About Me

In writing the "About Me" portion of this blog I thought about the purpose of the blog - namely, preventing the growth of Socialism & stopping the Death Of Democracy in the American Republic & returning her to the "liberty to abundance" stage of our history. One word descriptions of people's philosophies or purposes are quite often inadequate. I feel that I am "liberal" meaning that I am broad minded, independent, generous, hospitable, & magnanimous. Under these terms "liberal" is a perfectly good word that has been corrupted over the years to mean the person is a left-winger or as Mark Levin more accurately wrote in his book "Liberty & Tyranny" a "statist" - someone looking for government or state control of society. I am certainly not that & have dedicated the blog to fighting this. I believe that I find what I am when I consider whether or not I am a "conservative" & specifically when I ask what is it that I am trying to conserve? It is the libertarian principles that America was founded upon & originally followed. That is the Return To Excellence that this blog is named for & is all about.

Sunday, January 8, 2017

Popular Vote Analysis Shows The Fragility Of Trump's Victory

On Friday, amidst the annoying last ditch interruptions to object & protest the proceedings, principally by Congresswomen Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX), Barbara Lee (D-CA), & Maxine Waters (D-CA), the President of the Senate, in the presence of the Senate & the House as per our Constitution, overruled the objections, called the protests out of order, & counted the votes for President & Vice President & found that Donald Trump received a majority of electoral votes meaning there are no more legal or procedural stumbling blocks in Trump's way to the presidential inauguration on January 20.  It also means it is safe to write this post.
 
As readers of RTE know my
attraction to Trump's presidential candidacy started about half way through his announcement declaring his run for the presidency that I saw live on June 16, 2015.
 
Specifically, I saw the chance for a start of a change to the political correctness mindset that is ruining America unless it is reversed – & quickly.  Items like eliminating the fallacious destructive anchor baby claim to birthright citizenship, settling the incompatible relationship of Muslims who follow Sharia law taking a U.S. citizenship oath, banning people from Muslim countries from entering America until we know that immigrants & refugees from these countries are not terrorists, ending sanctuary cities, & restoring the enforcement of immigration laws – are all bedrock matters that must be settled before issues like tax reform, healthcare, climate change, the national debt, the budget deficit, or even adequate national defense can be addressed. 
 
Without Trump none of the politically incorrect issues listed above would have ever been brought up @ all by any other person running for office.
 
Yet on the morning of November 8 I doubted Trump would win, but like Peggy Noonan, I was not convinced he would lose.  After all he has been a winner @ everything he has ever done.
 
With Hillary Clinton seemingly sitting in the catbird's seat for over a year before the election the media played us for fools with their constant reports of tightening polls the last five weeks of the presidential campaign – the media (& Hillary) always thought she would win – in fact, early on election night Trump & his daughter Ivanka thought he would lose. 
 
Of course the tightening polls referred to the popular vote – a meaningless statistic, as far as the immediate election is concerned, if only evidenced by the fact that no federal government agency is in charge of compiling it.  More important - the Constitution does not mention it.
 
But in any event Hillary did not win the popular vote – when the votes were certified in all fifty states Hillary had not received a majority of the popular vote.  She led with a plurality of 2,865,075 votes (65,844,954 – 62,979,879) or 48.04% versus 45.95%.
 
Conservatives like to point out that the large national popular vote margin is due to California's results & that Trump won the national popular vote if you subtract the California walloping Trump got by 4,269,978 votes (8,753,788 California votes for Hillary – 4,483,810 California votes for Trump) or 61.48% versus 31.49%. 
 
New York was the only other state where the difference for either candidate was greater than 1 million votes: 4,547,562 for Hillary – 2,814,589 for Trump = 1,732,973
 
Prior to the election Democrats were fine with any electoral system because they thought Hillary would win any way the votes were counted.  Since Hillary started with a virtual certainty of 242 electoral votes & most probably 257 electoral votes based on states that had voted for the Democrat candidate the last five presidential elections (242) or four out of the last five (15 additional electoral votes) the electoral college system was tolerated by Democrats who were still leery of it after the election of 2000 when GW Bush was elected president despite not winning the popular vote.  It takes 270 electoral votes to win the presidency.
 
Hillary finished with only 227 electoral votes because - from her assumed starting point of 257 electoral votes - she lost Wisconsin (10), Michigan (16), Pennsylvania (20), Iowa (6), Maine (1), & had 5 faithless electors in the electoral college for a deduct of 58 but picked up Nevada (6), Colorado (9), & Virginia (13) for an addition of 28 electoral votes.
 
This is now the second time since 2000 that Democrats have claimed victory in the popular vote but lost the electoral college & the presidency.
 
Accordingly, ten states & the District of Columbia have formed a pact known as the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC)  in which all electoral votes in these ten states & DC will go to the winner of the national popular vote regardless of who wins the individual state vote – I'm sure they consider a plurality for Hillary like in 2016 as the winner of the national popular vote.
 
The NPVIC is planned to only go into effect, if it passes inevitable legal challenges – see Compact Claus of the Constitution, Article I, Section 10, Clause 3 which states that "No State shall, without the consent of Congress . . . enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State . . ." - when the electoral votes of the states who enter into the pact total 270 which will ensure the desired outcome.
 
See graphic below for details of the NPVIC – note all the states & DC heavily favor Democrats so again we see that Democrats prefer the national popular vote & regard the NPVIC as an end around the Constitution & the electoral college.  These states will give up their state sovereignty to get the statist president they want.
 
click on graphic to enlarge
 
Now Democrats obviously prefer to determine the president by a national popular vote because they know we are outnumbered – just look @ this last election. 
 
Conservatives say that the country needs the electoral college system because it would be unfair for one or two large states (CA & NY) with concentrated populations to dominate the rest of the country. 
 
