Clicking around on the New York Times election map, I stumbled on this result, from Los Angeles County:
Biden 2,947,568
Trump 1,107,090
In terms of percent, this was 71.2 to 26.7, a familiar story about a Democratic landslide in a major metropolitan area. But more than a million votes for Trump! He currently has around 72.4 million in the whole country, so that's more than 1 percent of his total out of a single county in which he got about one vote out of every four.
I have a kind of grudging respect for the Trump voter in LA County. The Electoral College makes their ballot worthless. They know there's no way Trump is going to win California's electoral votes. If they cast a ballot, Biden wins 55 electoral votes; and, if they don't cast a ballot, Biden wins 55 electoral votes. It's impossible for them to help Trump win. They know this beforehand. At the presidential level, they are as a practical matter disenfranchised. Yet they vote anyway. Of course, the ones who don't vote aren't reflected in the tally. I wonder how many of them there are.
I had the idea to click around some more to see how many states Trump won with fewer votes than he got in LA County. I think the answer is 14. They are, in no particular order: Utah, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa, Mississippi, West Virginia, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Alaska. In all these states, a vote for Trump helped him win a packet of electoral votes—a total of 65 of them, which is 10 more than California has, even though California's population is roughly half again as great as that of these 14 states combined. Since you don't get any electoral votes for losing a county, more than a million Trump votes in LA County were lost in the Electoral College shuffle. Of course, in other venues the vote massacre cuts in the other direction. In the recent past, more Democratic votes have been wiped out. This year, for example, Biden, whose advantage in the national vote is 5.3 million and growing, prevailed in the Electoral College only because he won three states—Wisconsin, Arizona, and Georgia—by a total of fewer than 50,000 ballots.
The Georgia run-offs, which will determine control of the Senate, are going to consume attention between now and January 5. In the new Senate, there will be 50 Republicans, 48 Democrats, and two seats yet to be determined from Georgia. Of the 48 Democrats, two will be from California. The residents of LA County will share those two senators with around 30 million other Californians. Of the 50 Republican senators, 26 will be from the 14 states identified above. Leaving Georgia out of it, 21 states will be represented by two Democrats, 22 others will be represented by two Republicans, and six will have one senator from each party. The population of the 21 states represented by two Democrats is about 157 million. The population of the 22 states represented by two Republicans is about 126 million. Assuming a Republican wins at least one of the Georgia runoffs, we will be told, for example when climate change legislation is blocked in the Senate or Biden nominates a new justice to the Supreme Court, that "the American people" wanted Republicans to control the Senate. But it won't be true. The Democratic minority will represent many millions more Americans than the Republican majority.
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