Since everyone else is intent on writing an obituary for Donald Trump in terms of his last flight on Air Force One, I’m going to drop in my two cents as well. And frankly, what I still don’t understand, is how all my liberal media friends can explain to us what it means that Trump is no longer around, when they didn’t do very much to explain how he got here in the first place.
Trump became the 45th President because he flipped three states – Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin – by one-tenth of one percent of the total votes cast for him and Hillary in those three states. For all the talk about how Trump represents a new surge of alt-right, populism anger and angst, the vote numbers don’t even remotely bear this narrative out.
Granted, Trump was able to take advantage of the fact that Hillary basically didn’t run a campaign. Granted, Trump took advantage of some social media technologies which the Democrats now utilize in a much more comprehensive and powerful way. Granted, it’s always easier to attack than defend in terms of how you want to organize and define a political campaign.
But when all is said and done, the bottom line is that nobody has bothered to explain how and why the blue team ran up numbers in the 2020 election that nobody ever thought could ever be achieved. I’m not talking about flipping states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin back to where they ordinarily belong. I’m talking about what the Democrats did in states where Democrats don’t exist at all.
There are 16 states which have consistently voted for the national GOP candidate in every election since 2000; i.e., the last six times. These states are mostly located in the border plus the Deep South: TN, WV, KY, AL, AR, LA, plus Midwestern and Western states like ND, SD, MT, KS, IN, WY – what Al Franken used to call the ‘dumb states.’
Together, these states gave Trump 12 percent more votes in 2020 than he got from these same states in 2016. Running against Hillary, Trump’s winning margin in these states was 63 percent. Trump lost the 2016 national vote by roughly 4 points, 52 percent to 48 percent. He won these ‘dumb’ states in a walk.
In 2020, Trump still won all these states. But taken together, his winning margin was 60 percent. Meanwhile, the Biden-Harris ticket registered just under 40 percent of the total 2020 vote, whereas the Democrats pulled 36 percent of the statewide votes in 2016.
Now you might think that a swing of less than 5 percent in the percentage of all votes is no big deal. It happens to be the average swing in all national elections since 2000. For all the talk about how we are such a ‘divided’ country, just about every national and state-level election turns not on how 95% of the electorate votes, but how 5% decide which lever to pull.
Talking about the strength of the MAGA movement and how divisive politics have become, did you notice all those disenfranchised, angry citizens who came back to D.C. on Wednesday to demonstrate against the inauguration of Kamala and Joe? For that matter, did you hear about all those violent demonstrations that were going to take place in state capitols here and there?
You didn’t because there wasn’t anything at all. And the reason there wasn’t anything is that Roger Stone didn’t have the time or the money to put another big deal together like the rally he organized on January 6th. The only demonstrators we saw on Trump’s ride from the West Palm Beach airport to his temporary home at Mar-a-Lago were a hundred or so dopes who lined up on Ocean Boulevard to welcome him back home.
The first thing I did this morning was to turn on my Twitter feed to read the latest thing said by Trump. And then I remembered. He doesn’t have a Twitter account. He’s nobody and there’s already a guy on the internet giving away the MAGA hat for free.
So much for how the MAGA movement has just begun to fight.