Presidential Election Post Mortem: Not that Close After All

[The Frankish Reich]

Popular Vote:

Biden by 7 million votes. 

51.4 to 46.9% -- a 4.5% margin

 

Compare 2016:

Trump: 46.4%

Clinton: 48.5%

 

So Biden gained almost 3 percentage points vs. Clinton, whereas Trump only "outperformed" his 2016 vote tally by 0.5%

 

Electoral College:

306 to 232 both times; just switch the winner

2020: Trump would have needed to shift 81,000 votes in PA, 12,000 in GA, 10,000 in AZ = 103,000 votes in order to win those 3 states and the electoral college

2016: Clinton would have needed to about 80,000 in MI, PA, WI (combined) to have won

 

So it was close, but not as close by any measure as 2016. John Kerry's loss to Bush 43 was considerably closer -- Bush won the popular vote by 2.4%, and a shift of about 120,000 votes in just one state -- Ohio -- would have given Kerry the electoral college win.

And yes, there were allegations of fraud and voter suppression claiming that Kerry was the "real" winner back then. It's just that neither Kerry nor his supporters was so unpatriotic as to try any and everything to undo the official count. See if this is sounding familiar -- it's an unhinged essay by the unhinged anti-vaxxer Robert Kennedy Jr. after the 2004 election. Just switch the party ID from Democrat to Republican and you could write exactly the same story about 2020. In other words, this happens ALL. THE. TIME.  What doesn't happen is a power-mad (or prosecution-scared) President refusing to accept the result an go away.

 

The Washington Post immediately dismissed allegations of fraud as ''conspiracy theories,''(1) and The New York Times declared that ''there is no evidence of vote theft or errors on a large scale.''(2)

But despite the media blackout, indications continued to emerge that something deeply troubling had taken place in 2004. Nearly half of the 6 million American voters living abroad(3) never received their ballots -- or received them too late to vote(4) -- after the Pentagon unaccountably shut down a state-of-the-art Web site used to file overseas registrations.(5) A consulting firm called Sproul & Associates, which was hired by the Republican National Committee to register voters in six battleground states,(6) was discovered shredding Democratic registrations.(7) In New Mexico, which was decided by 5,988 votes,(8) malfunctioning machines mysteriously failed to properly register a presidential vote on more than 20,000 ballots.(9) Nationwide, according to the federal commission charged with implementing election reforms, as many as 1 million ballots were spoiled by faulty voting equipment -- roughly one for every 100 cast.(10)

The reports were especially disturbing in Ohio, the critical battleground state that clinched Bush's victory in the electoral college. Officials there purged tens of thousands of eligible voters from the rolls, neglected to process registration cards generated by Democratic voter drives, shortchanged Democratic precincts when they allocated voting machines and illegally derailed a recount that could have given Kerry the presidency. A precinct in an evangelical church in Miami County recorded an impossibly high turnout of ninety-eight percent, while a polling place in inner-city Cleveland recorded an equally impossible turnout of only seven percent. In Warren County, GOP election officials even invented a nonexistent terrorist threat to bar the media from monitoring the official vote count.

 

https://www.commondreams.org/views06/0601-34.htm

[transplantbillsfan]

Is this finally with 100% of the count in?

[The Frankish Reich]

6 minutes ago, transplantbillsfan said:

Is this finally with 100% of the count in?

Yep. No votes left to be counted.

[Unforgiven]

LOL snowflakes snowflakin' rats swallwell or spit rofl

All the rats bitched and moaned and cried and burnt down ***** because of "election fraud"

Now no there's no such thing as election fraud.

LOL

Edited December 10, 2020 by Unforgiven

[Warcodered]

2 hours ago, Unforgiven said:

LOL snowflakes snowflakin' rats swallwell or spit rofl

All the rats bitched and moaned and cried and burnt down ***** because of "election fraud"

Now no there's no such thing as election fraud.

LOL

It's over, it's done it's safe harbor day.

 

I mean this ***** is ridiculous.

 

Texas AG to Supreme Court: "maybies wees can have Coup?"

Supreme Court gonna say: "*****!!!!! no."

Edited December 10, 2020 by Warcodered

[TBBills]

8 hours ago, Unforgiven said:

I am a bitter little brainwashed feeble minded cult follower. 

 

[SoCal Deek]

Thanks for the data Mr Reich. Those figures are really very interesting. 

[Q-baby!]

11 hours ago, Unforgiven said:

LOL snowflakes snowflakin' rats swallwell or spit rofl

All the rats bitched and moaned and cried and burnt down ***** because of "election fraud"

Now no there's no such thing as election fraud.

