Everyone knows that in all the swing states (except Arizona), the final vote margin was just a few percent, and that was well within the MOE for all the "50-50" polling in each of those states.
No one seriously believes that any President has had a blowout election since maybe Obama in 2008 or Bush in 2004, but the media sure loves the word "blowout".
The “ground game” is extremely expensive: https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/4934604-kamala-harris-g.... Especially for republicans, whose voters are spread out over rural areas. In post-election interviews, Trump campaign strategists revealed that to save money they largely eschewed a traditional ground game in favor of target outreach to low propensity voters. Even then, Trump received a lot of criticism on the right for doing a handful of rallies in California and New York.
As it is, both campaigns focused most of their resources on the seven swing states, and Trump swept all of them. Had the election been close you would’ve expected by sheer chance each candidate to get some of the swing states, but that didn’t happen.
IMHO, if you don't win in any of your opponent's stronghold states, it's not much of a blowout. Yes, it was a win and any win gets you the whole four years, so it doesn't really matter what you want to call it, but it's yet another gaslighting IMHO.
In particular, he wiped out two decades of immigration-driven leftward shift in the electorate, which was how Biden was able to win traditionally red states like Arizona and Georgia. Trump won Nevada, which is now under 45% white, by more than Bush did in 2000, when it was 65% white. He lost New Jersey by less than six points, doing better now that the state is only 55% white than Bush did in 2004 when it was 70% white. He won Texas by a similar margin to Bush in 88 and Florida by more than Reagan did in 1980.
You can pretty much ignore every non-swing state and the result of polls would be the same.
Even if you insist on going by electoral votes, 58% to 42% isn't a blowout either.
And if they're not that close, they're not battleground.
Maybe he meant an EC blowout. But that's easier to predict. Most polling had almost all the swing states as extremely close. The outcome was likely to swing in the same direction across all swing states so an EC blowout is likely
Anyways Decision Desks are a very different topic than pollsters and have no overlap.
I don't know what "mainstream media" you were consuming but as a bettor, I definitely didn't get the sense that the race was locked in. All major polls had Biden trailing Trump. Harris got a big boost but that only pushed her to being neck and neck with Trump. We can check the Wayback Machine to verify your claim
* NYTimes frontpage the day before the election says "turnout is a focus in a closely divided race" https://web.archive.org/web/20241105011526/https://www.nytim...
* Vox frontpage says "5 reasons Harris could win and 4 reasons Trump could" and "Should it really be this hard to beat Trump?" https://web.archive.org/web/20241106000611/https://www.vox.c...
* CNN frontpage does not include any particular characterization of chances https://web.archive.org/web/20241105000156/https://edition.c...
A cursory look at other "mainstream" media sources will easily verify that the race was clearly represented as a very close tossup.
> has no idea what mainstream media says because only source of information is unreliable fringe news sources
many such cases
And who, in your opinion, executed this coordinated deception, and to what end?
So yes, in a literal, technical sense, my vote counted. But in reality, my vote had little to do with the outcome, whereas the votes of someone in Pennsylvania or Arizona had everything to do with the outcome. Those seven states absolutely did decide the election.
I do think that tallying the overall popular vote is a useful metric, even if the election's outcome doesn't depend on it, so I guess in that sense my vote "counted" as well.
The popular vote count is a measure of the level of support for the candidate.
The electoral vote count is, unfortunately, how we determine who gets the office, and that's literally it. It just tells us who did better at influencing voters in a handful of states that actually matter in the idiotic electoral college system, putting the result of the election into the hands of a small minority of voters. That says nothing about the overall support a candidate has.
In the end, Trump had the support of 1.5% more actual voters than Harris did. It wasn't a blowout, he has no mandate. And we really have no idea what would have happened if our system was based on the popular vote. If candidates had to campaign in every state, to get every voter out that they can to support them, the final results would probably not look the same as what we go.
