Sure, sure, it's been over three weeks now. I should be moving on. I should be figuring out exactly what role I'm going to play in The Resistance, how I'm going to find the strength to get out of bed everyday and fight the evil that now has a stranglehold on our democracy. But the truth is I'm still too livid to even see straight; the rage I feel is palpable and it has shown little sign of abetting since the day we somehow collectively decided as a nation to turn back 80 years of progress.
Except we didn't really collectively decide this did we? In fact, the majority of us that bothered to vote were pretty clear that we shouldn’t give a misogynistic, racist, xenophobic, narcissistic, serial sexual assaulter the most powerful job on the planet (see: popular vote). But here’s the reality that really stings: many others that did vote or stayed home were the victims of the greatest con our nation has ever seen, and I'm 100% convinced they wouldn’t have been able to pull it off without the help of James Comey.
So how might we determine if there was a late shift in the presidential race away from HRC in the closing days of the election? How about we look at how she did with early/absentee ballots versus ballots cast on election day, and then compare that to how Obama did in 2012. Pollster Matt McDermott has done just that in the state of Rhode Island. McDermott argues RI is a good state to look at since there were no other competitive races on the ballot. He Tweets about the results and his suspicions here.
Both Obama and Clinton won approximately 60% of absentee ballots (Obama: 60.85%, Clinton 60.15%). So far so good. But if you look at the election day ballots cast, you see a rather dramatic shift from Obama's performance in 2012 to Clinton's in 2016. Where Obama actually improved his margin to 65% on election day in RI, HRC dropped to only 54%. This represented a net 13% shift in Clinton's margin of victory over Trump on election day vs absentee ballots as the chart below illustrates:
So what do you suppose happened in the last few weeks of the election to cause HRC's numbers to tank on election day when she performed just as well as Obama in 2012 with absentee ballots? Anyone…?
Yes, I understand there were several factors that led to Clinton's Electoral College defeat. I get that she was not a perfect candidate and did not run a perfect campaign. I get that her camp was too complacent about the Rust Belt states (although with the polling as it was it seems awfully hard to blame them).
I guess I'm just extremely pissed off that this is not THE STORY post-election, particularly given the breathless Page One coverage Comey's letter was given at the time. The drip, drip, drip from Wikileaks also played a role in all of this, but most didn't get nearly the coverage as emailz. Reference the Trump campaign’s own quote at the time: “This changes everything.” Notice how energized and on message Trump was in the closing days of the race once they realized Comey had given them a chance to win. You really think Trump would’ve given up his Twitter toy otherwise?
Anyway Bernie supporters (of which I was one in the primaries) and anyone else can go on and on all they want about what a flawed candidate HRC was, but you aren't convincing me that this election wasn't flat out stolen from her.