They don’t have to be that good.
It really, doesn’t take much to tip the scales nowadays - every election from 2004 through 2020 (sans 2008) was decided by 500,000 votes or less. Allow me to quantify that.
Gen.Blather wrote recently that his Uncle who was big in Ohio Repub circles said “ said, each party candidate will attract about forty percent of the total vote. It doesn’t matter who they are, whether they’re good candidates or even if they’re dead. They get forty percent. All elections are a fight for the necessary eleven percent to make 51%”
He’s a smart man. I would argue, however, it’s actually LESS than that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_presidential_elections_by_popular_vote_margin
Since Reagan’s landslide in 1984, the popular vote margin ranged from a high of 8.51% for Clinton to a low of -2.09% for Trump.
As we know, the popular vote isn’t the decider - it’s the Electoral College. Thus you have to scrutinize the winning vote margin in those close states that tip the balance to the winner, ie the Tipping Point states. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tipping-point_state
Since 2004 every election except for 2008 it came down to the handful of states that tip the Electoral College scale to the winner:
- In Trump’s win in 2016, his cumulative winning margin in the tipping point states of Wi, Mi, and PA was 77,444 votes.
-In Biden’s case, his tipping point margin was about 40k votes.
-Obama in 2012, it was about 500k votes.
-Bush in 2004, about 16k votes.
All this campaigning and rallies and debates blah blah blah…it all comes down in general to beating the other guy (or gal) by less than 100,000 votes.
….and it’s actually thinner than that, because all the losing candidate needed was to flip at least half of those votes.
Very true and good reasoning as you said the floors are already set let the battle for the few begin
That’s why the “no evidence of widespread voter fraud” is meaningless. It doesn’t take widespread fraud, just carefully chosen spots here and there.
“As we know, the popular vote isn’t the decider“
It isn’t even required.
Trump was elected by 80,000 white Democrats in three states.