The reason the electoral college system is needed is because the Framers of the Constitution knew that the Constitution would never have been ratified without it – the small states would not agree to be dominated by the popular vote majority of the large states.  In brief, without the electoral college there would have been no ratification of the Constitution – i.e., there would be no United States.
 
When Hillary topped out @ 232 electoral votes in the early morning hours of November 9 (for those who stayed up to watch the returns) Trump had 260 electoral votes meaning that Trump needed either Wisconsin, Michigan, or Pennsylvania to win the presidency if there were no faithless electors – a win in any one of these states would get him to 270 electoral votes.
   
This makes the case that Trump won the election, 306 electoral votes to 232 electoral votes (before the electoral votes of faithless electors are subtracted), by winning Wisconsin (by 22,748 votes), Michigan (by 10,704 votes), & Pennsylvania (by 44,292 votes) – each narrow wins but in three states a Republican had not won since 1984 (WI) & 1988 (MI & PA).
 
Of the original seventeen Republican candidates for president only Trump had a chance to win the presidency from the get go – & that was because he was the only candidate who could appeal to Democrat voters in states like Wisconsin, Michigan, & Pennsylvania who saw a glimmer of the return to excellence that Trump's candidacy represented to them after decades of broken Democrat promises & a life of mediocrity @ best.
 
It truly was a narrow win & that is why the takeaway from the election should be that in order to prevent the further development of the Democrat statist ideas of government dependency that is the cause of so much misery Trump needs to win over the people Romney famously identified (Romney's 47%) as "people (who) will vote for BO (in Mitt's case) no matter what . . . these people are dependent on government, believe they are victims entitled to government handouts, & pay no income tax."  In order for Trump to win in 2016 – & in particular these three long-time Democrat states - he had to already win over & receive the votes of some of these people – or else he too would have lost like Romney, McCain, & Dole did.
 
Don't think for a second that Democrats don't know that Trump has won over some of their voters & is positioned to win more of them – as distasteful as it is to them, Democrats are not worried by a one time loss of three states by a mere cumulative 77,744 votes (out of more than 137 million votes cast) but rather what they rightly perceive as an encroachment on their territory (i.e., voters) that has the potential to grow.
 
The best thing Democrats can do, from their prospective, is delay or disrupt anything Trump tries to do after he takes office.  The backlash from this is that the next wave of Democrat voters who just couldn't quite bring themselves to vote for Trump this time, for whatever reason, may finally see that Democrat politicians, for their own political advantage, are holding people back to keep them dependent on government.
 
In summary this is a tipping point for our country that could return us to the liberty to abundance stage of our history – we know we were not going in that direction if Hillary had won.
 
Trump got in by the barest of margins & has been given the chance to move forward.  Black, Hispanic, & Asian minorities are growing in electoral importance every year.  If Trump doesn't remove regulations on businesses & present free enterprise policies that will increase the growth of the economy that will allow all of these groups to participate in wealth creation the trend of minorities voting Democrat will not be reversed.
 
Before the 2016 election Democrats had already blatantly boasted of winning the electoral votes in Arizona, Georgia, & Texas – not in 2016 but in 2020 because of the growing minority vote.  Just look @ the trends below:
 
Trump won Arizona by 3.50% (48.08% – 44.58%) & a margin of 91,234 votes – Romney won Arizona in 2012 by 9.03% (53.48% – 44.45%) & a margin of 208,422 votes. 
 
Trump won Georgia by 5.09% (50.44% – 45.35%) & a margin of 211,141 votes – Romney won Georgia in 2012 by 7.80% (53.19% – 45.39%) & a margin of 304,861 votes.
 
Trump won Texas by 8.99% (52.23% – 43.24%) & a margin of 807,179 votes – Romney won Texas in 2012 by 15.78% (57.13% – 41.35%) & a margin of 1,261,719 votes.
 
Please look @ the electoral map of Texas below that shows the large number of southern border counties that voted Democrat – the usual color convention is reversed in that red signifies Democrat.  Hillary Clinton won 569,744 more votes in Texas in 2016 than BO did in 2012 while Trump won only 115,204 more votes than Romney did in 2012 meaning that the Democrats picked up 454,540 net Texas voters in the last election – a troubling sign.
 
click on graphic to enlarge (red signifies Democrat)
 
But to show the fragility of Trump's win consider the challenge that BO made when he said he thought he would have won a third term if he would have been able to run for president against Trump. 
 
Of course we will never know but the closest we can come is to ask ourselves if we think BO would have won more than 10,704 Black or Hispanic votes in Michigan than Hillary did, & then carry the appropriate projection out in Wisconsin & Pennsylvania.
 
To help in this projection, please look @ the following graph that shows the pertinent results from the past three presidential elections.
 
click on graph to enlarge
 
All of the above shows the fragility of Trump's victory & the importance of Trump reversing the political correctness mindset, presenting free enterprise policies that will increase the growth of the economy, & working directly with Black, Hispanic, & Asian communities so that they finally realize the American dream.   
 

3 comments:

  1. It was a wonderful ride.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Trump has a rare opportunity to reverse a pro-Big Gov / Socialist mindset shift that has been underway since at least past 15 years. If he accomplishes this via pro growth economic policies that increase GDP between 3-5% annually next 4 years, and clearly explains how capitalism works to benefit all economic classes, he may well have created a new majority favoring pro private markets / small Gov. Let's hope he views this as a rare historical opportunity. Who better than a successful capitalist to succeed and make this case!

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  3. All I can say is you used that cold weather down there effectively. This was a lot of research and I appreciate it! (Someone gave me a Trump-Pence US president pin. It's about 3" in diameter and I put it precariously under my Sacred Heart card so I can pray for them and our country.)

    Have to go - need to forward this! Take care!

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