Replies

Also, I woudn’t say there was no monster vote... It manifested itself in places for sure... most noteably the upper midwest. However, overall vote totals were down, and down big... though the provisional ballots haven’t all been counted, so exactly how far down not sure yet.. but right now looks like about 120M ish votes cast compared to 127M ish in 12 and 130M ish in 08.

PA in particular Trump put more votes in the box than Obama did in 12... He overperformed Romney by over 225k votes... Meanwhile Hillary was only down about a little under 50k votes from Obama in 12. Those 175k votes came from somewhere.... And that was in an election where it looks at least at this point where overall turnout will be noticeably down from 12.

WI definitely seems to support no monster vote argument, as Trump basically put the same number of votes in the box as O in 12... but Hillary was down by nearly 240K there!

MI though again supports a monster vote.. Trump overperformed Romney by 164k votes.. Hillary underperformed by nearly 300k votes there. too.

PA, MI and WI clearly had a monster vote... those improvements are nothing to sneeze at... but only PA put enough votes in the box to have beat Obamas 12 numbers... but this was never about beating obama’s 12 numbers, because obama’s 12 numbers were never going to be hit, and that’s why the press and the pundits had this all wrong from day one... they insisted on using 12 as a baseline and it was an unrealistic one.

In these 3 state combined... Hillary underperformed Obama by over 600k votes.. This wasn’t hard to predict, hell if a schlub like me saw this coming, then anyone who is paid and doing this for a living should have seen this coming... and for all their high talk publicly to the contrary, I don’t think for one minute anyone honestly thought Hillary would pull 2012 numbers..

However they never, ever expected Trump to put over 500k more votes in the box in PA and MI!

There was a monster vote, and it was hiding in plane sight, and as you and I agree, the tapes probably depressed these numbers significantly... Not just in these states but across the north east. Trump was just starting to break away when the tape was put out because they had no choice, had he broken the damn which he was starting to the tape would not have had any shot of stopping it.

I haven’t looked at every state, and there totals... I do admit my original overall view of the election did not come to pass, and I think the tape was the single reason why... However, I always admitted from the primaries... Trump may not take red states by the same margins as another R might.. but he was going to be able to win blue states no other R could manage...

He proved me right... I suspect when its all said and done, most of the southern states margines may have been smaller, than 12, but Trump flipped PA, MI and WI... something no other R could have done... not a one of the lot... no other R could have flipped one, let alone all 3 of these, and the R was going to need to take at least 1 of these to win... Taking FL, OH, IA even NH while holding NC didn’t get you to 270... the D’s knew this, and that’s why they were so damned arrogant all cycle, they never in a million years thought this could happen..