LOL

Enjoy the next 4 years snowflake! 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂

[Backintheday544]

Let us never forget the people on here who:

 

1) called Trump supporters the silent majority. They were neither silent nor a majority

 

2) laughed at projections of Biden winning thinking it impossible since they deemed him a pedophile that is going through dementia

 

3) that felt boat parades were accurate representations of voting enthusiasm

 

While we shall not forget them, we should have pity on them. These were people who were lied to constantly and believed it. While a lot of people say they were a cult, I think a battered spouse who was gaslit is more an appropriate of an analogy. People get lured into scams and lies all the times and this was there time.
 

For these are probably the same people who get phone calls from the IRS requesting them to pay in Amazon gift cards and they pay. Or the people who have funded close to thousands of Nigerian princes still waiting for their millions of dollars.

[The Frankish Reich]

4 hours ago, Backintheday544 said:

Let us never forget the people on here who:

 

1) called Trump supporters the silent majority. They were neither silent nor a majority

 

2) laughed at projections of Biden winning thinking it impossible since they deemed him a pedophile that is going through dementia

 

3) that felt boat parades were accurate representations of voting enthusiasm

 

While we shall not forget them, we should have pity on them. These were people who were lied to constantly and believed it. While a lot of people say they were a cult, I think a battered spouse who was gaslit is more an appropriate of an analogy. People get lured into scams and lies all the times and this was there time.
 

For these are probably the same people who get phone calls from the IRS requesting them to pay in Amazon gift cards and they pay. Or the people who have funded close to thousands of Nigerian princes still waiting for their millions of dollars.

That one is actually my favorite. "But thousands of people come to Trump's unmasked cheek-to-jowl rallies, and only dozens of socially distanced cars come to Biden's drive-in rallies ... it's obvious Trump is going to win."

 

It would be laughable except the exact same type of illogic pervades the Trump team (and fellow traveler) court filings. For example, the Texas one includes an idiotic declaration stating that there was only a "one quadrillion to the fourth power" likelihood that Biden could have won. The assumptions? (1) That voter preferences were exactly the same as they were in 2016 (in sports we say "this is why you play the game"); (2) that early-counted in-person voter preferences were exactly the same as late-counted mail-in voter preferences. In other words, the Bills have a one in quadrillion chance of winning the AFC East this year because the Patriots have won it 20 years running. It really is that stupid. 

 

https://reason.com/volokh/2020/12/09/more-on-statistical-stupidity-at-scotus/

 

Here is how that idiotic "one in a quadrillion" estimate was derived.

First, Cicchetti shows that if the voters in 2020 had the same Dem vs Rep preferences as they had in 2016, the chance that the results would show Biden out-performing Hillary Clinton to the extent reported in the certified results is virtually zero. That is correct. Here's his analysis.

"10. In 2016, Trump won Georgia with 51.0% of the vote compared to Clinton's 45.9%, with more than 211,000 votes separating them.  Clinton received 1,877,963 votes and Trump received 2,089,104. In 2020, Biden's tabulated votes (2,474,507) were much greater than Clinton's in 2016.

11. I tested the hypothesis that the performance of the two Democrat candidates were statistically similar by comparing Clinton to Biden.  I compare the total votes of each candidate, in two elections and test the hypothesis that other things being the same they [i.e., Clinton and Biden] would have an equal number of votes. . . . I can reject the hypothesis many times more than one in a quadrillion times that the two outcomes were similar.

Statistics textbooks and statistics professors love to state problems with reference to balls in urns, so we can restate what Cicchetti has actually shown this way:  Suppose you have many millions of balls in an urn; 51% of the balls are red and 45% of them are blue (the 2016 distribution). You now draw 5 million balls out of the urn (the 2020 election). The chances that 2.5 million of them (50%) would be blue is, indeed, virtually zero (one in a quadrillion).

So we can reject the hypothesis that Cicchetti testing: that "the performance of the two Democrat candidates [i.e., Clinton and Biden] were statistically similar [and] that other things being the same they [i.e., Clinton and Biden] would have received an equal number of votes." As he shows, the two performances are not "statistically similar." If the voting population in 2020 had exactly the same distribution of preferences it had in 2016, Biden could not possibly have out-performed Clinton as substantially as he is reported to have done.

Second, he demonstrates that if the population of voters using mail-in ballots had the same preferences as those voting in person, the chance the mail-in ballots could have turned the tide for Biden in the manner reported is also virtually zero. That is also correct.

"14. At 3:10 AM EST on November 4 the Georgia reported tabulations were 51.09% for Trump and 48.91% for Biden…. On November 18 at 2 PM EST, the reported percentages were Trump 49.86% and Biden at 50.14%.

