Being the continuation of InstaPunk and InstaPunk Rules
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.
I’ve been at sixes and sevens about this post since I knew I had to do it. Even had a hard time picking the leadoff graphic. This one does convey the idea of questioning the decision by a great man of senior years. But this one introduces the notion that Philip Glass’s principled stand is one that has been sponsored by indolent dilettantes who didn’t give a fig about the Kennedy Center during the decades in which it has been literally falling down. Falling down. Along with all the forms of high art the Kennedy’s were trying to inspire with a facility for culturally significant performances by the nation’s most gifted artists. Interesting and ironic that they choose the 87 years Philip Glass to deliver their most stinging blow against the unspeakable privately financed renovation of the crumbling building and its wayward preoccupation with niche artistes. Am I getting ahead of myself here? Did you miss the story when it broke? Lawrence O’Donnell, the left’s fantasy Dean of Jeffersonian ...
HINT: It’s more than flashy hair. President John F. Kennedy now resides in a curious limbo. He was briefly the face of the Democrat Party as it wanted to see itself in the post-WWII era. In hindsight he was an anomaly in the party’s history. Before JFK, the most prominent Democrat Presidential contenders teetered between the crude (Andrew Jackson, William Jennings Bryan, Harry Truman, Al Smith) and the unashamedly elite (Stephen Douglas, Jefferson Davis, Rutherford B. Hayes, Woodrow Wilson, FDR, Adlai Stevenson). JFK was an interesting hybrid of both. Like Al Smith, he was a Roman Catholic, like FDR a graduate of Harvard College. His lineage also had its disreputable side, with a family fortune reputedly acquired by bootlegging during the Great Depression. Backed by that fortune, he became famous and successful at an early age but was criticized as callow and rumored to be a philanderer in his first years in the Senate. When he became a presidential candidate, he was a clear brea...
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Lewis Hamilton wins Seventh World Championship at Formula 1 Grand Prix in Turkey: A stunning drive from Mercedes’ Lewis Hamilton in the Turkish Grand Prix gave him his 10th victory of the season – and, more crucially, saw him claim the seventh drivers’ title of his career, to equal the record of Michael Schumacher, as Racing Point’s Sergio Perez and Ferrari’s Sebastian Vettel completed the podium after a thrilling race in Istanbul. Hamilton had started the race in sixth, risen to third midway through the first lap and then dropped back to sixth by the end of Lap 1 after an error at Turn 9. But a decision to change his intermediate tyres just once saw Hamilton drive a masterful race to claim victory by over 25 seconds from Perez. The win alone was enough to claim championship #7, but it was even more assured after a disastrous race for Valtteri Bottas - the only man who could have stopped Hamilton winning the title today - who spun six times en route to a P14 finish.
R. F. Laird of Yardarm University “University of California-Berkeley professor and former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich proposed the radical idea for a post-election commission to censor speech and name and shame every public figure who supported President Donald Trump’s rise to power. He wrote on Twitter over the weekend that “when this nightmare” — or Trump’s presidency — “is over, we need a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It would erase Trump’s lies, comfort those who have been harmed by his hatefulness, and name every official, politician, executive, and media mogul whose greed and cowardice enabled this catastrophe.” In response to the tweet, several Twitter followers agreed and even raised the stakes of his proposal. “I am thinking more of using the postwar Nuremberg Trials as a template,” one Twitter user wrote, speculating that criminal trials should be in order. “Felonies were committed as were treasonous behaviors. The guilty should be arrested, tried, convicted and f...
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Sunny Hostin, our favorite blonde-ish Black Pantheress, is wrong on a couple counts here. First, like the rest of The View panel, she fails to realize that most of us ‘right-wingers’ aren’t at all outraged by Christopher Nolan’s casting in his Odyssey movie. Talented as he may be, he’s also a Brit, and they’re a nation that has gone so far down the Woke hole that actuaries are predicting a majority Muslim population in the U.K. by 2030. Nolan will also have been intensely aware that the Brit film industry has crippled itself by insisting on 30 percent nonwhite casting in BBC productions, regardless of the bizarre casting anomalies that such a rule makes inevitable. In remaking Greek mythology he knows he has license to curry critical favor while boosting the free PR of a project that is, in the cold light of day, an old and cinematically familiar story not likely to sound like a must-see pic to most. His cheerful acceptance of this and his calm defense of an absurd unconfirmed po...
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