In yesterday’s column I said that Trump won because he got 1/10th of 1 percent of the total votes cast in four states. That was wrong. In fact, he won because he got 1/10th of 1 percent of the votes in three states – Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. He flipped several other states that had gone blue in 2012 but those were states, like Florida, which tip back and forth every four years.
On the other hand, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin were always blue states, so Trump winning the electoral votes in those states was something not only unexpected but unprecedented as well.
In all three states, Trump was able to overcome traditional Democratic urban votes from cities like Philadelphia, Detroit, and Milwaukee by running up red vote numbers in rural counties where residents own lots of guns. Which maybe explains why the aggressive, pro-gun narrative from Trump in the 2016 campaign made so much sense. Perhaps it also explains why Trump went out of his way to give verbal high-fives in 2020 to lockdown protestors in Wisconsin and other places who marched around with their guns openly displayed.
There’s only one, little problem with this explanation, however. It happens not to be true. Or at least it’s not a realistic analysis of why Trump won these battleground states in 2016 and lost them the last time out.
Trump won the 2016 election because he ran against an opponent who didn’t run any kind of campaign at all. Hillary spent twice as much money per vote as Trump spent, but she was almost as absent from the campaign trail as Wendell Willke, who ran against Roosevelt in 1940. Willkie was from Kansas, but he believed that the New Deal had saved a lot of family farms, so he wouldn’t speak out against the Roosevelt’s economic programs on the campaign trail.
Ready? Between September 1st and November 7th of 2016, Trump did 14 rallies in those three, crucial states; Hillary made 3 campaign stops in PA, 2 stops in Michigan and zero appearances in Wisconsin over the same period of time.
The only Presidential election in the 20th Century where the winner got less electoral votes than what Trump received in 2016 was the 2000 Bush-Gore contest. Otherwise, no other candidate moved into the Oval Office with an electoral mandate as slim as what Trump received in 2016. And let’s not forget that he lost the popular vote that year.
Now that Trump’s out of office, having lost to Joe by more than 7 million votes, here’s what he faces going forward:
- Criminal investigations in New York and Georgia.
- Civil lawsuit for incitement to riot and possible defamation lawsuit from Dominion Systems.
To add insult to injury, this past weekend the Feds arrested a guy from Newburgh, NY who was seen talking to Roger Stone just before he breached the Capitol on January 6th. Nearly 300 ‘patriots’ have been charged with participating in the riot event, and sooner or later one of them will probably talk about how his group was taking orders from Stone who will then roll over and say that he was taking orders from Trump.
And yet, despite the fact that no President ever got elected with such a thin margin, nor has any President ever left office with so much legal baggage in tow, the liberal media keeps telling us that Trump is still running the Republican Party and is a force to be reckoned with in 2022such and beyond. The latest example of such attempted wish-fulfillment comes from Jelani Cobb, a know-it-all who writes for The New Yorker Magazine.
Cobb’s piece begins like this: “In just four years, the G.O.P., a powerful, hundred-and-sixty-seven-year-old institution, has become the party of Donald Trump.” It ends like this: “January 6th was not a culmination but, rather, a preface to more violence conducted under the same banners.”
What an apocalypse. The political party whose leader planned January 6th is now planning more such events. That being the case, how come Trump couldn’t even get one person to show up for his second inauguration last week?
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