counting in Philly which will favor Harris, if not by the margin we needed. However there are all those mail in ballots that their legislature refused to allow to be processed early, and provisional ballots. It’s a big state, and the bulk of those will come in Democratic areas.
The point is that Trump’s margin WILL go down. Perhaps even below 50% Harris might not get up to 49% but it’s not crazy to think the final margin in the popular vote will be between 1%-1.5%. It will almost certainly be well below two percent. That my friends is NO landslide. Just a close win. It hurts to the point of being discouraging, even depressing that things are what they are. However as I’ve said in earlier articles WE are still virtually half the country! Try to park that deep in your mind and take solace from it. And use it as emotional fuel to start and continue the long fight to make Trump and his people have to fight for every bit of ground they intend to grab. Raise hell with our Democratic elected officials to make THEM fight like hell. I say use the term “bar fight” because that’s what’s needed. You punch, kick, gouge…whatever it takes to protect yourself and your friends.
Trump and the GOP are and will keep claiming landslide and mandate. But it’s not and don’t think for a second it is. As the linked article indicates this won’t wind up being a low turnout election. It won’t be as high as last time but it appears when all is accounted for turnout will be over 62%. I’ll leave how pissed I am the likelihood of that missing four percent being mostly from our side for another time. But ignore the conspiracy theories being floated about twenty million (or some other huge number) of missing votes. No, they just haven’t all been counted yet and the places where the counting is still ongoing are all the “usual suspects”/places.
As for the Electoral College again it might seem like a “big” win but it’s not. Historically these last three elections rank in the bottom half of things when you translate the hard numbers into percentages. In my lifetime we’ve seen far bigger wins. From CNN:
In terms of the Electoral College, Trump is on track to win 312 electoral votes if his lead in Arizona holds. It’s a solid win, but in the lower half of US presidential elections.
It would be a better showing than either his or Joe Biden’s 306 electoral votes in 2016 and 2020, respectively. It would also outperform both of George W. Bush’s electoral victories in 2000 and 2004. But it would be far short of Barack Obama’s 365 electoral votes in 2008 and 332 in 2012.
Bill Clinton never reached 50% in the popular vote because both of his presidential elections featured a strong third-party candidate in Ross Perot. But Clinton did run away with the Electoral College vote, winning 370 electoral votes in 1992 and 379 in 1996.
Reagan, Nixon and LBJ had true, massive landslides. However even in the last several decades we’ve seen much larger Electoral College wins than these past three Presidential elections. Those wanting to tweak Trump can easily do so by pointing out Obama’s margins! Hell, you and I can do it to MAGAs for that matter.
My point though is that talk of any Trump landslide is pure, unadulterated bullshite. I stopped making predictions about margins before the election but I’ll make one now. Once ALL the votes are counted (sometime into December) Trump’s margin in the popular vote will have shrunk. Probably to under 50%. Even if say 49.8 or 49.9 it will be a massive blow to his ego. Anything that distracts him to say and do things that cause complications for those trying to carry out his Project 2025 agenda helps. I also think Harris will get up over the 48% mark. But Trump’s current 2.6% margin isn’t going to hold.
In the end, it will be under two percent and there’s a good chance it will be closer to 1.5%. That’s no landslide. Nor will be his Electoral College margin despite how it looks at a glance. So as I already said park that deep in your brain, then go about parking it in other’s heads.
Thanks Denis. I needed this because I’ve been despondent thinking that a vast majority of my fellow citizens are stupid morons who can’t think past the price of eggs.
And they don’t get that the upcoming tariffs and mass deportations, as well as muskrat crashing the economy, will make the prices of today seem dirt cheap. But they are the poorly uneducated!
Thank you! This is something that he will lie about until he is planted in the earth. He lies about EVERYTHING, all the damned time. This is just one more opportunity for him to lie and the mainstream press, who are TERRIFIED of him, to magnify it. If the press would have told the truth…if, if, if. It’s done. But when we do come back, we need to take whatever media is still allowed, to task and tell them it’s time for the TRUTH!
Thanks for this Dennis. It’s really helps to get things in perspective.
Apparently, swing state voters got that the Democratic party saw them as “stupid morons” and “poorly uneducated”. They also saw the Harris campaign as more concerned with abortion, transgender rights and the threat to democracy in Von Schitzie’s candidacy than the issues that concerned them the most, immigration and inflation (Remember James Carville’s famous statement that all elections boil down to, “It’s the economy, stupid”?).
The party and Harris campaign were also seen as not taking notice or putting to effective use traditional voting blocs, notably labor. From an October 20 Michigan Review article: “I have yet to see one direct Union ad in Michigan”
From a November 9 Michigan Review: “Most voting blocs aren’t interested in boring, liberal civility politics that focuses 95% of their attention on DEI, advancing transgender rights, focusing solely on abortion as the number one issue, and spending the other 5% pretending to be upset about some specific economic disparity, only to do not one single thing to correct the issue. ”
“Most importantly, the neoliberal, socially progressive overriding ideology of the Democratic Party has become toxic to many voters, especially the traditional voter blocs of the Democratic Party”
We may not see the party as condescending and/or elitist, but that’s how the campaign was seen by enough swing state voters to hand VP Harris the loss.