1/ Some notes to start:
1⃣ I’m as devastated by this loss as anyone—for more reasons than I can say or readers will know. Please understand, I feel the same pain as you.
2⃣ If contrary hard evidence emerges, I will say so.
3⃣ I worked on post-vote stolen-election claims in 2004.
2/ Every analysis—and many of the ones I mean are coming from the *right* (using current data to “prove” that the *2020* election was stolen)—that relies on *current* vote tallies is bogus. Millions of votes are still being counted, and the final results will look very different.
3/ Several days ago—when stolen-election claims began—it was, “Where did 20 million voters disappear to?”
Then, “Where did 18 million voters disappear to?”
Then, “Where did 12 million voters disappear to?”
Yeah, folks—what was happening was that votes were still being counted.
4/ In saying “the final results will look different,” I mean:
1⃣ Harris will have many more votes than when folks first compared her tally to results from 2020
2⃣ Trump will have many more votes than when folks first compared his tally to results from 2020
3⃣ The gap will narrow
5/ So the charts being sent around—to be clear, mostly by *MAGAs*—comparing Harris 2024 to Biden 2020 and Trump 2024 to Trump 2020 were *deliberately created way too early* so that literally *millions* of predominantly Harris votes from California would not be considered at all.
6/ Second, there is a temptation in alleging a stolen election to look at battleground states.
That is exactly wrong.
Yes, any theory about a stolen election is *of course* going to focus on the states where the election was “lost,” but that is actually the *wrong praxis*, too.
7/ If VP Harris had increased her vote share in states no one had any reason to screw around with—if we had seen evidence of increased turnout for Harris in blood-red states like OK and WV to strong red states like IA and OH to light red CDs in ME and NE—that would be one thing.
8/ In that instance we’d say, “Why was there such an obvious distinction between battlegrounds and non-battlegrounds”?
2024 was *exactly* the opposite.
Trump increased his vote share *everywhere*, from blood-red states to strong red states to light-red areas to *blue states*.
9/ You want to be serious when talking about the 2024 election? Talk about how the Trump vote *blossomed wildly* in states like NY and NJ that he nevertheless lost. Talk about states we (and any hackers) well knew he would win—TX and FL—where he *dominated* beyond expectations.
10/ In short, every data-point from *non*-battlegrounds no one would bother to hack or muck about with shows an enthusiasm for Trump that you and I find *absolutely unconscionable* but that makes what happened in the battleground states *statistically consistent*, not suspicious.
11/ Third, please do not make the argument that crowd sizes point to vote share. That is... sorry... *so* stupid. It is the same sort of nonsense low-information persons spread on Trump’s behalf and it is *silly*.
A *million* things determine rally sizes; none affect vote share.
12/ In 2020, Biden had lower rally attendance because he didn’t want to give folks COVID-19. He held distanced events, many media-only. MAGAs *knew* this but *couldn’t resist* being trolls; they showed Biden event photos to “prove” people did not like him.
Do *not* emulate them.
13/ Besides which, Trump’s rally attendance was *fine*. Yes, folks would stream out when he got long-winded. Yes, folks were slightly less invested in this election than last—all the data shows it, though it’s unthinkable to most of us—so maybe fewer folks turned out for rallies.
14/ Harris’s rallies were well-attended. But that doesn’t have anything to do with voter turnout—Bernie had bigger rallies than Hillary in 2016, remember—as rallies are about *the most highly motivated* 5% of voters, *not* about the average voter. Most people don’t go to rallies.
15/ Fourth, the exit polls. When I worked on stolen election claims as a political journalist in 2004, we had the most shocking exit polls imaginable—*clearly* indicating a Kerry win. And they still turned out to be flawed, as exit polls always are.
But the *2024* ones were OK.
16/ The 2024 exit polls didn’t show a Harris win.
Did they show people about as worried about democracy as Democrats would have hoped? Yes. But you forget that Elon Musk spent October lying to America about *Dems* being a threat to democracy...
...hence those exit-poll results.
17/ Fifth, the idea that hackers are going to hack *only one race* when they have a chance to remake Washington so that elections can definitely never be held again is silly.
Democrats may well yet take the House, and no foreign hackers would have allowed that outcome, clearly!
18/ But it *wasn’t just the House*. Democrats actually did better than you think—repeat: better than you think—in their Senate races. They won in Michigan, in Wisconsin, in Nevada, in Arizona, and will likely go to a recount in Pennsylvania. Allred ran ahead of Harris in TX, too.
19/ The point here is that people had particular views about Trump, and about Harris, that did not necessarily indicate a view of the political parties themselves.
Across the board, Democratic candidates ran ahead of Harris and that does *not* indicate a senseless one-race hack.
20/ Many independents aren’t ready for a woman POTUS. Sad but true. Many independents don’t watch real news, so they felt Trump—Trump *specifically*, not his whole party—had been wrongly victimized by false allegations. Many people associated *Trump*, not the GOP, with PPP money.
