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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   28005 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 7, 2024

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What do you mean by "more popularly elected?" Biden's EC margin was lower than either of Obama's and Biden's popular vote margin was between Obama's margins (lower than 2008, higher than 2012). More generally the US popular vote has been trending Dem for a while now. The Republican presidential candidate has won the popular vote once (Bush 2004) in the last 30 years.

I am not talking about the relative margin.

Biden got 81,284,000 votes total, the most ever. Beating Obama's record 69,498,516.

I don't think population growth alone can account for that. And I'm not really seeing how one can justify it with enthusiasm.

If you think this needs explaining, then why do you not think that Trump's 74,223,975 total votes need explaining as well? You can weave the same sort of just-so story of how that outcome is implausible, with the same sort of emotional incredulity - how did an incumbent candidate who achieved so little of what he had promised to do and stumbled from scandal to scandal manage to attract some 10 million more voters than the first time around, and also blaze past Obama's record? Unless you are contending that the forces of election manipulation also conjured up millions (but fewer) fake votes for Trump for good reason, you are just left claiming a convenient cutoff point where your candidate's unprecedented increase in support is still low enough to be normal but his opponent's is high enough to be evidence of foul play.

Do not presume. I do think the higher turnout on both sides is suspicious.

It speaks to me of a complete free for all where all the normal rules and safeguards were thrown away because of Covid and where the legitimacy of the outcome is impossible to verify.

Had Trump won we may not be having this conversation because the topic would be something else, but it would still be suspicious.

How can one justify it with non-enthusiasm?

Take out a factor for population, and you’re still left with millions of excess votes. The number of citizens grew by around 7.5M, but there were over 17M more votes. That’s not the kind of gap that hides in a couple of stuffed mailboxes. It should be obvious, incontrovertible, a smoking gun.

But that’s not what we see. Existing mechanisms like poll watchers haven’t caught such fraud. Surprise audits by experts and partisans haven’t found anything close. States with wide variety in procedures and political incentives keep turning up the same lack of evidence.

Forget the Republicans. There’s a huge incentive for Democrat muckrakers to look for just one abuse in a red state. That kind of “gotcha” would be plastered all over social media. But we don’t see that, because there’s nothing to be found. Trump didn’t have to fake it to get 11M more votes.

If he managed that compared to his 2016 bid, surely Biden could manage it compared to Hillary Clinton. People stopped voting Green, stopped voting Libertarian, stopped sitting it out. It was just that polarizing.

While I am and have been generally skeptical for the strong version of the 2020 vote fraud argument:

There’s a huge incentive for Democrat muckrakers to look for just one abuse in a red state. That kind of “gotcha” would be plastered all over social media.

McCrae Dowless was.

Exactly. That’s the best they could come up with.

I think of cases like these as the motte for election interference. If we can’t find equivalents for the 2020 election, which was more charged, more vulnerable, and more closely scrutinized, I think that suggests an extremely low rate of fraud.

Existing mechanisms like poll watchers haven’t caught such fraud.

Funny you would say that, since one of the big 'smoking guns' was poll watchers in battleground states being effectively prevented from watching -- whether under the pretense of anti-covid measures, or counting continuing outside of their presence.

It’s not funny I’d say that. Poll watchers are doing an important job. If you’re talking about the Detroit or Fulton cases, I found them unconvincing.

Do you have more info on the COVID topic? I’m curious about the actual changes in policy. All I find with Google is scaremongering about amateur poll watchers.

I was more talking about Philly, it's well documented due to being one of the few successful R court challenges:

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/pennsylvania-judge-permits-campaign-observers-close-view-ballot/story?id=74040279

OFC the 'success' was in the form of a court order allowing them to approach counters within six feet instead of being roped off at 20+ -- and came after the counting was largely complete.

I'd have to dig through old reddit materials to get you policies in other places, but six feet was widely enforced, which I'd argue is still too far away to reasonably see what a counter is doing; watchers also complained of being dismissed for improper mask wearing, which Republicans claimed was disproportionately targeted at them in locations with disproportionately fat black female Democrat-leaning counting officials. Of course they would say that, but it doesn't seem like an outrageous scenario even without fraudulent intent -- dealing with challenges is obviously more work for the counters than not, so I can well believe that they'd be looking for any excuse to get rid of people who were bugging them all the time about their procedures. Covid provided that excuse, and people took advantage -- whether they also took advantage in the form of actually biased counting procedures and/or full-on fraud is an open question, and it really really shouldn't be.

Voter turnout was up significantly in 2020 compared to any presidential election since at least 1992. This was true in every state, with most states seeing around a 6 point bump. It didn't even seem to matter if the state was competitive or not in the presidential election; Hawaii, which usually sees a turnout in the 30s or low 40s, jumped from around 38 percent turnout to around 52 percent turnout. Texas, the new loser, saw turnout increase from 43.4% to 51.3%. California and Montana both saw ten point increases. For whatever reason, Americans, regardless of political disposition, were more inclined to vote in 2020 than they were in previous years. If this, in and of itself, is evidence of fraud in swing states, then it's evidence of fraud in every state, including ones controlled by Republicans that voted for Trump in larger margins than in 2016.

The only metric of "voter turnout" is "votes cast," so ballot harvesting generating 10 million fraudulent votes is the same as 10 million extra people actually standing in line to vote, as far as turnout is concerned. Pointing to 2020's high "turnout" isn't evidence of legitimacy.

I mentioned arguments to the contrary being perfunctory, and we see a lot of this in this thread. Note that "well, Biden may not have been popular, but maybe they just hated Trump so much?" and then the argument stops right there. People publicly called Reagan the antiChrist, I watched prime-time network movies about how totally-not-Reagan was going to get us all killed; I watched every celebrity in the world shit all over GWB, also insisting he's going to get us all killed. Arguing that Trump was so uniquely hated that he drove record-shattering numbers of voters against him (while also driving record-shattering numbers of votes for him), and furthermore accomplished this feat with virtually no help from the Biden camp, who did precious little campaigning to build his own support, again requires me to ignore everything history has taught us of how elections actually work, of what motivates voters to vote. We have to have selective amnesia to think "well, maybe they just hated Trump that much" carries water.

I wouldn't say it's evidence of fraud in and of itself, but it is suspicious. And I have trouble with the legitimacy of mail in voting in general since it's much easier to coerce or buy votes with it, especially if the conditions are as relaxed as they were that time.

Easier mail-in voting + COVID meaning there was literally nothing to do except get sucked into politics.

Does this also apply to Trump? His 74M votes in 2020 is the second most any presidential candidate has ever received. Also beating Obama at his peak.

I think so. I find it hard to believe Trump is more popular than peak Obama either.

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