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Notes -
Popular vote counts for Democrat candidates since 2008, per Wikipedia:
What is the steelman for why I shouldn't take Biden's anomalously high vote count in 2020 as evidence of fraud? I never looked too closely into the details of the 2020 fraud claims, and I'm sure that this issue has already been discussed at length previously, but it seems like it would be reasonable to revisit that discussion in light of Harris's vote count dropping back to be more in line with the historical average. (The votes are still being counted, but we can safely assume that her total vote count won't go too much higher than 70 million. Biden got over 10 million votes more than that.)
Trump's vote total of 74,223,975 in 2020 was also elevated compared to what would historically be expected of a Republican candidate, but it seems less anomalous in light of the 71,352,277 votes he's received so far this year. Whereas Harris has drastically unperformed Biden while simultaneously performing more in line with other Democrat candidates.
It's not exactly a formal statistical analysis, but this does somewhat increase my credence that there was substantial fraud in 2020. It just doesn't pass the smell test that there were ~15 million people who were that excited to vote for Biden, who had largely never voted Democrat before, and then they all just failed to materialize again in 2024.
It's because the votes aren't done being counted yet. As I write this, California is only reporting 59% so far, and they'll probably add a few million by themselves. Also, since you wrote your comment, Harris has already gained about three million votes and is sitting just over 69 million. Polymarket expects her to end up near 76-78 million, and there's little doubt she'll have the second highest vote total of any Democrat ever. There's nothing here that needs any deeper explanation.
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Well, Democrats generally were more worried about Trump this time round given all of his post-2020 election denialism, so if 'they' had the ability to rig it last time, why didn't it happen this time round? After all while it wasn't 'close' this year, the actual number of votes needed to flip the election wasn't even particularly high given that only 3(?) states would need to change hands. I've heard the figure 120,000 in a few places. If you're alleging that fraudulent votes numbered in the millions in 2020 (otherwise what's the relevance of the disparity in total vote), could really have been that hard to find 120,000 votes this time round. My prior for election fraud was already non-existant, but if anything this should lower it even further. Covid also throws in huge uncertainty - boredom driving political engagement, anger at Trump's non-existent/incompetent response (except warp speed, which he then couldn't talk about because of his deranged supporters lol), world-wide anti-incumbent feeling (which we see again here).
If this is your argument then it implies the number of fraudulent votes must have been at least well over 5 million (after all there wouldn't be that much difference in plausibility between 10 mil above the last two cycles and 15 mil above), which is a truly extraordinary claim that would require commensurate evidence.
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There's about 16 million votes cast but not yet counted as of right now, with a reasonable expectation of 55% of those votes going to Harris. Trump will still handily win the popular vote, but turnout almost rivals 2020. I wouldn't be shocked to see Harris hit 75 million, which, even if it's not quite Biden numbers, is still better than how Trump did in 2020.
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Trump got 12M more votes vs 2016. Fraud? I asked chatgpt to make a table of voter turnout by year, % turnout for D's and R's, and voter registration rate - for the last 5 elections. It supposedly took data from here:
https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2022/demo/p20-585.pdf
2020 had the highest values in every singly category. I think a lot of people voted in 2020.
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Well, it would have been stupid and unnecessarily risky for Democrats to rig the vote so hard in 2020 that they won by 7 million popular votes. Presumably, people smart enough and capable enough that they could rig the vote so massively while leaving no clear smoking guns of a massive election steal would also have been smart enough to just win by a safe small margin, not by 7 million popular votes.
This would also be an incredible display of competence totally out of line with anything else the DNC has displayed in my lifetime. Any group that could pull off election fraud this massive, with no credible evidence left behind, maybe should be in charge.
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This characterization assumes there is a group called 'Democrats' who 'do things' in some top down fashion that can include, among other things, directly manipulating votes. This group sees itself as a representation of all 'Democrats' and then takes into account whether or not doing something would be 'too risky' for them as a group.
To me this characterization makes no sense, and as it asserts a very conspiratorial mechanism for how things have to happen. In the real world it's real people who do things. They don't need to be controlled from the top down to do things that they think benefit their group. Even if there is a conspiracy to do something illegal it would very rarely be rubber stamped by some 'higher up'. Personafying events in the way you do feels very fallacious.
I have similar feelings every time someone misrepresents any assertions about group based behavior in a manner such as this. Not everything needs to be ordained from a higher power. People can just believe things and then do things based on that of their own volition. Their ideas can even be bad!
There actually is "a group called Democrats" who do "do things" and they happen to be rather famous/infamous within the context of US politics for thier top-down organization and for exercising strict control over thier subsidiaries.
So nothing can happen anywhere with regards to voter fraud favoring democrats without it being under the control of this group called 'Democrats'?
I'm trying to highlight the contention I made. Which was that the assumption that there has to be a higher power making measured and deliberate decisions in order to facilitate voter fraud is fallacious.
