In case you were not aware, Rudy Giuliani is still pushing to overturn the Michigan results and there were hearings in the Republican-controlled state legislature for four hours on Wednesday where he brought in witnesses who alleged widespread fraud. One of them was someone named Melissa Carone who said that she worked as a contractor for Dominion Voting Systems, the company that manufactured the voting machines and that has been accused by Trump lawyers of working in cahoots with Hugo Chavez (who died in 2013) and the CIA to electronically switch Trump votes to Biden votes as part of their plan to turn the world Communist. Or something like that. It is hard to keep up.
You’ve got to hand it to her, she is feisty, too much even for Giuliani who tries and fails to rein her in as she badgers a member of the legislature (a Republican, mind you) as he tries to figure out exactly what the fraud is that she is alleging. She has been compared to a Saturday Night Live parody character.
Holy smokes the sequel is even better!
Rudy Giuliani tries to shush her to calm her down and the Republican even tries to reel her in!
She treats this Republican* like he’s a Chick-fil-A employee and the milkshake machine went down.
*corrected pic.twitter.com/CK1HqGpp2d
— Ryan J. Reilly (@ryanjreilly) December 3, 2020
But the absurdities in her testimony pale in comparisons to Trump’s 46-minutes rant yesterday that he gave in a recorded speech. It was wild, repeating the craziest allegations that have been repeatedly debunked over and over again. If you went by his account, you could be forgiven for thinking that vast numbers of votes were fraudulently cast quite openly. He took the time to give this rant while ignoring the raging pandemic on a day that saw the highest daily death toll and hospitalizations.
Clearly some people are feeding him false information and charts to humor his belief that he actually won and that he only seems to have lost purely because of fraud, even though his lawyers have not produced evidence in the venues that matter, the courts, and the cases have been thrown out, and even his own attorney general has said that the department of justice has not found evidence of widespread fraud.
Stephen Colbert had an immediate response to Trump’s speech.
Trump is clearly attempting to delegitimize the election of Joe Biden, even though Biden’s margin of victory is now approaching seven million votes, a bigger margin than at any time in history (see corrections pointed out in comments), the percentage split is up to 51-47%, and the electoral college margin is 306-232, all of which are hardly close. To what purpose is he doing this? To dupe his supporters to sending money to his slush fund? To lay the groundwork for a second Trump presidential run? To fire up his supporters? Because he cannot accept that he is a loser?
Probably all of the above.
Definitely all of the above.
.
And I thought at first that Carone was Victoria Jackson for reals!
I thought that sounded odd, so I just checked the 1980 result. Reagan’s margin was 8.4 million.
That kind of sloppy failure to check a fact that can be verified with a five second Google really annoys me.
I’m sure Reagan’s margin over Mondale in 1984 was even bigger.
Biden did get the largest number of votes ever in the US; nearly 12 million more than Obama got in 2008.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_presidential_elections_by_popular_vote_margin#List
No, you misunderstand. Biden’s margin is now bigger than *Biden’s* margin has ever been…
I, too, have an immediate response to Trump’s speech. In the interest of decorum, however, I shan’t be posting it here.
If we’re going to be pedantic about vote margins, Joe Biden’s (7.0 million) is about the same as Warren Harding’s in 1920 or FDR’s in 1932. Richard Nixon’s 1972 vote margin (17.9 million) is largest, followed by Ronald Reagan’s 1984 (16.8 million), Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 (15.9 million), and FDR’s 1936 (11.0 million) vote margins.
Also, in 1920 for example, Harding’s margin over Cox was about 26%, which is a lot bigger than Biden’s 4%. And that was with Eugene Debs running as a third party candidate, who got around 3.5% of popular vote. (Not to mention several others with a lot less.)
The population is growing, meaning the same ~7 million figure becomes a smaller and smaller proportion of the total (given similar rates of turnout). If you’re not going to be impressed in pretty much every election by the fact that there are simply more voters than there were in the past, then the absolute figures are really not the ones you should be interested in.
Biden’s was actually not so impressive, as (per the wiki link from Rob, #5) there are 41 presidential elections when it was bigger margin (proportionally) and only 17 when it was smaller.
Of course proportionally George Washington’s 100% margin is pretty much unbeatable. Still, only 44K votes or so.
Rob Grigjanis (#4) --
How much of that 1984 “landslide” was media driven by early returns from the east coast? It was that election that led to a ban on early reporting.
https://www.nytimes.com/1984/11/07/us/1984-elections-long-campaign-finally-ends-tv-networks-call-race-early-renewing.html