Does This Map Provide a Plausible Theory for the 2020 Election Madness?
The presidential election is not, to my mind, settled yet. There are still too many credible examples of shenanigans out there, too many implausible count stoppages, and now software glitches, to call it quits yet.
As I’ve asked elsewhere, why cannot Nevada, of all places, count votes? The state’s entire economy was built on counting things. These stoppages have not been explained and are far from being above suspicion. They provide the opportunity to cheat, and Democrats and the media have shouted their motive for four years.
All that being said, one story making the rounds is that it seems improbable that Biden could have racked up a whole bunch of votes in the questionable states and other places from voters who then either voted Republican or did not vote down the ballot at all. Some of them would have voted for Biden and then simply went home. How did Republicans lose the White House (if that’s what happened) but hold serve everywhere else? We were told by all our betters that this was supposed to be a “blue wave.” It does seem implausible. But Trump’s performance in a state he won suggests some other ideas.
Take a look at this map, provided on social media by Ryan Data in Texas. I’ve known the founder for more than a decade. His data is solid.
Deep red is where Trump overperformed in 2020 compared to 2016, and deep blue depicts the opposite. Look deep in the heart of Texas and you’ll see light blue, which is where Trump underperformed in a big clump of counties. Those counties run along the north-south I-35 corridor. Many of them were once rural but have been filling in as suburban sprawl over the past couple of decades as the Texas population has skyrocketed. Trump either lost those counties outright or lost ground in them compared to 2020. Why?
In the final Texas vote tally, here’s something interesting: Trump underperformed compared to Sen. John Cornyn, who was easily reelected. Trump beat Biden 52-46 in 2020, compared to beating Clinton 52-43 in 2016. Cornyn smashed his Democrat opponent in 2020, 53-43. Trump actually got fewer votes than Cornyn in Texas: 5,860,096 to Cornyn’s 5,931,602. Some may argue that Cornyn’s election was hotly contested, but was it? The Democrats poured money into it but they ran a re-tread who had already lost a congressional race and who had issues shoring up the minority vote after the primary. Mary Jennings Hegar’s ads were transparently dishonest and all about her, not the voters. There was no Beto effect. The former bartop-jumping phenom was heading off to teach classes at Texas State last time anyone heard from him. Cornyn’s election probably fairly represents where Texas as a whole is. It’s a red state that’s getting bluer for a variety of reasons, but it’s still red. Trump lost some ground in Texas, most conspicuously along that urbanizing I-35 corridor and the flanking counties. The trend to blue can be reversed.
Cornyn probably helped Trump a bit, which is flipped from the normal presidential-down ballot dynamic. Likewise, it’s possible that John James helped Trump a bit in Michigan. In Cornyn’s case and many others, the Republican aligned with Trump on policy but offered a much milder personality. Republicans didn’t add more than a dozen pro-life women to Congress because the country hates Republican policies and values.
Nationally, it appears that something unique happened. Supposing for the sake of argument that Trump lost, the Republicans are on track to hold onto the Senate and even increase their share in the House by several seats. At the state level, the status quo was maintained. This is important for redistricting battles to come.
Not only was there no blue wave anywhere, the progressive left lost in California on the issue of forcing gig workers to be converted to employees. Biden campaigned on making this terrible idea national, based on California’s AB-5. California’s own voters said no to that. Cuban-American candidates campaigned against socialism and won in Florida and New York. Nationally, some Democrats are blaming the socialist-progressive left and “defund the police” for their losing ground in the House and at the state level.
Meanwhile, here’s more from Ryan Data.
These are a handful of Texas state House races. Democrats made a strong bid to capture the state House, and failed. These are all incumbent Republicans who overperformed Trump. These are suburban or urban districts and were Democrat takeover targets.
State Rep. Angie Chen Button (HD112), by the way, is from Taiwan. Not a fan of socialism.
Look at the map, look at these races, and consider the national story (supposing Biden ends up winning). It suggests that Democrats lost on policy but won on Trump’s personality (with the COVID chaos also factoring heavily in — that changed pretty much everything right down to how millions cast their votes). There isn’t a pro-Biden vote but there is an anti-Trump vote. And Biden (later, Harris) has no mandate to do much of anything. Every policy position he took he either lost on or had to abandon before Election Day (fracking — banning it one day, loving it the next). “Defund the police” probably did cost them substantially, as it should have. It’s a ridiculous sop to far-left radical activists and will get people killed.
