hanimmal
Well-Known Member
1. There is more people in America than ever before.
2. Biden was running as a politically middle of the road white man with a long career in public service (aka not a minority or a woman) and zero scandals.
It is not rocket science.
Toss in that Trump is arguably the worst POTUS in history and a puppet for Putin and any other dictator that bribed him, and you get the biggest voter turnout ever for the candidate running against Trump.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/11/22/actually-it-makes-perfect-sense-that-biden-would-get-more-votes-than-obama/
2. Biden was running as a politically middle of the road white man with a long career in public service (aka not a minority or a woman) and zero scandals.
It is not rocket science.
Toss in that Trump is arguably the worst POTUS in history and a puppet for Putin and any other dictator that bribed him, and you get the biggest voter turnout ever for the candidate running against Trump.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/11/22/actually-it-makes-perfect-sense-that-biden-would-get-more-votes-than-obama/
As part of a lengthy Twitter thread aimed at bolstering President Trump’s wild and baseless allegations of electoral impropriety, cartoonist Scott Adams distilled a common argument about President-elect Joe Biden’s win.
“No one believes Biden got far more votes than Obama,” he wrote on Twitter on Friday.
This claim comes up a lot as Trump supporters like Adams seek to support the idea that somehow Trump was cheated out of a victory. How could Biden, a guy who barely drew any crowds, get more support than Barack Obama, whose 2008 campaign was historically popular? If Biden didn’t get that many votes, why do national tallies say he did?
Simple. Biden outpaced Obama’s totals in 2008 and when he was reelected in 2012 because: 1) The country has gotten more populous; 2) There was a lot of enthusiasm for voting this year, and 3) Much of that enthusiasm from Democrats was targeted not at Biden, but at Trump.
Trump supporters will say this is impossible, that Trump was clearly the focus of more enthusiasm. Given the president’s rallies, Biden should not have been able to keep pace.
But that’s wrong for two reasons. The first is that Trump’s rallies are being compared with Biden events that were specifically meant to be small. Why? Well, there’s a pandemic going on, as you’ve probably heard, and not everyone probably gained immunity to the novel coronavirus after an outbreak at their place of employment. Trump possibly did, and, given his indifference to the virus’s spread, he moved ahead with his large events.
If any Trump supporter finds this dynamic hard to believe, that may be a function of the sort of isolation Trump frequently suggests is a feature of his opponents. In 2016, it was red states in which people were the most likely to live in precincts with others who overwhelmingly voted the same way as them. In September, a Pew Research Center poll found about 40 percent of both Trump and Biden supporters knew no one who was planning on supporting the other candidate. That was more true of Trump supporters who lived in more heavily Trump-supportive counties.
There are other likely factors, too. The expansion of mail-in and early voting made it easier to vote, probably meaning some more infrequent voters cast ballots. After Trump’s narrow 2016 win, there were efforts introduced to encourage voting from Democrats who had stayed home. Georgia’s Stacey Abrams has been given a lot of credit for helping to overhaul the turnout operation in that state, which Biden won.
Given all of the above, the math becomes easy. Biden outperformed Obama because there were more voters from which to cull votes. At the same time, enthusiasm was similar among Democrats in 2008 and 2020, in part because Democrats were so eager to see Trump ousted — and in part to avoid what happened in 2016.
If no one Scott Adams knows believes that could be true, that’s a reflection of the bubble in which Adams apparently lives, not of the reality of politics this year.
