Can we talk about vote math?

First of all, I am not a political scientist, or mathematician, or guru of anything of substance. In my professional life, I can bore you with the finer details of my specific work in depth, but politics is not my game. In short, I may just be an overeducated redneck who likes to point out bullshit.

So while we all bask in the fun of the triumphant return of Trump, whether the result of a decades long social engineering project (as Mathew Crawford makes a compelling “tinfoil hat” case for- go read it, it’s really good) or just some good ol' fashioned red-blooded American revival, something kept gnawing at me last night and into the wee morning hours of that charade of the Regime’s usual suspects coping, seething, dilating, and delaying.

And that’s math.

I told my boys group chat my concerns. Despite the wildly inappropriate name of the chat, these are some smart guys. Yet they seemed too drunk on the elixir of sweet relief at the increasingly obvious Trump triumph to do anything other than dismiss it as more of Gringo Luminoso’s conspiracy foibles.

Here’s what makes no sense to me:

2008 Obama 69.5 million votes, McCain 59.9 million votes. 129.4 million total

2012 Obama 65.9 million votes, Romney 60.9 million votes. 126.8 million total.

2016 Clinton 65.85 million votes, Trump 62.98 million votes. 128.8 million total.

2020 Biden 81.3 million votes, Trump 74.2 million votes. 155.5 million total.

2024 Harris 66.9 million votes, Trump 71.8 million votes. 138.7 million total as of now.1

What happened to so many million of votes that showed up in 2020? There may be millions of votes that showed up in 2020, and may never be seen again.

The poll workers will keep counting and the tally total is bound to increase still, which may eventually make this entire train of thought moot. However most of the states are at 97-99% reporting. California is lagging, with a 38.96 million population, some subset who are clearly not eligible voters, at 54% reporting. In 2020, CA reported 17.1 million votes, of which 9.5 million are already reported now. Add in about 7.6 million votes yet to be reported there, the new total is 145.8 million. Still missing 9.7 million votes— now the gap is reduced to missing the equivalent of the entire population of New Jersey, give or take a few football stadiums worth of people.

I’ll certainly withhold total Tin Foil mode until the total is all said and tallied. This morning’s ruminations might be premature. Yet the smell lingers for now.

Harris outperformed 2012 Obama and 2016 Clinton, perhaps even 2008 Obama (to be determined). It’s the same voters. Biden, The Most Popular President in History TM, set a high water mark of votes, outperforming Harris by 7 million even if 100% of the rest of California is added to her tally. Trump had 11 million more votes in 2020 than 2016.

Gary Johnson had 4.4 million in 2016, and Jill Stein had 1.4 million, and Evan “CIA” McMullin scratched in 700k. In 2020, thirdees shrunk to 2.35 million. That covers 4.2 million potential real voters switching from thirds to casting a lot with the two majors’ candidates.

Don’t think this wasn’t a partisan W.T.F. moment, either. Last night, Trump simultaneously crushed all over the place, gaining more votes all over the map, while lacking 2 to 2.5 million votes somewhere along the way from 2020 to 2024 as reported late night. Will those votes show up in the piles remaining to be counted? I’m looking at you, Western USA. The math seems to work for Trump to essentially repeat 2020.

Assuming the overall math continues to show millions upon millions of missing votes compared to 2020, the highest water mark ever, I can sum up my deduced options thusly:

1. Biden-Harris was the G.O.A.T. ticket, inspiring 5 (maybe 6 or 8?) million more people to turn out, than turned out for Harris alone.

2. A lot of people decided in 2024 to drop out of the voting game, and they were all former Biden-Harris voters. Maybe mRNA vaxxes cured T.D.S. in some percentage of people? Or Biden appealed to them, but they were not charmed by Harris’s strength, eloquence, and gentle laugh.

3. Shenanigans.

As of this morning, Options 1 and 2 don’t really make sense to me. They might be two sides of the same hypothesis. It seems to me that most everyone that dislikes Trump, still dislikes him. It also appears that Trump more or less repeated his 2020 performance in overall votes. With 46% of votes uncounted in California, Trump’s tally in the last big population state is at 3.9 million currently. He turned out 6 million in CA in 2020, so it’s reasonable to expect another 2.1 million to bring him to 73.9 million, and it’s not a stretch to sweep up another 300k nationwide in the final finished tally. A hypothesis that says millions and millions of people disliked Trump, then became neutral or liked him, doesn’t explain why those hypothetical people did not show up at the ballot box.

To rule out 3, the poll workers need to keep counting it up.

What happened to millions of Biden-Harris votes? Harris sola is currently 14.5 (ish) million shy of the G.O.A.T. Biden-Harris ticket, and the waning unreported votes along the West Coast can only cover so much of that gap. Maybe we will see 7.5 million from the Blue West Coast and 1 or 2 million in shake from the remaining unreported votes across the country? That helps cover the gap, assuming we see 8 or 9 million added to Harris’s tally. It may put the national popular vote within spitting distance, as national polling showed it statistically tied.

Why was the old white man + ethnic woman ticket so insanely popular, but the ethnic woman + old white man ticket not? A + B = B + A, or something.

There’s a solid, undeniable 5 plus million missing votes, somewhere, so far. It doesn’t make sense to me. If all the people that liked Trump basically voted for him again, and all the people that disliked Trump voted for the Harris + old white guy combo (again), who the hell were the 5 or 6 million mystery voters? 5 to 6 million more votes showed up for Biden-Harris, but not for Harris sola. Either way, that’s a leftist problem: lack of turnout, or lack of cheating and rigging and e-vote algorithms.

Deus ex machina.

Let’s see how this math plays out.

Additional Thoughts:

The 2020 numbers assumes a certain naivety to be believed prima facie: that the American electorate out of nowhere increased by 26.5 million voters to the two major parties. This is an incredulous event. Assuming even 4.4 million former Lolbertarians covered a significant portion of Trump gaining 11 million votes over his 2016 showing, there is still a mystery of where the hell did Trump get 11 million more voters from 2016 to 2020, while Biden-Harris also produced an additional 15.4 million voters. Only perhaps 5 million third party voters were in this pool. A logical rationale would assume that former Clinton Blue voters made up some portion of 2020 Trump voters. And yet, Trump gained 11 million new voters during the same small stretch that 15.4 million MORE votes showed up for Biden-Harris. There aren’t enough Lolberts to go around! I won’t re-tread the many many great analyses done in the aftermath of the openly barbarous 2020 election, that have been done by greater minds than I. Ultimately, however, this leads to an unpleasant place that I may expand on in the coming days: whether the vote tally is still filled with phantom votes, beyond the 5 to 6 million from 2020 that were left off the board in yesterday’s election. These phantom votes, purported by many to be the algorithm votes in unsecure states, if still in play, necessarily mean that they were allocated some to Harris, and some to Trump. There are still too many votes on the board, intuitively, but I could be overlooking raw population numbers and substantial increases in both eligible voters and voter participation. If the fix was on the table, why did 2020 deny Trump and 2024 grant Trump? If the fix wasn’t an option, what the hell happened during the last 4 years?