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Landmarks in Voting
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Can’t you smell that smell?
The news imagineers at CNN are trying to peddle the idea that Trump’s victory was not a landslide, not even as monumental as Clinton’s win over the dangerous Bob Dole in 1996. Here’s the gist of their argument, as reprinted by the Stella’s Yahoo newsfeed:
FTA: < A version of this story appeared in CNN’s What Matters newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free here.
► It’s a comeback for the ages for a president to go from a pariah after trying to overturn one election to president-elect after the next.
► A rightward shift in election results gives him a mandate to start trying to remake the US governmentlike he promised he would.
► If Republicans win control of the US House of Representatives, he’ll have control of the entire US government to help him enact change.
What Trump cannot claim is a landslide victory, although that’s how he will describe it.
As of Saturday, Trump is winning the popular votewith a little more than 74.5 million votes, although millions of votes have yet to be counted in California, Washington and Utah, among others. The final 2024 popular vote tally likely won’t be known until December.
When he lost convincingly in 2020, Trump got a little more than 74 million votes. So while it’s true that much of the country moved to the right in this election, it’s also true that there was some voter apathy if, at the end of the day, turnout is down from 2020.
That doesn’t mean this will end up being a low turnout election. The University of Florida Election Lab estimates as of Friday that turnout in 2024 will be about 62.3% of the voting-eligible population, down from the high-water mark of the modern era of more than 66.4% in 2020 but still above other recent elections. Turnout in 1996 and 2000 was not much over 50% of the voting-eligible population.
In terms of the Electoral College, Trump won 312 electoral votes. It’s a solid win, but in the lower half of US presidential elections.
It was a better showing than either his or Joe Biden’s 306 electoral votes in 2016 and 2020, respectively. It also outperformed both of George W. Bush’s electoral victories in 2000 and 2004. But it was far short of Barack Obama’s 365 electoral votes in 2008 and 332 in 2012.
Bill Clinton never reached 50% in the popular vote because both of his presidential elections featured a strong third-party candidate in Ross Perot. But Clinton did run away with the Electoral College vote, winning 370 electoral votes in 1992 and 379 in 1996.>>
Two huge issues with all this. First, the preoccupation of the diehard lefties with refuting the Trump claims of a landslide victory are ironic, given the lay-of-the-land glimpse of the election provided by the map of how the counties voted on November 5:
Red is Trump, blue is Harris.
Kill the Electoral College and a handful of coastal cities run everything.
Now can we talk about that word “landslide”? It’s the land grows the food and raises the cattle, produces the lumber and minerals and fossil fuels that enable us to build the cities who care nothing for the people who make it all go, except to resent the fact that because they represent the land that makes wealth rather than the people who people who exploit that wealth for paper gain, the residents of all those counties in flyover America count just a little bit more in the vote count than the city dwellers.
In the context, there’s no way the 2024 election wasn’t a landslide. All that land voted for Trump the builder, and all that parasitic paper money voted for Harris the user.
That’s the first of the big issues we have with the dismissive CNN take on the election. Now for the second issue. The truth about the election turnouts in 2020 and 2024. Which was and remains a huge lie being perpetrated by all the keepers of the numbers I have been able to find. They are calculating voter turnout by dividing the number of votes cast not by registered voters but by Voter-eligible adults.
Not even the pollsters talk to voter-eligible adults. Only registered voters can used in calculations of voter turnout. The eligible who did not register are not voters and can’t be counted in election measurements.
CNN is quoting turnout numbers of 62.3 percent in 2024 and 66.4 percent in 2020, while conceding that both of these are substantially higher than the 50 percent back in the pre-Obama days of Bush and Clinton. No shit, Sherlock. So what were the real turnout figures in 2020 and 2024?
How many registered voters in 2020 and 2024? Here you go.
How many votes were cast in the 2020 and 2024 elections?
And…
Here are the real calculations which must be performed.
In 2020, it’s 158.4/168.3=0.941
In 2024, it’s 155.2/161.4=0.962
94 and 96 percent turnout. These are impossible numbers. Why the vote tabulators have all been using vote-eligible adults in their calculations.
Think about it. Even the MSM has been reporting on all the voting bloc shifts toward Trump. He gained over his 2020 vote in every state, even in deep blue NY and CA, and he made significant percentage gains in the black, Hispanic, female, and Jewish vote. Yet somehow he only beat Kamala by 1 1/2 points in the popular vote? Who was voting for her? Not voters but the still intractable embedded Democrat machine.
