A new narrative has begun to crystallize in some corners of the Right, suggesting that Trump lost the election and that his loss was driven by a decline in support among the white working class. This analysis largely relies on notoriously unreliable exit polls, conducted by the same firms that projected Biden winning Wisconsin and Michigan by 17 points and Texas and Florida by five points. Exit polls have long been the least reliable form of election polling, and in a year when normally accurate conventional polls were so far off, they should be taken with a grain of salt.
The better method by which to gauge demographic shifts in support is through election results themselves, which show revealed preferences, not just stated preferences. We can do this by honing in on localities that are primarily populated with the demographic we want to measure. For instance, we can see that Trump made big inroads with the Latino vote by looking at Miami-Dade county, which Trump lost by 30 points in 2016 but by only six points in this election.
We can also tell that the gains with Latinos weren’t limited to Cubans or other sub-groups by looking at his performance in the border counties of Texas, which are overwhelmingly populated by Americans of Mexican ancestry. He won the most Hispanic county in the country, Zapata County (where 95 percent of the population is Hispanic) 52 to 47 percent over Biden, after losing 32 to 65 percent in 2016 to Hillary.
We can determine the president’s performance with white working class voters in the same manner, by looking at bellwether counties and comparing them to his past performance there. The Twitter poster 4DChessmaster has done this and found that Trump either improved on or matched his performance in key white working class counties.
In 99 percent lower-income white Elliot County, Kentucky, Trump increased his margin by five points. In Vigo County, Indiana, which has voted for the winner of the presidential race in every election going back to 1908, he matched his 2016 performance. In every single county in Southwest Virginia he improved his margins, in several cases by four or five points. In Mahoning County, Ohio (Youngstown), Trump became the first Republican to win since the Nixon landslide of 1972, improving on his 2016 share of the vote by 4 points. In Wisconsin, Trump improved his margin in Kenosha County by over three points after flipping it in 2016 for the first time since Nixon in ’72.
Out of the 200 counties that voted for Obama and then flipped to Trump in 2016, he retained 185, including all of the important bellwethers. In modern American politics, the eventual presidential winner has never lost a perfect bellwether county. Trump won them all. Since 1960, no president has won the presidency without winning the bellwether state of Ohio. Trump won it by 8.5 points.
The Red Wave was not confined to just the competitive states and bellwether counties either. In the quintessential white working class state of West Virginia, Trump won by 39 points, increasing his raw vote total by over 50,000. He improved his margin in California by nearly four points, increasing his raw vote by 1.3 million. In his native state of New York, he improved his margin by six points going from 36.5 percent to 42.6 percent.
Where Trump did lose ground is interesting, as it may reveal something more sinister than merely a shift in voter preferences. In states like Texas and Florida (where the election itself was well-run, with state governments actively combating fraud), Trump increased his margins in rural counties over his 2016 performance, receiving a higher share of the vote in a higher turnout election. Georgia had higher turnout in the rural counties, but a lower margin for Trump than in 2016. For example, Trump’s margin declined in Gilmer County by 3.3 percent, Glynn by 5.4 percent, Gordon by 1.1 percent, Harris by 3.6 percent, and Jackson by 5.8 percent.
A similar situation occurred in rural North Carolina. Trump’s vote totals increased, but his margin declined. What we would expect in a scenario where the voting machines are compromised would be exactly this—not a concentration just in the cities, but shaving off Trump’s margins in deep red counties so those areas couldn’t overcome the purple and blue areas. And this is exactly what the recounts in New Hampshire are turning up. In counties where Republicans won, the recounts are showing almost uniformly that Republican candidates won by much larger margins than the initial count showed.
This would also explain the curious preponderance of drop-off votes—ballots that were cast only for Biden, leaving down-ballot races blank—in certain swing states like Wisconsin, where over 100,000 ballots were cast for Biden but not for the Democratic House candidate. Some down-ballot dropoff is natural, but it’s a fairly tiny margin in almost all cases. As of this writing, Republicans have flipped 12 House seats previously held by Democrats and are leading in most of the remaining uncalled races. Not what you would expect given the Left’s “Vote Blue No Matter Who” motto this year. The simple explanation is that when rigging an election, you need to avoid giving local candidates who have the local organization a reason to closely analyze the results and canvass.
What actually happened is fairly obvious. Trump didn’t lose the white working class. He gained strongly with Hispanics and other minorities. He improved his performance with women. He won the election. But when that fact was becoming clear on Election Night as results started coming in from the bellwethers, Philadelphia, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Atlanta stopped counting votes. Then around 4 a.m., they started counting votes again. And wouldn’t you know it, it turns out that those cities all happened to have turned out for Biden in exactly the numbers he needed to win those key states—turnout far greater than for Obama in 2008 and 2012.
The guy who gave speeches to empty parking lots upstaged his old boss, a man who could bring out 100,000 in the cold November rain for his closing rally. Who ever could have thought that Joe Biden might so excite the passions of voters in these four specific cities that they would get turnout at levels seen only in countries where it’s illegal not to vote? Indeed, it was levels far exceeding that of comparable cities (Biden’s net gain in Cuyahoga County [Cleveland] was 4,000 votes, in Wayne County [Detroit] it was 70,000 votes) and levels exceeding the actual number of registered voters. If this had happened in any other country the state department already would have begun the sanctions process. We saw them do it to Belarus earlier this year, without a fraction of the circumstantial and substantial evidence of fraud that has been brought forward in our own election.
This is a naked and coordinated attempt to subvert the will of the American people. It’s a tragedy not just in this particular race, but for our society and it’s future as a whole. Good people worked for hours to run a clean election. The workers of the vast majority of precincts in the rural areas, the suburbs, even some of the cities did their civic duty, working from before sunrise to after sunset to serve the voters, then tallying and reporting votes within an hour or so of closing, while keeping the process open to observers from both parties. These are the kind of people who make a high-trust society possible and allow our political process to remain peaceful.
But their corrupt counterparts have failed on these points, by hiding the process from observation, by “discovery” of ballots in the dead of night, by open and flagrant violations of election law. These people are destroying the credibility of one of our last great functional institutions, and they can’t be allowed to get away with it. This isn’t just a fight for four more years of Trump, this is a fight for American democracy. We have the legal and constitutional means to save the American system of self-government. All that remains to be seen is if we have the will to save our country.