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.
A Facebook friend sent me a comment today wondering why I was spending so much of my time lampooning a conservative news site he never looks at. I spend time on a lot of things, like ALL the news outlets, but in the grand scheme of things it only amounts to my spare time. For anyone else who’s concerned, here’s a look at the bigger news picture… The New Yorker: https://instapunkreturns.blogspot.com/2026/04/ai-fun-with-dick-and-jane.html The New York Times: https://instapunkreturns.blogspot.com/2024/12/gray-lady-down.html The Instapunk Times, 2019: https://instapunkreturns.blogspot.com/p/the-instapunk-times-morgue.html Brightbelt News, 2021: https://brightbelt.blogspot.com/ Brightbelt Perspectives, 2022: https://instapunkreturns.blogspot.com/p/brightbelt-perspectives-on-2022-midterms.html The Instapunk Times, 2025/26: https://instapunktimes.blogspot.com/ And before that, there was The XOFF News Network :
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