There is an anti-Democrat vote that may be growing. Evidence for that may be found in the map again, in the Rio Grande Valley on the Texas-Mexico border. Trump overperformed in all of those counties compared to 2016. Those are all deeply Hispanic counties. Notably, Trump actually flipped one of them. Zapata County is 94.5% Hispanic. Clinton won it with 65% of the vote in 2016, but Trump won it with about 52% in 2020.
Listen to what Hispanic voters and leaders are saying about socialism and “defund the police.” They despise both ideas. Trump picked up more than 41% of the Hispanic vote in Texas, increasing the Republicans’ share of that vote overall and following a trend observed over the past few years.
That’s after four long years of the Democrats and the media calling Trump a “racist” and a “Russian stooge.” Trump actually picked up ground with minority voters, earning more of their votes than any previous Republican.
In recent years, many Texas Republicans believed they needed a “game-changer” candidate who could attract Hispanic voters to the GOP. Trump, for social policy and economic reasons — combined with the hard-left socialists who want to defund police — may have been that candidate. Bet ya didn’t see that coming.
At the same time, evidence suggests he lost ground with other voters.
Take all of this into account, and yes it’s possible that some voted against Trump for personality reasons but sided with his party for policy reasons.
Or, to put it another way, voters basically voted against a lot but not for a lot. They voted against Trump because they don’t like his personality and all the drama (the I-35 suburban corridor erosion), and they voted against the Democrats because they’ve gone totally bonkers. Biden benefits because he happened to be standing there. He would be the Chauncey Gardner president, well, for as long as he would actually be president. Pelosi didn’t trot out that 25th Amendment stuff just to have something to do. His own party is already plotting to get rid of him. Of course, with a slimmer House majority and GOP control of the Senate, Pelosi’s eject-the-president bill is not getting passed. She’ll have to find another way. Second look at Hunter’s laptop…?
Here’s what’s likely among some voters. There is a sizeable Trump-hating cohort on the left and they voted. Trump has sizeable support on the right and they voted. Some Democrats cannot abide Trump but despise socialism more, and voted Biden as a safe harbor at the top but voted Republican down the ballot to check him. Some Republicans were tempted to do something similar but saw Harris waiting in the wings and went for Trump anyway (or didn’t vote at the top). Some, not a lot, did vote for Biden, repelled by the Trump drama or pushed to fear due to COVID, etc.
The latter may rue that choice once Biden (later, Harris) starts pushing executive orders to undo much of what Trump has done. Biden was not a safe vote at all. He was what we call “buying a pig in a poke.” That’s when you buy something sight unseen. It tends to backfire badly as country folk can tell you. We can probably say goodbye to the historic Abraham Accords and hello to taxpayer funding of abortions again. Critical race theory, which teaches that America is fundamentally racist and fatally flawed, will be taught to the entire federal bureaucracy and the military unless someone gets it tossed by a court. The 1619 Project will remain in many school curricula despite being dishonest and discredited by real historians. The Lincoln Project should be so proud of themselves…they didn’t actually manage to help flip Republicans to Biden but they’ve helped Planned Parenthood to taxpayer money. That industry’s genocide against black America will continue and it will continue to fund the Democratic Party. If any cycle in this country needs to be broken, it’s that one.
The Democrats may have an unanticipated problem on their hands. The Hispanic vote is not theirs as they have claimed for years. Policy matters and they’re offering policies that more and more Hispanics do not want. There was a poll about a decade back in Texas that bore this out. It found that Texas Hispanics tend to be more conservative than the state’s Anglos. Media deep-sixed that poll at warp speed and Democrats pretended it never happened.
Hispanic Texas is trending red, see above. Trump’s successes and the Democrats’ radical policies have accelerated this, while they’re trading control of other parts of the state.
Now the Republicans need to learn what mattered in Texas for good and ill and apply it nationally.
Meanwhile, a Democrat civil war looms on the horizon.
I’ll leave this here because it’s hilarious.
“Stop being negative on Twitter…”? That’s why leftists are on Twitter in the first place.
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