Being the continuation of InstaPunk and InstaPunk Rules
Landmarks in Voting
Get link
Facebook
X
Pinterest
Email
Other Apps
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.
Take a minute to look at the opener here. We all know this is pretty much how things are nowadays. Everything chaotic, backwards and upside down, as if some law of nature had been violated. Which it has. Early in this this century, wishful thinkers believed in a mirage called Hope and Change that turned out to be shallow, insincere, and small-minded. We survived that, sort of, but the ones who felt most betrayed, about 30 percent of the nation, believed they deserved more than the eight years of delusion which had been their sacrifice given in exchange for the real prize. In compensation, they wanted to elect a very bad woman to the Presidency of the United States. They were denied that wrongheaded but deeply felt desire. Since that bitter disappointment they have become obsessed with becoming as mean and hateful and ruthless as it took to wreak their revenge on the man who defeated them and the people who helped him do it. The bad woman led the legions of those smashing everythin...
Who’s in charge of building the American ‘woman’ of the future? Everyone knows what TEMU is, right? Even I know what TEMU is, and I don’t have anything to do with TikTok. How can that be? I don’t even associate with the CCP-friendly mass media. But I do know and I’ll explain why. For those a little bit farther behind the curve, this is TEMU: Companies like TEMU are the reason why Trump is taking a harder line against China than every other treacherous trading partner of the United States. The Wall Street media crowd is actively hoping for a recession to cool Trump’s jets on the tariff thing. They can’t afford to lose the enormous subsidy their publications receive from Chinese advertisers. Anything is preferable to losing those big big bucks in a period when the suckers are no longer willing to read libels against themselves by paying to see behind a pay wall. The crisis of the Trump tariff policy (that’s “Trade War” in NYTspeak) is hitting TEMU too.. Oh. Right. The crisis is higher pr...
AI is independently objective? Not politically biased? Not a powerful hidden censor? Guess again. This post isn’t about AI. But AI is now part of an increasingly ominous context in which the fate of western civilization is being played as both low comedy and high tragedy. I use an AI app as a satirical tool. It enables you to make still photos of faces say things from a long list of snappy quotes and music clips. A lot of the quotes are themselves satirical, with voices altered from the original speaker or singer, to make them funny in some other mouth. But they don’t like it when you use their little app to make certain sacred cows look stupid or dishonest. Any Every time the name Trump appears in a headline over a photo featuring one of his thousands of enemies, the Revive app is certain to flag your work in process as NSFW, as in not safe for work in the politically correct Progressive media environment. You’re not allowed. If you try to appease by moderating headlines o...
Mad Max as you’re supposed to want her Having finished my Mad Max post yesterday, I realized I had confined my discussion of the ‘Instant Gratification’ problem to the MAGA fainthearts. Their inability to look far enough forward to envision consequences is far less than that of the whole half country full of Democrat apologists and Trump haters. Shouldn’t I address that fact in some comparable terms to what I just wrote? I guess so. The easy answer is referencing the two recent Mad Max sequels provided to us by Woke Hollywood. But I haven’t seen them. I had no interest in paying to see them in a theater. At one point I did put one of them, Furiosa I think, on my IMDB watch list. I received a notification that it would be briefly available on one of the streaming services and I did tune in to watch. Lost interest about 15 minutes in, by which time the old rules had it a good movie should have you hooked. I was not hooked. It was just the same cinematic backdrop as the Road W...
This post is a pick-up from an entry at another website of mine from Good Friday, a couple days ago. Originally, I didn’t see it as having an audience here because I don’t want to overdo the archaeology of my own work and past personal experience. But looking back is part of the process of using insights past in new ways that illuminate the present and the challenges of the future. So I rethought the placement and offer it here without apologies. The one day a year devoted entirely to death. Got to wondering, what’s the single deadest thing in our culture right now? Deader even than journalism, the fine arts, literature, music in every genre, and the scientific method. My own answer is history. I’ve read and studied a lot of history, both in school and as an avocation. As an elementary school kid, I saved a Sunday supplement that put color pics of all 35 Presidents on one sheet of newsprint and I memorized the order. Before college I got AP credit in both American and European history....