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Covid caused states to take actions that would increase turnout through a bunch of second-order effects. From increased polarization, from how increased government power made who that government was more important, from how being at home with nothing to do all day but consume political content, from how it made it easier to vote.
Now, you could argue that (mostly) democratic governors broke the law with the covid response in ways that, via second order effects, happened to also benefit their election chances in 2020. And that is a misuse of political power for personal gain. But this isn't the usual definition of fraud. It's not even the media censorship non-fraud argument for election rigging.
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Obama 2008 was a blowout year, 2012, 2016 and 2024 had a lot less enthusiasm, and between 2008 and 2020 the population grew by 10%. That gets you halfway there, more if that growth was skewed democratic.
Not to mention the vast majority of fraud claims would be in the thousands to tens of thousands of ballots in swing states, not literally 15 million votes across the country. How can you possibly envision fraud on that scale? Literally every dem leaning county dumping tens of thousands of fake ballots and none of the election officials turned up concrete evidence?
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Grassroots mail-in ballot "Harvesting;" Everyone had too much time on their hands and mail-ins were convenient; especially if it got the wokescold in your life to stop bothering you about if you voted or not. Lots of small-time activists agitating in their community to get every warm body to send their mail-in ballot out.
There's a lot of people out there that truly DON'T engage in politics; they have manual jobs that keep them busy and don't require ideological posturing, they don't consume political entertainment media, they're not radical hipsters trying to out-radical other radical hipsters. They're hard to spot because by definition they're not posting X or Facebook politics screeds. Whatever combination of being too dumb to read, too grounded to get fearmongered, too unhip to get peer-pressured, too lazy, too disorganized, too busy, too enlightened. Only easy pandemic mail-ins and the omnipresent media narrative got them to vote, then things went back to normal.
That's my pitch, anyways.
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It'll take California a week to finish accepting, nevermind finish counting, their votes, and there's probably around 8m uncounted in that one state alone, of which Harris can probably expect around 5m. I don't want to bet that final turnout matches exactly, but even if below, it's not gonna be so far that simple 'reduced enthusiasm and less remote voting' is outside of the realm of plausibility or even reasonability.
((Now, whether there's fraud in California is a different question, and one I can't really promise. Probably not unusual levels this year.))
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Aren't there still a lot of ballots left? CA is only 54% reported, for instance.
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I firmly believe the 2020 elections were the least secure ever and definitely opened opportunities for voter fraud, while 2024 has probably been one of the most secure elections due to the amount of R oversight funded by the Republican party and coordinated with modern R leadership.
That being said, 2020 was also a referendum on Trump and COVID response - something that was largely unpopular in how it was handled and was the worst administrative goof of Trump's previous tenure as president by far. On top of that, the multiple investigations, the constant drama and controversies of the Trump cabinet (and Trump himself) heavily motivated voters, including old school conservatives, to buck the party line in a hope old Joe would bring some semblance of 'normalcy' to the presidency.
So, the larger question which will never be answered is how many votes were potentially voter fraud, and how many were motivated by unpopular administrative actions.
The media had also successfully painted Trump's handling of COVID as inept, enough so that when Trump said the vaccine was likely to be out before the end of the year that was treated as just another lie.
In reality Operation Warp Speed did succeed, and it was only via shenanigans that vaccine approvals were delayed until after the election.
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Occam's razor in my opinion is that Harris, Clinton, and Obama in his 2nd year underperformed, and turnout has been increasing as America becomes more polarized and politically activated.
Biden overperformed for the same reason normies went to BLM rallies in 2020, there was an huge anti-Trump awakening, it's just petered out.
Compare that to a 15 million vote fraud coverup, which is more likely?
The coverup, obviouslyl. It requires us to pretend history began circa 2019 to pretend that BLM represented a ground-breaking, once-in-century event that the Reagan landslides, the Chance to Bury Racism Forever that was 2008, or ushering in Camelot with JFK that previous elections couldn't dream of coming close to.
Previous centuries didn't have a 9 minutes video of a handcuffed man dying in front of a crowd.
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Covid, definitely. The fear of both the disease and our response politically activated people to an unusual degree, and we have regressed to mean.
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I don't know if it's a steelman, but here's an alternative explanation: they ran out of mana. You can literally see when the tank ran dry.
I think that graph would be a lot more compelling if it wasn’t 50% empty space. There’s room for plenty of spikes between ‘78 and ‘96.
Ok, but how would those spikes change the conclusion about what happened from 2016 to 2024?
As it stands, we see rising edges in credibility with Democrats each time a Republican is elected. I want to see if that holds for Bush Sr. or Reagan.
I suspect the curves have more to do with media technology and the collapse of newspapers than with the actual Democratic establishment and their mana pool.
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Like I said the fully Trump captured GOP invested heavily in proactively preventing what they believed were the avenues of voter fraud Trump has never given up on from 2020. I can't exactly take a victory lap because even I said I thought an outcome like this was weak circumstantial evidence. But maybe the GOP's heavy investment in fraud prevention carried the day. We may never know since the election only happens once, and we'll never see the counterfactual.
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