I. The rural and small town versus metropolitan political chasm was vividly displayed in this year's presidential election result within my home state of Minnesota. We have 87 counties. Trump carried 74 of them. His cumulative margin in these 74 counties was 310,315 votes. Biden carried the state's biggest county, Hennepin, home to Minneapolis and most of its suburbs, by 322,047 votes. So Biden won Hennepin County by more than Trump won 74 counties combined.
I culled that factoid from this MPR article evaluating State Republican Chair Jennifer Carnahan's claim that Minnesota's result exhibits "extreme abnormalities and statistical variations from Minnesota's historic voter trends." If you're going to click on the link, do it before reading another word because, spoiler alert, she's full of it.
II. Team Trump's clown show gets a lot of attention, and deservedly so, since for pure entertainment pleasure it's hard to top Rudy Giuliani shouting "Fraud!" in front of the entry to Four Seasons Total Landscaping next to the dildo shop at a mini-mall in North Philadelphia. More recently, of course, Rudy gave an encore performance while brown rivulets of Just For Men trickled down the creases of his jowls. This might have been on the same day that some other legal sharpies working overtime on behalf of Trump filed an affidavit alleging fraud in Michigan based on returns from Minnesota towns and townships. Who can possibly keep straight the postal abbreviations for all those M-states? And who could have doubted that Detroit Lakes must be in Michigan? (Because, you know, Detroit.) These lawyers are sophisticated.
But it's odd how pyrotechnic incompetence tends to outshine very prosaic reasons to conclude that Trump's bumblers are gaslighting us. Compared to four years ago, Trump's margin in Kentucky shrank by 4 points, in Kansas by 6 points, in Alaska by 5 points, in South Dakota by 4 points, in Montana by 4 points, etc., etc. Meanwhile, Trump's deficit in Oregon increased by 5 points, in Maine by 7 points, in Virginia by 5 points, in New Hampshire by 7 points, in Colorado by 8 points, etc., etc. No one is questioning these "suspicious" outcomes, yet we are told that shifts toward the Democratic candidate in Michigan (3 points), Pennsylvania (2 points), Arizona (4 points), Georgia (5 points), and Wisconsin (2 points) must be attributed to massive fraud. LOL!
III. When one considers some of the specific complaints of Team Trump, oddness multiplies. In Michigan, for example, their attention is centered on Wayne County, in particular the city of Detroit, where Biden outpolled Trump by 227,865 votes. But Clinton beat Trump in Detroit by 227,189 votes. Massive fraud in Detroit, 2020? Really? Meanwhile, relatively populous parts of western Michigan, such as Kent County, home to Grand Rapids, swung hard against Trump: in 2016, he carried the county by 10,000 votes, but this year he lost it by 22,000. Why does Trump shout "Fraud!" concerning the result in a venue where there was no shift while alleging nothing about one where he incurred a 30,000-plus meltdown?--enough, on its own, to put the state in Biden's column, since in 2016 Trump carried Michigan by only about 11,000 votes.
I'm sure it has nothing to do with a calculation about whether his supporters might be more ready to believe a lie about Detroit than a lie about Grand Rapids.
IV. I'll admit that there are people I'm ready to believe the worst about, too—for example, Kristi Noem, the governor of South Dakota. If her state were a country, it would have ranked second in the world for most new COVID cases per capita since October 1 (unless North Dakota were also a country, in which case Kristi's state takes the bronze). Yet the governor apparently has nothing better to do than go on Fox News to yammer about freedom, except for the days when she's posting to social media pictures of herself carrying a shotgun in a corn field. Here's an oddity: more people have died of COVID in South Dakota than in South Korea.
The population of South Dakota is 885,000. The population of South Korea, which has about half the area of South Dakota, is 51.7 million. South Korea and the United States reported their first COVID cases on the same day, January 20, 2020.
Comments