The facts: As of this date, Trump has about a 1.5% edge in the popular vote, and a decisive win, 312 to 226 over Harris in the Electoral College. By any analysis, it was a very close election. A single percentage point of votes flipping would have given Harris the popular vote lead, though her winning the Electoral College would have required pinpoint distribution of those votes.
What is a fair and ethical interpretation of this? Who’s lying, spinning, exaggerating or telling it like it is?
1. Today stories came out about Harris’s staff saying that internal polls showed her behind Trump from the start, and that they knew everything would have to break right for her to win. This in part is the campaign ducking responsibility: if Harris lost by only 1.5%, obviously she could have won. They are saying, absurdly, “It wasn’t our fault, the deck was stacked against us!” Harris ran a terrible campaign, and still came close. If she had run a better campaign, and got better advice (that she paid dearly for) that 1.5% would have been within reach. If she had competently answered a soft-ball question she got on “The View,” for heaven’s sake, that might have been enough. Or if she had agreed to the interview with Joe Rogan (and not fallen flat on her face, which is a big if). If she had not chosen The Knucklehead as her running mate. Any of these might have allowed Harris to prevail despite everything else.
2. And that is amazing. Harris was awful. Her party’s conduct in nominating her was disgraceful. Biden’s administration was and is a mess, and Harris never was able to separate herself from its botches and failures. Yet she almost won. What does that tell us?
3. It tells us that a) Trump is still wildly unpopular with about half the electorate. b) The news media’s aiding the Democrats’ Big Lie-and-Scaremongering kept Trump from clobbering Harris as a normal ex-President running against a weak candidate would. c) The Trump-Deranged hoard that the last eight years have created would literally vote for anyone and anything but Donald Trump—a piece of wood, a bowl of pudding, whatever.
4. For enough voters to get past all of the obstacles to Trump’s election, some of them self-erected, to give him a victory in the popular vote has to be regarded as an accomplishment, yes, even with his stunningly incompetent opposition.
5. The Electoral College in this case better represents what was going on. Trump’s support was broad, with him gaining support over his 2020 election performance in almost every state and almost every demographic group—despite the impeachments, despite the lawfare cases, despite the unprecedented news media prejudice against him, despite the January 6 riot, and despite the fact that he is an unrepentant asshole. Moreover, the virtually non-competitive, one -party politics of a few outlier states—California, Massachusetts, Maryland and New York, plus D.C.—gave Harris a six-million votes edge (half of which is California) that Trump had to overcome and did. In the other 46 states, he had a nearly 9 million vote advantage. Americans have come to see California as some kind of weird cult at odds with much of what the majority of the United States believes and stands for; I know I have. This is why it felt all along like Trump was likely to win, despite New York City pundits saying that they literally didn’t know any Trump supporters.
5. Does Trump have a mandate? It’s a silly question that the losing party always tries to spin after a close election. He won. That’s all it takes to have a “mandate.” John Fitzgerald Kennedy had an Electoral College victory similar to Trump’s, with an even closer popular vote: just120,000 votes separated him from Richard Nixon. Kennedy didn’t hold back on pursuing his policies and agenda one bit, nor should he have. Checks and balances in our system are provided by Congress through the Constitution, not some arcane formula interpreting how a President reached the White House.
In 1975, the Cincinnati Reds beat the Boston Red Sox in the closest World Series of all time. In seven games, the Red Sox scored one more run and had one more hit than the Reds, but the Reds won one more game, and that’s what mattered. The Reds were still the World Champions, no less than the Los Angeles Dodgers are today after clobbering the New York Yankee in a 4 games to 1 World Series rout. In Presidential races just like the World Series, the winner is the winner, and once the games are over, the scores don’t matter.
Ethics Alarms 
Happy Thanksgiving Jack!!!
That graphic doesn’t match up with the 2024 election results; Trump won Michigan and Pennsylvania
It was sent to me by the DNC…
Jokes aside, I was rushing to get that post up before midnight (I failed anyway) and found it absurdly difficult to find a map that 1) was downloadable or 2) didn’t have Arizona and Nevada still undecided. So as soon as I got one that had them red, I grapped it, and didn’t notie that it had Penn. and Mich. wrong. Phooey. FIXED.
Let me say this morning: the first thing for which I’m giving thanks is this piece.
Those running the Harris/Walz campaign DID have the deck stacked against them, primarily caused by two issues: Harris and Walz. Fortunately, no amount of lipstick from the media, the donors, or the DNC itself could hide the obvious.
Item 5 on the Electoral College was particularly good. The election maps that show the counties in the US are even more telling. Someone – maybe someone in this space – accurately stated “there are no more blue states in America, just blue cities.” Little blue islands with gobs of population surrounded by an ocean of red, where about 70% of the population sees the situation in a completely different light.
Your final point provides a great response to Curmie’s statement in the trans-volleyball story that a 1.5% win is not a consensus or a mandate. Had VP Harris collected exactly 270 EC votes and won the popular vote by 10,000, it still would have been a mandate from the citizenry that she be Commander-in-Chief. Thank God and everything on the Thanksgiving dinner table we don’t have to realize that tragedy.
A win is a win, and the champion only needs to best, not trounce, the competition.