Are you referring to the final 538 electors who actually make the final vote? Most of them are bound to vote based on who their state voted for. Aside from some rare exceptions (like that WA elector that voted for Chief Spotted Eagle in 2016 as some sort of weird protest).
Or are you trying to claim that only swing voters in swing states are responsible for the outcome of the election? Because that's a fallacy I've seen a lot of people make recently that I'm just going to start calling "the tiebreaker fallacy". If you have a panel of 101 voters where 50 people vote one way, 50 vote the other way, and one person is the tiebreaker, you can not make the claim that only the tiebreaker's vote counts. All 101 voters were part of the process. At any time, any of the other 100 voters could have changed their votes and the outcome would have changed.
This is where your analogy is getting tripped up. The EV outcome for the vast majority of states is certain. California's EVs were never going to go to Trump in any possible reality. Louisiana's EVs were never going to go for Harris. These states cannot "change their votes."
If the makeup of the 50-50 split voters in your scenario is fixed and known with certainty ahead of the election, then it really is the case that only that 101st vote matters and the other 100 people have to live with that 1 person's vote.
This is how the EC works. The EV outcomes for most states are fixed and known ahead of time. The only votes that matter for the presidential election are those in the ~7 or so states that we call "swing states," because the outcome of the election in the other ~43 states is known with certainty ahead of time.
Note: I'm using "fixed" here to mean "unchangeable," not something like "rigged".
There's a world of difference between being predicatively partisan and not being able to vote at all.
>only that 101st vote matters and the other 100 people have to live with that 1 person's vote
No, its actually that 50 people have to live with 51 people's votes. That one person is not voting alone. Your post is the perfect example of the tiebreaker fallacy.
California was reliably Republican in the 80s, so no, you can't really say that for certain.
All states shifted to the right in this election. Illinois for example has been reliably Democrat, but if it shifts as much in the next election as it did in this past one, it would become a swing state.
This would only be true if the popular vote result would be entirely unchanged if the election system was changed to be based on popular vote. And the popular vote would almost definitely have been different if the election results were based on popular vote, so it's then not a measure of the level of support for the candidate.
> The electoral vote count is, unfortunately, how we determine who gets the office
Why is it unfortunate?
> That says nothing about the overall support a candidate has.
Can you cite any evidence that the popular vote is a better indication of the candidate's popular support than the electoral college?
> In the end, Trump had the support of 1.5% more actual voters than Harris did.
Again this would only be true if the popular vote would be unaffected if the election was based on popular vote, which is a false assumption.
> he has no mandate.
Please cite.
> And we really have no idea what would have happened if our system was based on the popular vote.
This seems to contradict everything else you wrote as your reasoning is only valid if you work under the assumption that the popular vote would not have changed at all if the system was based on the popular vote.
It also shows potential for how things could've otherwise gone.
If you wanna use the electoral college, be my guest. But know that making that data is useful is MUCH more difficult. In theory a candidate could win every single state by 0.01% and lose a state by 99%. They would win in a blowout in the EC but in the popular vote they actually lost. And you would get a highly skewed and unhelpful representation of the actual election results
> If you wanna use the electoral college, be my guest.
It's part of the constitution of the US, not my personal preference.
You're kind of glossing over the fact that a Republican hasn't won the popular vote since 1988 and the prevailing wisdom was that the EC was the _only_ thing giving Republican candidates a fighting chance in presidential elections (so much so that every election we hear much wailing and gnashing of teeth that the EC system should replaced by popular vote, and in fact there is an "electoral vote compact" that several states have entered into that pledges to give all electoral votes to the popular vote winner as a way to nullify the EC). For Trump, with his MANY issues, to win the _popular vote_ by 1.5% is monumental, and I guarantee you not a single model predicted that in any way whatsoever.
You put a Nikki Haley up there and she would've won the popular vote by 5-10%, easily. Which would be astounding numbers for a Republican candidate in this day and age.
George W. Bush won the popular vote in 2004. There are several other factual errors in your comment that are ruinous for your conclusions.