MY PROBLEM WITH THE 2020 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION

           There are plenty of reasons to think the election was stolen and that Biden will forever be an illegitimate president.  For me, the most telling piece of evidence is the red wave that swept the nation, with large numbers of Republicans getting elected to the House of Representatives and to state legislatures and other local offices across the land.  That Trump alone would fail to get a lift from this wave makes little sense.  Elections with our two-party system just never work that way.  Sometimes an elected President will have very short coattails, and his popularity will have little influence over the results of down-ballot races.  But this result, where Democrats are rejected by voters pretty much everywhere but take the presidency with a record number of votes---well, it doesn’t happen.  And it didn’t happen.  Something else happened.  Ballot boxes were stuffed with phony ballots for Joe Biden.

 

          More evidence appears when we examine the history of presidential elections.  When an incumbent President is running for re-election, the contest is primarily a referendum on his performance over his first four years, and the electorate’s feelings about the challenger are secondary.  If the president gets fewer votes than he did the first time, he loses.  If he gets more votes, he is re-elected.

 

          The one exception to the first part of this rule occurred in 2012, when Barack Obama got fewer votes than he did in 2008, but was elected again anyway  Every other time in American history the president got fewer votes in his second try, he lost.  And the reason for this anomalous result in 2012 seems clear.  Mitt Romney was such a dreadful candidate that he mattered.  Though the public was ready to replace Obama, Romney was NOT the guy they would replace him with.

 

          The second part of the rule is that when a president gets more votes in his second election than he did in his first, he is re-elected.  Here is a list of all the American Presidents who got more votes than they did the first time.  (I have left off the first few contests, where there was no popular vote.)

 

Andrew Jackson               647,286           687,502

ELECTED

Abe Lincoln                     1,866,452      2,213,665        

ELECTED

U.S. Grant                         3,012,833       3,597,132      

ELECTED

Grover Cleveland              4,874,986       5,540,309       

LOST ELECTORAL                                                                                                       COLLEGE

Wm. McKinley                  7,104,779       7,207,923       

ELECTED

Woodrow Wilson               6,293,454       9,129,606       

ELECTED

Franklin Roosevelt            22,821,857    27,476,673       

ELECTED

D. Eisenhower                   33,778,963    35,581,003       

ELECTED

Richard Nixon                   31,710,470    46,740,323       

ELECTED

Ronald Reagan                  43,642,639    54,455,075       

ELECTED

G.W. Bush                         50,456,002    62,028,285       

ELECTED

Donald Trump                   62,979,636    74,208,375        

LOST??

 

          Toward the end of the campaign, as you may recall, Biden was playing to crowds of a couple hundred people once in a while, while Trump had rallies with tens of thousands attending (sometimes two or three rallies a day).  And yet Joe is now credited with 81.2 million popular votes, eclipsing Obama’s 2008 popular vote record by 12 million.

 

          No.  I don’t believe Joe did something no other challenger in American history ever came close to.  And no, I don't believe the numbers.

 

Copyright2020MichaelKubacki