15.  [T]he votes tabulated in the two time periods could not be random samples from the same population of votes cast…. There is a one in many more that quadrillions of chances that these two tabulation periods are randomly drawn from the same population.  Therefore, the reported tabulations in the early and subsequent periods could not remotely plausibly (sic) be random samples from the same population of all Georgia ballots tabulated."

That, believe it or not, is it.  (A) If the 2020 voting population had precisely the same party preferences as the 2016 voting population, Biden could not possibly have won; and (B) if the mail-in and in-person voters had precisely the same party preferences, Biden could not possibly have won.

Wow! Man bites dog!!  Who would have believed it!!  If the 2020 voting population had the same Repub/Dem split as it had in 2016, Trump must have won!! If mail-in voters had the same preferences as in-person voters, Trump must have won!! And if my aunt had four wheels, she'd be a motorcar!!

 

 

[SoCal Deek]

7 hours ago, Backintheday544 said:

Let us never forget the people on here who:

 

1) called Trump supporters the silent majority. They were neither silent nor a majority

 

2) laughed at projections of Biden winning thinking it impossible since they deemed him a pedophile that is going through dementia

 

3) that felt boat parades were accurate representations of voting enthusiasm

 

While we shall not forget them, we should have pity on them. These were people who were lied to constantly and believed it. While a lot of people say they were a cult, I think a battered spouse who was gaslit is more an appropriate of an analogy. People get lured into scams and lies all the times and this was there time.
 

For these are probably the same people who get phone calls from the IRS requesting them to pay in Amazon gift cards and they pay. Or the people who have funded close to thousands of Nigerian princes still waiting for their millions of dollars.

Are they the same people who were lied to in the 2016 election?  Or were those different people who were lied to? 

Edited December 10, 2020 by SoCal Deek

[Warcodered]

1 minute ago, SoCal Deek said:

Are they the same people who were lied to in the 2016 election?  Or were those different people who were lied to? 

Saying Russia interfered in our election while still conceding is not the same as claiming election fraud and not.

[Backintheday544]

25 minutes ago, SoCal Deek said:

Are they the same people who were lied to in the 2016 election?  Or were those different people who were lied to? 

Same people. Trump has been spouting his lies since at least when he announced his running in 2016 so yea same people lied to then, were lied to through 2020 and up to the 50 plus court case losses. 

[Unforgiven]

 

Have to be brain dead to believe there wasn't massive cheating.  

Edited December 11, 2020 by Unforgiven

[Q-baby!]

26 minutes ago, Unforgiven said:

 

Have to be brain dead to believe there wasn't massive cheating.  

See a doctor! 

[WideNine]

22 hours ago, Unforgiven said:

LOL snowflakes snowflakin' rats swallwell or spit rofl

All the rats bitched and moaned and cried and burnt down ***** because of "election fraud"

Now no there's no such thing as election fraud.

LOL

 

This post should come with a warning label that reading it could make you stupid.

 

This sounds like something some MAGA hat-wearing drunk would struggle to piece together before sliding off his bar stool onto the floor.

 

Someone call this guy a cab.

 

 

 

 

[Scraps]

2 hours ago, Unforgiven said:

 

Have to be brain dead to believe there wasn't massive cheating.  

 

Hmmm

 

Kind of looks like the population density of the country.

 

People vote, not land.

 

[TBBills]

2 hours ago, Unforgiven said:

 

Have to be brain dead to believe there wasn't massive cheating.  

Seems more you have to be a brainwashed feeble minded idiot to believe their was massive cheating. You got owned pretty quickly this time... Don't know how many more times you can do this to yourself.

12 minutes ago, Scraps said:

 

Hmmm

 

Kind of looks like the population density of the country.

 

People vote, not land.

 

 

Edited December 11, 2020 by TBBills

[TBBills]

1 hour ago, WideNine said:

 

This post should come with a warning label that reading it could make you stupid.

 

This sounds like something some MAGA hat-wearing drunk would struggle to piece together before sliding off his bar stool onto the floor.

 

Someone call this guy a cab.

 

 

 

 

You know them backwoods in.cest mother *****, thinking Trump is a religion.

[SoCal Deek]

12 hours ago, Unforgiven said:

 

Have to be brain dead to believe there wasn't massive cheating.  

Southern California is a bit misleading on this map. I live in San Bernardino County, the largest geographic county in the nation. It’s that big blue mass to the east of Los Angeles running all the way to the Arizona border. The vast majority of the county is open desert. All of the people live in the far western edge in what is really a huge bedroom community to the LA Metro area.