What I Got Wrong (And Right) About The Election
One of my primary pet peeves about this day and age of politics is that online pundits will intentionally push misinformation to score political points while knowing the news cycle moves so fast that no one will call them out. The perfect example is the ridiculous chart floating around last week purporting that 2020 voting totals were clearly fraudulent when compared to 2012, 2016, and 2024. But the problem was that the 2024 vote counting wasn’t remotely close to being complete when the charts were circulating. The news cycle moved on and certain dishonest actors on the right perpetuated the baseless idea that 2020 was stolen without ever being held accountable.
Instead of running from what I got wrong in this election, I want to break down the specifics starting with Tony Hinchcliffe’s comments on Puerto Rico. I (along with many people on Trump’s team) was convinced that the floating island of garbage joke would turn off Puerto Rican Americans in pivotal places like Pennsylvania. In fact, Donald Trump won the Puerto Rican vote which propelled surprising victories in places like Miami-Dade County. But there’s one important thing I got right that has major implications for future elections on the right. Watch:
If you think about it, the 2020 election - though rife with election interference, drop boxes everywhere, etc. - was in many ways a blessing. It provided a policy contrast that may not have been as obvious had Trump won a second consecutive term. Whatever you believe about 2020, the resulting policies have kicked-started a potential generational shift right that may not have otherwise happened.
So the 2020 election with a Democrat candidate that never left the basement and could not get more than a few hundred paid attendees at his events ended up with 155.5 million votes cast. Today with almost all the votes cast (and again the benefits of late counted ballots are 100% Democrat) we are looking at about 147 million. The difference of nearly 8.5 million votes is significant given that our population of voters is greater and the spending was greater to encourage more voting. The 2016 election there were only 128.5 million votes cast. The trend line for every election shows 2020 to be an abnormality where the 2024 election returned back to near normal.
All of the states except for one that voted for Harris are non-voter-ID states, and most of them allow same-day registration and mass mail in balloting.
Clearly ballot harvesting is happening, but because of election oversight this time, less of it has occurred.