Now, you are a bit premature about Trump winning the popular vote. States are still counting votes and those votes are almost exclusively for Harris. In the last few elections, California has claimed that about 20% of their voters were out-of-state and had to mail in from distant locations. These ballots could arrive much later than election day and vote counting could continue into the New Year.
https://factcheck.afp.com/sites/default/files/styles/image_in_article/public/medias/factchecking/united_states/wisconsin.png?itok=xjja1ZeN
We also see this pattern again. How does this happen (1) only for Democratic votes and (2) only about 3 AM in multiple states in multiple elections?
So, it isn’t that Trump won the popular vote by 1.5 million votes. It is likely that Trump won so big that enough votes couldn’t be manufactured to beat him.
And Yet, no less an expert than “Not the Bee” wrote today of Harris, “she ran a 100-day campaign which never stood a chance.” If she lost by that narrow a margin, she obviously “stood a chance.”
Happy Thanksgiving Jack
Happy Thanksgiving, Jack.
“Bucky Fucking Dent!”
And then there was, as Jack Brickhouse called him, “Billy Buck.”
But eventually, they prevailed.
3. It tells us that a) Trump is still wildly unpopular with about half the electorate.
Which is why I’m convinced the biggest winner in November was J.D. Vance. Trump only has one term. If Vance plays his cards right, he should inherit the opportunity to run two terms of toned down, cleaned up, d-Trumped Make America Great for a long time. And is there anyone on the Dem bench other than Gavin Newsom?
Did 1% of the population pick R over D because of the clear advantage one ticket had over the other in the #2 slot? I think that’s reasonable. I think the pure knuckleheadedness of Walz might have been enough all by itself.
That’s an interesting theory. I am just thinking if Trump is at all successful, that will pave the way for Vance, a cleaned-up, more conventional Trump (military vet and Yalie), to continue in his wake.
I can’t believe Walz is polling among Democrats as a likely candidate in 2028. That’s simply preposterous. (Or that anyone would run Harris again.) Polls really are just (mostly Democrat) propaganda.
Any 2028 polls is silly from the outset. Of course nobody will nominate either to run for President again.
And the first gentleman Dougie may have to go back to filling out time sheets! Condign justice! But what law firm would want him?
But did Harris even rise to the level of knucklehead? I’m guessing nitwit is at least a few standard deviations below knucklehead.
3. It tells us that a) Trump is still wildly unpopular with about half the electorate.
I must wonder how much of that half believe Trump is a traitor.
So looking at maps and such, I’d say it’s almost certain Trump will end up winning the popular vote by at least 2 million. California’s at 99% reporting, and there’s not state I saw under 97+%. About 154 million voted this year in the presidential election.
I would wager that, had the Republicans run someone decent other than Trump, like a four years older Vance, the Harris turnout might have been significantly depressed. On the other hand, had the Democrats run a good candidate, like maybe Whitmer, that might have boosted their total. Hard to quantify the overall effects, except I do think the Republican bench is deeper.
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I finally found a site that estimates the House vote totals (Cook political report), and about 146 million votes in these races — 8 million less than for president.
The Republicans got 50.7% of House votes, outpolling the Democrats by about 4.4 million votes. Interestingly, if we had absolute proportional representation, the GOP would have 221, Democrats 207, others 7 seats. If you eliminate gerrymandering, perhaps the GOP has about 225-230 seats.
But I digress.
Cook also has a map that shows the change in turnout from 2020 to 2024. It looks to me that where you had the biggest decrease in turnout was where you saw Democrats flip seats from the Republicans. Also of interest — two of the few states that seem to have a higher turnout were Wisconsin and Michigan.
What that suggests is that lower turnouts are favoring Democrats more than Republicans. This is something I’d seen suggested after the 2022 midterms, and it also suggests that GOP efforts at voter turnout this year were crucial to their victory. Going forward, when Trump is not on the ballot, the GOP needs to intensify those efforts.
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What I am hoping for is that we are in the midst of another major realignment of voting patterns. Democrats thought they had one going starting around 2006, but it turned out to be illusory, because of a combination of wishful thinking and terrible presidential candidates. The candidates we all know, but the wishful thinking was that Latinos would be an ethnic voting block, like blacks have been.
Confoundingly, Latinos have decided to vote based on the content of their minds and not the color of their skins. How uppity of them! You’d think that, for example, they don’t like being called Latinx. How dare they! Even more worrisome, there are stirrings that blacks might be doing similar things.
I think this presents major opportunities for Republicans in general. I don’t think they should pander to these groups as the Democrats have done because a)It’s demeaning and not right, and b) It won’t work.
Trump I’s tax reform bill benefitted everyone including the lower classes. The classic cliche is “A rising tide raises all boats”, and it was exactly demonstrated in Trump’s first term. If they can substantially extend those tax changes without breaking the bank (sorry tip workers and SSA beneficiaries), another rising tide will lift Republican boats as well, possibly for a good fair while.
I’m sorry to break it to Washington that it will take some fiscal restraint, and perhaps especially legislative changes rather than executive orders. What lasted longer — Obamacare or his ‘Dear colleagues’ Title IX evisceration? The Trump tax reforms or Remain in Mexico.
It’s harder to craft and pass legislation, which is why Congress and the President don’t like to do it — but dagnabit that’s their job! And yes, it requires use of the “C” word, bitter as that pill may be.
Do your dang jobs, Congress!
Happy Thanksgiving, Jack.