Last night I was watching the Hannity show on Fox because I enjoy how the most belligerent pro-Trump noisemakers are trying to explain away the fact that their candidate keeps dropping in the polls. Two weeks ago, the story was that Trump would do the same thing to Joe that he did to Hillary; namely, push himself into the lead during the last 30 days of the campaign. 

              So now we’re right in the middle of those last 30 days and guess what? The Trump campaign isn’t moving forward at all. Remember how everyone was saying that the race would tighten up?  Joe’s national poll number was 50.3% versus 43.2% for what’s-his-name on September 1^st, this morning Joe’s at 52.4% and the other guy is at 42%, the gap has gone from 7 to 10.4 points. Some tightening up.

              So Hannity gets two other alt-right schmucks to appear, one guy a noisemaker down in Florida, the other some AM big-mouth out of who knows where. And what’s the new lie to go along with what Giuliani said yesterday that the virus isn’t killing anyone at all?  He really said that. He really did.

              Here’s what they have come up with. Ready? Trump won in 2016 because all kinds of people who had never voted before came out and voted for him. Which is why the polls were all wrong because pollsters didn’t know how to contact all these new, first-time Trump voters.

              Why will Trump win again even if the polls continue to go south? Hannity claims there’s still lots of new voters out there who will show up again. And how can you deny this when there’s so much enthusiasm at those rallies this week? Even the President himself, according to Hannity, can’t get over the energy and excitement of those crowds.

              So here’s what I did last night.  I looked at the state-by-state vote totals for 2012 and 2016. Obviously, if Trump won because he got so many new voters to show up, it must be reflected in the vote totals for each state. Okay – here goes.

              Trump won 30 states in 2016, including 6 states that went for Obama in 2012. Together, the total Trump votes in all those states was 40,35,550. If you add together the votes received in those states by Romney and Trump, Trump got 51% in 2016, Romney got 49% in 2012. Wow – that’s a lot of new voters, right?

              In 6 of the 30 states won by Trump, his vote total was less in 2016 than what Romney polled in 2012. In 8 other states, Trump beat Romney’s number by 1 percent or less. In other words, in almost half the states that Trump won, there was no appearance of ‘new’ voters at all.

              The only 2 states where Trump’s total vote represented an increase of more than 3 percent over what Romney pulled four years earlier were North Dakota and West Virginia, which together provided Trump with a whole, big 1.7% of the total votes he received in his 30 winning states. Let’s hear it for all the new voters in West Virginia! Yaaaaaayyy.

              For almost four years we have been assaulted with a steady barrage of absolute bullshit about how Trump’s election marked the beginning of a new populist movement, how he has brought a whole, new voting population onto the playing field, how he has created a new majority of voters who never had anyone listening to them before he came along.

              I’ll go back to what my father used to say – figures don’t lie but liars sure can figure. And this bunch has been lying again and again for the last four years.

              But please don’t let these numbers make you complacent. Please do whatever you can do – phone calls, street-corners, knocking on doors, sending Joe and Kammie a little more cash. Because it’s not only winning that’s important. It has to be a BIG WIN!