A Retrospective on Three U.S. Presidential Elections
Eight long years ago, the 2016 U.S. Presidential election resulted in the Electoral-College victory of Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton, despite Clinton’s winning of the national popular vote. Trump won the popular vote in six of the seven so-called “swing states” (Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin), failing only to win Nevada. (For a summary of these 2016 results, click here.)
In 2016, the Electoral College once again achieved its Constitutional goal: inducing the candidates to campaign in a broader swath of the country and not limiting themselves to the states of largest population (California, Texas, Florida, and New York). Widespread campaigning avoids the appearance that the smallest states are merely colonial possessions of the largest states. In winning most of the swing states by small popular-vote margins, Trump rolled to a robust 304-227 victory over Hillary Clinton in the Electoral College.
An aside: The 2016 U.S. Presidential race revealed seven so-called “faithless Electors,” who voted for persons other than those at the top of their party tickets. These faithless seven have never been punished, thereby providing a precedent for future Electoral-College misbehavior; yet as far as the present writer knows, no one has ever expended any effort to remedy this situation via statute or Constitutional amendment. It would be more accurate to say that the 2016 U.S. Electoral-College results were 304-227-7; indicating support for Republicans, Democrats, and what might be described as Insurrectionists, respectively.
A second aside: The Electoral College is based on a number of Electors for each state (plus three Electors for the District of Columbia). Each of the state numbers is equal to the sum of that state’s number of Senators (two for each state, assuming states to be co-equal in sovereignty) and of that state’s number of U.S. Representatives (representation proportional to population). The egregious Seventeenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution sabotages the original idea that the Senators represent the states themselves via appointment by their state legislatures to the federal legislature. James Madison thought that this appointment process would convey a sense of each state’s authority and legitimacy in the federal system - - i.e., that no state was a colonial backwater in a federal system. But what did James Madison know about the Constitution?
Joseph Biden defeated Donald Trump in the 2020 U.S. Presidential election in the midst of the COVID pandemic, the George-Floyd riots, outdated election-integrity laws, and an unprecedented flood of mail-in ballots. Biden won six of the seven swing states by small popular-vote margins, losing only North Carolina. (For a summary of these 2020 results, click here.) Biden recorded a strong 306-232 victory in the Electoral College.
In the 2020 U.S. Presidential race, Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin (11+16+10 = 37 Electoral votes) were decided by approximately 11,000, 13,000, and 21,000 popular votes, respectively. However, a few percent of the millions of mail-in ballots in those three states in 2020 seemed, to some analysts, to lack legitimacy - - or even to have been wholly fabricated - - based on the following line of thought: If a relatively low level of mail-in balloting in 2016 and previous years had resulted in an error rate of a few percent (rejection rate due to defective signature, dating, receipt-time, voter-ID, or any other problem), then a relatively high level (flood) of mail-in balloting in 2020 must have had at least the same error rate, not the much lower error rate alleged by some election precincts in Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin.
In the case of the U.S. Presidential race in Wisconsin in 2020, a remarkable example of the aforesaid mail-in ballot conundrum has been documented: In 2016, only 4.8% of the total number of ballots were mail-in ballots; and of those mail-in ballots there was an error rate (rejection rate) of 1.4%. In 2020, however, an unprecedented 41% of the total number of ballots were mail-in ballots (due to COVID and other causes peculiar to 2020); and of those mail-in ballots there was an error rate of only 0.2% - - a seven-fold decrease in error rate coinciding with a more than eight-fold increase in the fraction of mail-in ballots (41% / 4.8% = 8.54). Ultimately, in the case of Wisconsin in 2020, it seemed plausible that tens of thousands of questionable votes were being injected into a Presidential tally in which the purported margin of victory was also on the order of tens of thousands of votes, vitiating Biden’s claim to victory in Wisconsin. Analogous remarks pertain to Arizona and Georgia in 2020.
In this novel situation, however, the judicial system typically professed not to find anyone with a suitable legal standing to sue election officials over anomalies in the rejection rate for mail-in ballots. In these potential court cases, there was the distinct appearance that the judges just wanted “to get out of Dodge City” in unseemly haste before any rioting broke out. Additionally, the candidate challenging the vote count was left with the nearly impossible burden of proving a negative, viz., that the true rejection rate for mail-in ballots did not go down by an order of magnitude or so even while a much higher volume of mail-in ballots was being processed. If indeed the 37 Electoral votes of Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin had gone to Trump in 2020, then Trump would have achieved a 306-37 = 232+37 = 269-269 tie in the Electoral College, sending the election to the House of Representatives and generating even more excitement!
Just prior to the 2020 election, a widely acclaimed, professional, scientific poll of Wisconsin voters gave Biden a projected 17% margin of victory in Wisconsin - - the supposed expectation of all those who “follow the science.” (This was in the October 28, 2020 ABC News / Washington Post Poll.) The 17% projected Biden victory contrasted sharply with the 0.6% actual Biden victory. One wonders whether, heaven forfend, the 17% projected Biden advantage had been a polling fiction publicized precisely in order to discourage Trump voters from voting at all or to encourage them to switch sides in the contest.
Now compare the U.S. Presidential pre-election polling results from Wisconsin in 2020 to those from Iowa in 2024: The now infamous Des Moines Register pre-election poll by “legendary pollster” J. Ann Selzer purported to find, just days before the 2024 Presidential election, that Kamala Harris was ahead of Donald Trump by three percentage points in Iowa. Regrettably for Selzer, Iowa went for Trump by thirteen percentage points in 2024. Whoops, sixteen percentage points’ worth of error! The day after Election Day, Selzer seemed to be shocked - - shocked! - - that such egregious error could have infiltrated the inner sanctums of scientific polling. Selzer pledged to comb through her data in order to find the source or sources of this monumental error. One wonders again whether, heaven forfend, the 16% over-estimate of projected Harris support had been a polling fiction publicized precisely in order to discourage Trump voters - - nationally! - - from voting at all or to encourage them to switch sides.
Without the confusion posed in 2020 by the COVID pandemic, the George-Floyd rioting, and the inadequate voter-ID laws in some states, etc., the 2024 U.S. Presidential election resulted in the Electoral-College victory of Donald Trump over Kamala Harris. Trump won the national popular vote by 49.9% to 48.3%. Trump won the popular vote in all seven swing states. (For a summary of these 2024 results, click here.) The Electoral College again worked as intended in forcing the candidates to campaign in a broader swath of the country than just in the states of largest population. Trump stormed to an utterly dominating 312-226 victory over Harris in the Electoral College
In the opinion of Michael Barone, emeritus fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, “Mr. Trump’s ability to connect with the voters has ‘shaped and hastened’ two developments that could portend a political realignment,” which is to say, a fundamental change in the so-called rainbow coalition of political factions in the U.S.A. First, immigrants are drifting toward the Republican Party, demanding border security as much as any other citizen of any background whatsoever. Second, there is an “unraveling of black political unity.” One has recently seen extreme dissatisfaction expressed by some black citizens of New York and Chicago regarding the billions of dollars diverted away from the support of those cities’ citizens and funneled towards immigrant groups. Like any other citizens, those residing in the inner cities expect all levels of government in the U.S. to operate preferentially on the citizens’ behalf.