21/ Sixth, I think folks are misreading the ballot initiative results. Yes—data indicates voters *prefer* Democratic policies; but it *also* indicates *that they don’t know which party is behind such policies* (read that one twice, because it will give you an ice-cream headache).
22/ So the idea that America supporting Democratic policies should mean that folks vote Democratic *makes sense*, but our voting population is—per *data* PROOF is about to publish—*so misinformed on the issues* that Democrats don’t even get credit for the policies Americans love.
23/ The ballot-initiative results also confirm Americans felt there were *other ways to get their way* than to vote for Harris. Consider white suburban women—who in many states had the unique pleasure of voting for Trump *and* voting for reproductive rights *in their state only*.
24/ We assumed ballot initiatives allowing voters in certain states to sidestep the consequences of Trumpist machinations would help Dems. But in hindsight, it’s now easy to see that they made a Trump vote *easier* for some because it took *federal* abortion policy off the table.
25/ Seventh, you know what happens in stolen elections *everywhere on Earth* when they occur? You get whistle-blowers. You get election monitors reporting issues. You get statistically impossible results. You get localized recounts that raise red flags. We have none of that here.
26/ Sure, you could say there have been too few recounts *so far* to catch any issues, but here is the good news: there *will* be recounts in certain races, and if there was the *nationwide* hacking a stolen election would require *in this case*, that will out in those recounts.
27/ Eighth, I am telling you as a Trump biographer that you are misreading certain pre- and post-election signals. Trump saying he did not need votes was a *classic* rhetorical Trump maneuver, no different from saying he was leading in all the polls when he was not. The aim...
28/ ...is to create a sense he was *so far ahead* according to super-secret polling data *only he had* that if he lost, a civil war was warranted. But it was *also* classic Trump rhetoric because he knew it *wouldn’t* carry the deleterious effect—to him—you would normally expect.
29/ To explain (and it’s hard to do so on Twitter, as Trump’s rhetorical style is complicated—not by design, as he’s not a smart man, but by instinct): Trump often uses rhetoric that lets him play both sides of an issue, for instance by decrying foul language *and then using it*.
30/ Trump will say, for instance, “These days you can’t call someone fat, because that’s not considered nice. So I’m not going to say he’s fat. I would get in so much trouble if I called him fat. But in a different time, he would’ve been called a fat bastard, I’ll tell you that.”
31/ The goal here is to please the rabid MAGA crowd before him—which well understands he is calling the man fat—while still vaguely appealing to those watching at home who would like him to tone down his rhetoric. It is weird and stupid, but Donald Trump does this *all the time*.
32/ So when he tells rabid MAGA voters *he doesn’t need their vote*, he *well* understands that they’re going to vote for him anyway—he’s a cult leader and he knows his cult. But he deems the broader message to fence-sitters—I’M SO FAR AHEAD!—to be worth his strange double-speak.
33/ I beg you to stop analyzing Trump’s words through the lens of normal people. He’s a sociopath; he’s a monster; he’s *profoundly* deranged. Parsing his weird comments about not needing people to vote like he’s *projecting an intent to hack the election* misunderstands the man.
34/ Just so, all this stuff about Trump being oddly quiet now is *nonsense*. Trump felt his transition in 2016 was a disaster and led to him picking all the wrong people. It took his administration months to get up to speed. So right now he is down at Mar-a-Lago obsessing over...
35/ ...every pick for his top positions so he can start brutalizing America *on Day 1*. His supposedly weird silence is actually to be expected, and it’s indeed nefarious—but not in the way some folks are trying to tell you it is. Be afraid of it, but not for the reason they say.
36/ Ninth, with all due respect, *some* of the cranks coming out of the woodwork to talk about how easy it is to hack machines aren’t who you think. They have been saying the same stuff *since 2004*—when I was on the stolen-election beat—and haven’t proven their case in 20 years.
37/ What’s happening is that many Democrats of good faith are just being exposed to these cranks for the first time, and therefore think they’re *only* worried about *this* election—when they would tell you, if pressed, they had the same concerns *in 2008*, *in 2012*, *in 2020*.
38/ Tenth—again with great respect for my fellow Dems—please understand that *we are grieving*. You *must* be able to name your grief *as grief* before you can address it. I am grieving. You are grieving. And what is the first step of the grieving process? Denial. Many are in it.
39/ But here’s the good news: even the grieving can heal *while remaining open to new data*. You can let go of your grieving-denial about what’s just happened while *still* saying to yourself and others, “If hard evidence comes out that’s not just gut feeling, I will look at it.”
40/ And keep in mind—finally—that we *know* how Trump won. And whatever anyone may wish, it was *simply* because the right has a disinformation machine that the left does not and never will—and most voters had almost no knowledge of anything as they voted.
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