How come for all the talk about how the Democrats rigged the 2020 election, there’s never been any mention of maybe it was Trump and his gang that tried to steal the show?
Stop and think about it. After all, if you wanted to rig an election, wouldn’t you want to try to make everyone believe that you were the ‘good guys’ and that it was the other side that was playing dirty pool?
Near as I can tell, Trump started pushing the voting ‘fraud’ line at a rally in Oshkosh, WI on August 17, when he said that the only way he could lose the election was if it was “rigged.” On that specific day, one statewide poll had Trump behind Biden by 10 points, another poll had Joe leading Trump by 8 points. In both polls, Joe was at 52%.
In fact, the mid-August national polls aggregated by 270 To Win, Real Clear Politics and Five Thirty Eight all had Joe above 50% and leading Trump by 8 points. When the votes were counted on November 3rd, Joe ended up with 51.4% of the total vote, which is exactly what the aggregate polls showed him to have going into the last days of the campaign.
On the other hand, the aggregate polls had Trump finishing with 43.5%, when his actual votes were 46.8%.
In other words, when we compare the number of votes received by each candidate to the number of people who said they would vote one way or the other on or before November 2nd, it was Trump who got more people to show up and vote for him on election day, even though he didn’t get enough folks to show up and give him the win.
I would be willing to put a tiny bit of belief behind Trump’s election ‘fraud’ argument except for two things. First, Trump has a history of whining about rigged elections when his side doesn’t win. In 2012, he claimed on Twitter that Obama’s victory was a ‘sham’ and a ‘fraud,’ but didn’t present any evidence to back up these claims. And neither did anyone else. During the 2016 primary campaign, he claimed that Ted Cruz ‘stole’ the Iowa caucuses. After the general election, he said that he had not just won the Electoral College but also the popular vote.
Not only does Trump always claim that he’s the ‘victim’ of election fraud, but if you look closely at the votes in the three crucial states – MI, PA, WI - which flipped blue to red in 2016 and then back to blue in 2020, all of a sudden, the argument that it was the Democrats who jimmied the results starts to disappear.
In 2012, Obama got 7,175,828 votes from those 3 battleground states, Romney’s total was 6,203,656 votes from the same 3 states. In 2016, Trump pulled 457,904 more red votes out of those states, but the reason he won the election was because Hillary’s vote total from those states was 528,012 less blue votes!
Joe’s 2020 total for those three states was 9.9% higher than what Obama rolled up in 2012, and his margin over Trump was exactly what all the pre-election polls predicted it would be. How many more votes did Trump need in 2020 to beat what the polls said he would need? Try an increase of 8% over what he pulled out in 2016.
Early on in the campaign, Trump announced that he would have an ‘army’ of 50,000 ‘troops’ going around and ringing doorbells to get out the vote. There was no army, he had no ground game of any kind. He had the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, and the Three Percenters, who together don’t count for squat.
Go back to the looniest moment of the 2020 campaign, when Giuliani stood across the street from a sex shop in Philadelphia and delivered a tirade about a national election based on ‘fraud.’ Know who was standing right behind him? Bernard Kerik, who served 42 months in a federal pen after pleading guilty to eight(!) tax felonies.
You think that guys like Giuliani and Kerik don’t know anything about scams and frauds?
Think again my friends, think again.