Votes are still being manufactured out there by the millions, probably with the help of the drop boxes, mail-in votes being “counted” by precinct functionaries in Dem-controlled urban locations, the illegal votes induced to the polls in “No ID required” blue states, the dead and nursing home vote, the prisoner vote, and the omnipresent voting machines with their doubtful security provisions and provably film-flammable software algorithms.
The map is telling us what the liars won’t. Kamala lost by a huge fucking number of legal votes. Why they were still feverishly “counting” to the last seconds in Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Wisconsin, while they are still “counting” —a month and a half after the election — for Kamala in California, Oregon, and Washington. Why they are still so damn determined to kill the Electoral College. And will fight to the last breath to keep their crooked machines.
The land voted for Trump across the board. He wanted it too big to rig. He got it. Why it was a landslide both literally and figuratively.
We still have a long, long way to guarantee honest, fair, and efficient elections in this country. Nobody can breathe a sigh of relief over the bullet we just dodged.
And I do entreat the powers that be in the smug upper reaches of the RNC to accept that the turnout figures, properly calculated, are all anyone needs to understand at once that 2020 was stolen and 2024 might very well have been. Time for them to quit gloating and get down to work. 2026 is only 20-some months away.
Exhibit 1. The Myth of Scientific Omniscience Where to start. There are so many places to start, all with consistently alarming intimations of one deep problem. The inference is seditious of rationality as we have deified it in science. I’m going to show you some of the more accessibly evocative starting points, not to drag you into the weeds of higher mathematics, but to stress some elements of simplicity that overthrow the fallacy called Artificial Intelligence. Bear with me. Just look for now. I’ll make connections as we proceed after viewing the items below. Exhibit 2. Turing Test Fallacy Exhibit 3. The Proof of Digital Inferiority (It works. Click where indicated on screen.) Exhibit 4. The Implementation Overreach Exhibit 5. The Implicatuons of “Sensitive Dependence” Exhibit 6. The Measurement Problem Exhibit 7. The Illusion of Control Exhibit 8. The Hammer/Nail Delusion Exhibit 9. The Impossibility of Artificial Intelligence Exhibit 10. The Oversimplification Problem Exhibit 11. ...
[ Before we begin, a word about hyperlinks in this and any Instapunk post. They’re there to help you, not create a series of distracting digressions. Good rule of thumb: note that the link is there, take it if you can’t resist, but try to finish reading the post and then go back to any hyperlinks that still intrigue you. Videos are reader’s now/later choice every time Absolute linearity is the obsession of the obsolete typewriter crowd.] The Preface to this post is here . Göbekli Tepe. 12,500 years old. Belief in the existence of the divine lasted for 12,340 yrs. This is very long. I had to write down what I was thinking in some detail. I’m glad I did, but you don’t have to read it at one sitting. If you like, you can skip all the way down to the Section titled “The Secular Dead End” and get the tone and gist of my perspective, leaving the substance till later or never. Understood? Let’s get down to it. What’s the Big Thing that matters most, more than anything? Answer? The ...
This post was last updated at 11 PM, Wednesday, December 31. Latest entries are “Year End Thoughts on 2025,” “The ‘W’ File from Moon Books,” and “The Cryptkeeper.” The Instapunk Times is hot off the presses! XMAS STRIKE ISSUE! ] Undernet Black was updated December 24. This will be a pinned post in perpetuity, but it will be updated continuously, just like all of our lives. The title — “My World and Welcome to It” — is stolen happily from James Thurber, who is known as a humorist, unabashedly untrained cartoonist, and dog lover. He was also subject to melancholy, a drinker of note, and something of an outsider (in his own damaged eyes at least) as an Ohioan, born and educated, who became a fixture in the glamorous Algonquin Roundtable of Manhattan writers and playwrights. I can relate to all of that but the fame and the lifelong journey to blindness. I believe he was likely the best writer of the gang that gathered in the Algonquin Hotel in the 1930s, and I made...
