Some keep asking what can beat Trump? He lost by over 4 million votes. He got in b/c of voter suppression swinging 80k votes in a few states. How do you beat him? Fight voter suppression, turn out votes, don’t write off any states & fight him in the South.
— Rev. Dr. Barber (@RevDrBarber) February 10, 2019
Though disinclined to nitpick a fellow traveler, I think the above tweet, by Rev. Wlliam J. Barber II, indicates that the result of the 2016 presidential election is making its way from history toward mythic tale, the purpose being to inculcate a lesson on the magnitude of the heist. Trump didn't lose "by over 4 million votes"; the final popular vote tally was 65,853,514 for Clinton and 62,984,828 for Trump, a difference of just under 3 million. In percentage terms, Clinton won 48.2 percent of all votes to 46.1 percent for Trump. Close, but not that close--the precise facts are bad enough. Everyone says, "The polls were off!" Not by very much. On Election Eve, the RealClearPolitics average of the various polling organizations' last measurement put Clinton at +3.3 and she "won" by 2.1.
Let's elaborate just a bit on Rev. Barber's claim about Trump prevailing on account of "voter suppression swinging 80k votes in a few states." I think the few states he's referring to must be Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, all of which Trump won, by a total of about 78,000 ballots--45,000, 11,000, and 22,000 in those three states, respectively. Not to be all schoolmarmish about it, but "suppressing" votes is one thing and "swinging" them another. If in these three states 40,000 Trump votes had gone ("swung") instead to Clinton, in the ratio of 4:1:2, then she would have won all three by a little more than W won Florida in 2000. That would have given her 278 electoral votes, leaving 260 for Trump.
The results in these states were so close--Clinton, in percentage terms, won the national vote by three times Trump's margin in Pennsylvania--that any successful effort to suppress voting in Democratic strongholds might have made Trump president. But Rev. Barber's tweet doesn't supply any evidence. For what it's worth, I just checked, and in 2016 Clinton received about 27,000 more votes in Philadelphia County than Obama had in 2012. Trump got about 17,000 more than Romney had, so Clinton's raw vote margin in the big and overwhelmingly Democratic county was 10,000 more than Obama's four years earlier.
Rev. Barber is a North Carolinian and it's possible perhaps to sense a dollop of geographic patriotism in his tweet. He thinks his friends, neighbors, and parishioners can make the difference so leaves out the names of the Great Lakes states that were Trump's three narrowest wins and the key to his victory in the Electoral College. Meanwhile, he urges Democrats to fight for every state, especially in the South. I'd be for all of that, except it's also true that the goal is to win, resources are finite, and the all-or-nothing allocation of electoral votes makes it foolish to fight for Mississippi, Alabama, and Tennessee unless Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin are secure (along with Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina, Florida, Georgia, Arizona, and Texas).
Of course it shouldn't be necessary to reason thus. But thanks to the Electoral College we must. I might have mentioned once before how much I hate it. Have the College's defenders ever said one true thing about it? The last thing I'll say here is that D.J. Tice, editor of the Star Tribune's opinion section, has asserted--behind a pay wall but I think that's it--that the College, by boosting the amplitude of the winner's margin, brings "closure" to a close election. This is in the first place an odd notion--the country is like a psychological patient who, if her desired state of somnolence is to be maintained, must by artifice be distracted from perceiving the true state of affairs. It's obvious, however, that running the ballots through a Rube Goldberg machine does not yield anything like a predictably enhancing result. In 1968, Nixon beat Humphrey by less than one percent of the popular vote and by 110 electoral votes. In 2016, Clinton beat Trump by more than two percent of the popular vote, but, instead of winning by 110 or more electoral votes, she lost by 74. That the evident randomness of the College's machinations does not advance the cause of "closure" isn't the only, or preeminent, problem--on that, I bet Rev. Barber and I concur.
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