Not Close Enough?
By Mitch Berg
Joe Doakes, formerly of Como Park, emails:
Thank you to everyone who Voted as Hard as They Could. It paid off. The election was not stolen.
I have a parenthetical thought that doesn’t pertain to Joe. I don’t want to interrupt the flow, so I’ll hit that at the bottom of the post.
Back to Joe, who has the same question I had the day after the election:
But I still have a lingering question or two. What happened to those 81 million 2020 Biden voters? They didn’t go to Trump – he got fewer votes this time than last. They didn’t stay home – Kamala got as many votes as Hillary.
Did they ever exist? Or is this graphic proof of a stolen election after all?
My first principle is to never assume malice when stupidity and sloth are equally possible. The drop in Trump voters indicates that it’s at least partly the expiration of Covid-era voting rules that allowed people to submit ballots via their DoorDash driver, or by blinking three times during a Zoom meeting.
But that is a lot of disappeared Democrat voters. Which may speak just as well to the “sloth” thing.
OK. Discuss.
Deferred Parenthetical Thought: And again, pinky swear, isn’t aimed at Joe – I get the point he’s going for (or at least the one he will go for when I’m done interrupting), but could we retire the phrase “Vote Harder?” Smug anarcho libertarians have beaten that one to death.
We get it. You’re splendidly above the muggles and our quaint delusions.
November 22nd, 2024 at 7:20 am
Think back to 2020, Covid lockdowns, George Flyod riots, BLM everywhere and non-stop TDS. It would make sense that voters checked the Joe box – just to end the chaos.
After all, it is what the guy hiding in his basement promised – but that is not what was delivered. Instead we got boys in girl’s sports and bathroom, kids getting their privates chopped off, inflated grocery prices and out-of-control nation debt.
If Joe’s 2020 promise had been delivered, we all would have been better off than four years ago and he could have remained hidden away in his basement and coasted to victory, rather than offering up a dumber-than-rocks, joyless DEI candidate who stood for nothing.
Democrats either shifted to Trump or simply did not show up.
Chaos brought out the votes in 2020, but 2024 was simply meh.
November 22nd, 2024 at 9:41 am
“Vote Harder” perfectly illustrates the mind-set of Republican Charlie Browns who keep trying to kick Lucy’s football, instead of refusing to play a rigged game and demanding honest play.
That’s why we keep getting results like the Senate race in Wisconsin, where the Republican was winning until a 4:00 a.m. dump of 100,000 absentee ballots in Milwaukee went 80% for the Democrat, putting her over the top. And Wisconsin, as you recall, is where the state Supreme Court ruled in 2022 that absentee ballot drop boxes were illegal but overturned itself in 2024 to allow them again. What changed in Wisconsin law? Nothing, the law is the same. What changed was the makeup of the Supreme Court, from majority Conservative in 2022 to majority Liberal in 2024. And viola, the Liberal won the election with absentee ballots again.
The State Department has long experience detecting election fraud in other nations. The indicia of election fraud are well known and easily applied except when it comes to elections in the United States, then, somehow it’s different. Then, those indicia mean nothing, they’re not proof, they’re just misinformation and sour grapes. But look at this article from 2016 analyzing election results in Africa and consider how many of those indicia were present in recent American elections:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-37243190
And that’s with election monitors watching hand counts of paper ballots. How much worse when the results are laundered through scanning machines with a well-known history of incorrect results?
Paper ballots and purple fingers would go a long way to restoring faith in election results which would, in turn, obviate the need to ridicule the current system. “Vote Harder” would go away on its own.
Hey, I just thought of a simple solution. Add “Vote Harder” to the banned words list along with d0g and $ocia1i$m. Let the bot do the work. Easy.
November 22nd, 2024 at 12:18 pm
In 2020 I received 5 absentee ballot applications that were completely prefilled out. All I needed to do was put something on the signature line, and SoS Simon would’ve sent me a ballot.
In 2024 I receive 0 absentee ballot applications. I have no problem believing that the simple “extra” step of requesting an absentee ballot application accounts.
Personally, there were only 3 reasons why I even voted;
1) I always vote.
2) The State Constitutional Amendment.
3) The slim hope that Trump might win Minnesota if disaffected Outstaters showed up to vote Trump while disaffected Metro voters stayed home and didn’t vote for Harris.
The rest of my ballot was a lost cause.
MN HD 44B – The filed Republican was a wack a doodle that never even asked for endorsement and may have never even attended a Caucus, while the current DFL Rep. Leon Lillie may be the last voice of sanity in the DFL Caucus and he’s close enough to retirement that he sometimes speaks up.
CD4 – I love May, but this win is even more unlikely than a GOP statewide win.
Senate – Royce “I’m going to insult my own base” White vs Amy “The Buzzsaw” Klobuchar. BTW, the AP has called the 2030 Senate race for Amy over her opponent [insert sacrificial Republican here].
Ramsey County Commissioner – Like the St. Paul City Council, the question is will it be a unanimous vote or will someone go on the record saying that the rest of the Council is too conservative despite being leftwards of Karl Marx.
Judicial Races – The Incumbent will win by a lot.
I’m not much more hopeful about 2026 because Trump is Electoral Kryptonite in the first ring suburbs. I hope I’m wrong about that.
But if I only vote harder…
November 22nd, 2024 at 12:22 pm
^ Good comments, Mr Jones.
November 22nd, 2024 at 1:59 pm
C’mon Joe, the date of that tweet was the morning after Election Day, not even 12 hours after all the polls closed. The total number of votes cast weren’t even close to being counted by that point. Hell, there are *still* votes being counted 2-1/2 weeks later.
In the end, estimates for this cycle have Trump receiving 78.5 million votes, Harris about 76.5 million with about 1.2 million going to the various third party/write-in candidates. That brings us to approximately 156.2 million, compared to 158.4 million cast in 2020. Sure, raw votes totals were down in 2024 but not FIFTEEN MILLION less.
Let’s stop being stupid, shall we?
November 22nd, 2024 at 4:49 pm
It’s not being stupid, it’s just forgetting that several states have extensive mail in ballotting without an election day deadline. Hence the numbers have grown since then.
That noted, I’m still concerned about all the chicanery that can occur when ballots can go just about anywhere with not a lot of tracing, signatures, etc.. To draw a parallel, this is the reason that we require secret ballot for union votes.
November 23rd, 2024 at 8:16 am
2000 Bush Gore 100 million total votes cast
2004 Bush Kerry 120 million
2008 Obama McCain 130 million
2012 Obama Romney 130 million
2016 Trump Hillary 135 million
2020 Trump Biden 160 million
2024 Trump Kamala 160 million
Big jump in 2020, 25 million new voters in just four years. Why? Was there a Baby Boom in 2002 who all became eligible voters 18 years later? Sure, the vote total in 2024 matches 2020 but what if 2020 was artificially high, pumped up by thousands of fake ballots or voting machine “errors”?
Matching numbers doesn’t prove this year was fraud free, it might prove this year had as much fraud as last time but Independent voters broke for Trump in numbers large enough to overcome Democrat fraud. Can we depend on that happening in the future, or should we focus on election integrity now, while we have a chance to “fortify” future elections.
No, this won’t be the last election. There will be elections in the future, we just won’t win them. After all, Castro won his elections, as did Putin, no matter how hard The People voted.