WW2 Flying Tigers P-40 showing Ace-level kills at “Threads” based on notifications of 50 to 100 Likes for various replies I’ve made to TDS ranters. I’ve been in a down mood as we approach the end of 2025 and the completion of Trump’s first year in office since 2020. My annual End of Year post will describe my big picture view, but this post will fill in a significant part of that picture and can be used as a basis for endorsement or dismissal of my personal perspective. The social network app called Threads has been reference here previously, after my first exploratory encounters with what I’ve termed the “submerged 10 percent of Trump haters” the real percentage is probably much higher than a tenth, but these are the noncelebrity Rosie O’Donnells and Robert De Niros who are so obsessed with Trump that they have to type it out loud at the top of their keyboard lungs on a daily basis. After my first few brushes with them, I began to think that there’s something important goi...
We have one, secretly transmitted to us via the DarkNet… If you’re not allowed to play with DarkNet stuff, go no further. Fair warning. Don’t show this to anybody else. It could damage reputations… Who’s that smirking at Bill from behind the lavender incense cloud? (Don’t click on the pic; we can’t be responsible for what you find)
Most of the TDS we see and react to originates in the figurative space we call Inside-the-Beltway. Politicians, mass media opinion-shapers, deeply entrenched bureaucracies in the federal government, including the judiciary, the intelligence services, the innumerable money-dispensing and regulatory agencies, and the bicoastal social elites generally, who are bound to DC by ties of family, friends, and financial affiliations. We know that this sizeable group of powerful people hates Trump for very personal reasons, mostly fear and envy. He is a direct threat to them in every part of their lives, from career security to potential scandals involving corruption and/or sex. But what about all the people from outside the Beltway? The otherwise ordinary 75 million people who voted for an utterly unqualified candidate in the 2024 election. A woman who rose to the top the old-fashioned pre-feminist way, on her back, and proceeded to fail or phone in every position or responsibility she ha...
Our own Queen Iris Stairway to Heaven A Whiter Shade of Pale (Procol Harum) You Don’t Own Me (Leslie Gore) All I Knead (The Hollies) Take on Me (Aha!) Grand Prize Winner: Bohemian Catsody Got your mind right, yet? Good. Happy Hump Day .
Good ol’ W has put himself back in the news recently, bemoaning the plight of Afghans whose escape route to America via the Biden EZ-Pass might come unglued. A man’s got to have his priorities. Anyhow, I was reminded by his return to the public eye that I had an orphan piece about his 43ness floating around somewhere in the electronic ether I live in. There was a place called Shuteye Town 1999 , in which there was a mall store called Moon Books, in which there was a book for sale titled ‘Loving Ameria 2’ by George Hubert Walker Chevy Snaffle Adidas Bush IV. You had to use your video game savvy to get inside Moon Books w/o getting arrested thiugh… * The Bore Backgrounder exists too. Still needs formatting… For more than 50 of the books sold at Moon, you could click on titles and see the front and back covers. For a lot of those, there was also a representative text sample and background on the writers. Unfortunately, Internet life has been complicated for ST99, and at ...
Michael Smith He has about 10,000 more FB friends than I do. Just posted this on his Facebook page: You posted recently about the problem of what we can really do as individuals to deal with problems you describe capably and suggested a two-part format for addressing this hole in the communication challenge. I replied with this: “There’s an alternate universe to be built out there. For all of us who care about the ones who will come later, the ones who are kids now and the ones who may only be a gleam in your children’s eyes. A deliberate linkage of all that we consider best and inspirational, both intellectually and creatively, including pure entertainments. We have all been taught (programmed?) to regard ourselves as vectors, pushed by economic (egononomic?) needs, working alone with friends, acquaintances, acolytes as support for our labors. But we are limiting ourselves by an engrained habit of clinging to customary means of attracting notice to ourselves. I know there are pr...
Same idea. Turned into a galoop by misplaced trust in wrong’ uns. Christmas was especially generous to the Gateway Pundit yesterday, offering up a bonanza of Punch-and-Judy type slapstick comedy. The stars included both knowns and unknowns in the lefty art of making fools of themselves as they act out some of the dumber parts of the aging Panderer Playbook. Rather than string them together at Facebook as if they were breaking news that mattered, Instapunk decided to string them together here as an entry in his old regular feature, The Friday Follies. No more setup needed. Just sit back and laugh. Dressing up for the Holidays FTA: <<Minnesota Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan appeared in a video wearing a hijab while addressing members of the Somali community, gushing about how they’re woven into the “fabric” of the state. Flanagan, of course, is not Muslim. This comes amid growing backlash against Somali-linked fraud scandals in her state, which drained billions in taxpayer dollars. Flan...
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