Hunter is up again today on Kos with the ongoing pattern that around 70% of Rep voters think the election was stolen. I think that there a vast number of responses to this specious claim, and today I will list some of them, and then focus on the last one one. The seven:
1) Claims that the voting system companies like Dominion, were hackable and then hacked are being refuted in the best way: Dominion suing the claimants for billions of dollars. When they win one or two of these, which I am confident they will, the decibel level and headcount of the “Republican Stealers” will finally begin to diminish.
2) Of course, no single judge found in favor of these specious claims, including Trump appointees. “Stealers” claim that the judges were just being lazy, but of course, that’s ridiculous. If a hard-right, Trump-appointed judge saw even a sniff of a realistic claim he/she would have jumped all over it.
3) Lacking any proof at all that the voting machine people were willing to commit massive fraud and risk a lifetime in prison, the “Stealers” lack any theory whatsoever as to how this steal would have been carried out, or any logic that the same set of techniques would have been permitted in state after state, especially those run by Republicans.
4) A huge part of the illusion here was the vast number of Democratic votes in many states that were only started to be counted the evening of election day. This was because in many states, Republicans would not permit early voting or absentee voting to start before then. These were naturally Democratic-leaning-majority headcounts, because based up training by Trump on Covid, Reps had no problem showing up in person, while Dems were more cautious during the pandemic, and used mail-in voting—and drop-box voting-- vastly more than Reps did. So, big surprise--not—that Dem votes starting to catch up and run away in a number of states where absentee voting in whatever form was prevalent.
5) Vote counts in heavily concentrated urban areas were—by their nature-- slower that in other parts of many states, and they were heavily Democratic. . See: Fulton County, Ga. the two main cities in Pa., Maricopa County in Ariz., Detroit, etc.
6) In many parts of the country, Evangelical Christians and other heavily Republican groups live heavily with one another, so it was very easy to carry over the illusion that what happened in these heavily concentrated Trumpian areas would happen elsewhere. Um, no they wouldn’t, and didn’t.
7) And finally, look at the damned cohorts! None of the outcomes were shocking, because Biden had big majorities in a number of key cohorts, based upon exit poles, but in practically every case, the exit polls showed EXACTLY the proportions of Trump and Biden voters that one would expect. See the Roper Center for Opinion Research for one example:
ropercenter.cornell.edu/…
In every cohort imaginable, Biden did roughly as well among key segments as one would have expected:
--He won women by more than Trump won men.
--He won the black vote huge, but no more than expected.
--He won the Hispanic vote big, but no more than expected.
--He won big among the youngest voters, and pretty big among voters 30-44.
--He won massively with voters for whom race is an issue, and big among voters for whom the fight against Covid was an issue.
--He won big among voters under $50,000 in income, and pretty big among voters under $100,000. These groups, of course, got nothing out of the tax bill.
Other exit polls show EXACTLY the same patterns. And of course, the cohorts that won us the House in 2018 were a big part of the breakdown in 2020. And, of course, there was the big advantage among women. If you do not understand how Trump lost women by so much—just as Reps. did in 2018—then you do not understand what went wrong. And what went wrong was right there in the numbers.
Well, we can take at least a little solace out of the idea that so long as Republicans continue to believe this nonsense, they will never fix all of the things that are wrong with their party. So, let them stew, and let them lose by more that they would otherwise.