Happy Independence Day No. 250! I’m planning to do my part for the year-long celebration of the still remarkable birth of the United States of America. Just starting to realize that the number of us who remember the last big anniversary in 1976 is getting smaller every day. Why I have some special ideas about focusing on the moment of transition, that is the tick of the clock last night when the 249th year became the 250th. A kind of time capsule that may be buried now but dug up later to see who were way back when you were still as young as you think you are now. My credentials for the job. Quite a few actually, but the most important one today is that I was a working participant in the official Bicentennial celebrations back when I was still young. I wrote a post about it almost 10 years ago, ancient history in today’s 24/7 chronometer dial. In honor of the ones no longer with us from that time, I dug up the old post from the Wayback Machine and put it back together here a...
Make America Moral Again (Rockies caps are available super-cheap about now..) Epstein is the trigger. Mike Pence is the man to pull it. Time is of the essence here. Opportunities like this must be seized quickly or they go away just as quickly. The good news is I did some work on this back in the ‘24 Campaign, but there just wasn’t enough time to pull things together. Now I’m prepared to pass on the concepts and deliverables I developed before, spiff them up a bit for the new situation, and let all the brave new reformers use them to change the tide for the better. Yes, I’m talking about giving all you sudden moral stickler MAGA dropouts a head start on the ‘28 Campaign, which, believe me, the pollsters are already making serious money on. Still don’t get it? I’m giving you the basics for Mike Pence for President 2.0. I had already collected materials and some copy notes for a Kindle book called, simply enough, Pence for President. Here’s the cover I designed at the time. The co...
Another has-been life ruined beyond repair. Trump Curse writ large. Rosie O’Donnell still can’t get over the fact that Trump won the Republican nomination in 2016 by blowing off Megyn Kelly’s gotcha question about his mean tweets to women, using her as the completely understandable punchline. Millions of men, and even some women, said to themselves, “I would do that too.” She’s a sad case. But this latest outburst got me to thinking. Maybe I’ve been unfair to The Donald myself over the years. With my wife and others, I’ve taken the position that I admire Trump as a President and would-be savior of the Republic. I’ve also said I wouldn’t have him in my house for dinner. Or, less pompously, that I have never had any desire to meet him in person. I have fought strenuously for his political life and fortunes. No one can deny that. But I also fought for George W and Mitt Romney (as I had done for McCain, whom I genuinely despised) when they were running. Didn’t want to meet them...
Not quite true… Not quite true that I don’t care about you. Don’t care about whatever judgments you lay on me, but that’s different. Also not quite true that the big piece I’m referring to in the title is missing. It’s all there, more or less intact, but it’s missing to me. Why Facebook wants to sell it to me for just under $3,000. I’m not bitching about that. It’s the contract we accept when we join the network. Frustrated? Yeah. That’s the right word. Here at IPR, I refer to Facebook as something else I do in addition to this and my other website projects. Since 2019 (with one petulant year off), I have added posts here pretty steadily. They now add up to just under 700 posts in total. At an average of 1,500 words, that amounts to more than a million words of text and who knows how many graphics. At 400 words per printed page, excluding graphics, that’s about 2,800 pages. That’s a lot. I’ve never been able to guesstimate much hard data about Facebook. A little over 10 years of postin...
There is a movement underway to convince you that Artificial Intelligence is a massive, accelerating threat to your freedom and our way of life. The ones who are most alarmed are political commentators and technology experts on the right. The political commentators are ignorant of the real technology issues involved, and the technology experts are so isolated in a silo of delusion that they are the last people we should look to for the real nature of the threat. Yes, there is a threat. But it’s not Artificial Intelligence overtaking human autonomy. It’s Artificial Dementia overtaking our systems infrastructure. What? Yes. What purports to be Artificial Intelligence is in fact the opposite. You’re already experiencing this phenomenon, whether you choose to recognize it or not. Your social networks are a vivid case in point. Haven’t you noticed that every new release of device operating systems, network-level applications, and so-called task-level productivity aids only make things ...
Comments