Why did we win this year and not in 2016?
My best guess as to what eventually put us over the top was the sheer number of additional voters. I suspect that a lot of voters in 2016 didn’t take the election seriously enough because Trump was such a bad candidate that they couldn’t imagine him not being trounced. So they sat it out.
This year, they decided they had to do something. We just edged out the Trump contingent so I think we need to acknowledge that there is something going on with almost half of the voters that needs to be addressed.
We can’t ban Fox News but we will need to be vigilant year after year, election after election, until this destructive impulse burns itself out. We didn’t get into this mess overnight and we won’t get out of it overnight either.
Oh, and Centrist Democrats really need to sit on it for a few months and not jump to hasty conclusions.
Filed under: General |
The Confluence 
Someone else said it’s the paper ballots that made the difference, more secure than touchscreen machines. I think that may be true.
MsMass,
I agree! Paper ballots used with proper procedures in place to protect the integrity of the ballots before the counting begins is a much more secure method of casting our votes than the voting machines, especially when it comes to the counting part. I don’t know if it was by design or just good fortune, when Biden pushed his supporters to vote by mail instead of voting on election day on the machines. I believe it was the best way to override any possible Russian hacking of the voting machines to favor trump in the final count (which resulted in the razor thin number of votes which gave trump the electoral college in Michigan, PA and Wisconsin in 2016). It has been proven that machines can indeed be compromised in the counting of votes, without detection that they have been tampered with. So by voting by paper ballot, prior to election day, it’s next to impossible to calculate how much you need to cheat in calculating how many votes to alter in the voting machine software without raising suspicion.
I have always preferred accuracy to speed in the counting of our votes. It may take longer but in the end, we have a much better chance of the final count being the will of the people rather than the will of any outside source such as Russia. Preserving our democracy is worth the wait.
Don’t forget Donnie Two Scoops’s greatest enemy:
The most obvious part is that Hillary was running against a projection, something that Mark Burnett had created. Americans had been holding this fantasy of a smart businessman cutting through all the partisanship with good old American business sense, at least that’s how they saw it. That was the appeal of Perot, who was sitting at about 27% until he dropped out of the race and then got back in still got 19%. So put that together with the idiotic email saga which was nothing except that the media reveled in it for whatever reasons one wants to imagine, and a bunch of people decided to take a flyer. And then of course we had Comey’s contribution a week before the election.
This time, there were four years which should have cost him 80% of his prior vote, but Americans are not very perceptive, I guess, So it only cost him 10% or so. No Comey contribution, and the scandal they tried to concoct this time, was not given a hundredth as much coverage by the media than the emails, because they didn’t want to do that again, and then like Biden and did not like Hillary. Usually the candidate the media likes better, Reagan, GW Bush, Obama, gets their help. Put it together, and we got about 2% more in the key states of PA, MI and Wi. But yes, there is something wrong, and it is unsettling. Trump is going to lose by 5%, but the electoral college system gave him a major chance to win, and he is going to get 47% or so of American voters, which is almost incomprehensible. Republicans always have the trigger words; now they are “socialism,” “radicals,” and “riots.”