Not just a river in Egypt

I really like Sexton’s work but this is really ostrichesque:

First off, if the guy with the time machine had told you on November 2nd that he wasn’t going to tell you who was going to win, but that the presidential election was going to come down to a handful of votes in Georgia and Arizona, plus a one percent margin of victory in Pennsylvania, you would have been in a total panic and rightly so.

The current narrative being pushed by some people that it really wasn’t a close election but only seemed that way because it took so long to count the mail-in vote strikes me as pure rationalization. It was extremely close in the Electoral College, despite Biden’s eventual six million vote margin in the popular vote. (In regard to the latter fact, Even the Liberal Media has somehow decided that’s just an irrelevant detail that isn’t even worth talking about, when they bother to mention it at all.)

It was so close that even a relatively small tweak of the news cycle could easily have ended up re-electing Trump. What if the Pfizer and Moderna vaccine timelines had been three weeks earlier? I realize the overwhelming majority of voters who were going to vote for Biden and Trump were going to do so no matter what, but again we’re talking about marginal voters here, i.e., the most clueless and emotive people in the entire system, who are swayed by things like the Comey letter. This year the Comey letter broke the other way, structurally speaking.

I don’t mean to imply that these companies were behaving strategically and withholding data, so the analogy doesn’t fit in that regard, but rather the point is that when you’re talking about a few tens of thousands of votes in a handful of swing states, every little or not so little thing makes a difference.

Which brings me back to Sexton’s tweet. Biden’s margin over Trump nationally was 3.7%, although that might creep up a tenth of a percentage point or two when all the votes have been counted. ETA: There are still a ton of uncounted votes in New York, so Nate Silver estimates this actually climb to around 4.4%. And that’s at the national level. Collectively in the three swing states that decided the election, Biden won by .7% of the vote. Considerably less than one vote out of every one hundred cast in Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Georgia decided the outcome of the election. ETA: Spearmint66 points out that I missed the delightful detail that it actually only requires flipping Wisconsin, Arizona, and Georgia — states that were decided by a total of 45,000 votes — to re-elect Trump, since that would have resulted in a 269-269 tie, which would have led to the House deciding the election in Trump’s favor.

And while it’s true that “only” two-thirds of the eligible voting population voted, I think it’s safe to say that the vast majority of the one-third of the public that didn’t vote doesn’t believe in “democracy” enough to bother actually participating in the system at the most minimal level of personal investment. Yes voter suppression is definitely a (Republican) thing, but most states actually did make it a lot easier to vote this time around, although it should be made much easier still.

The notion that the vast majority of Americans oppose authoritarian ethno-nationalism, and love science and democracy, is completely unsupported by the evidence. In fact the vast majority of Americans either support Donald Trump or are so indifferent to what he represents that they can’t be bothered to do literally anything to oppose it. ETA: Let’s put some numbers on this. If we assume Biden finishes with 80 million votes, that would mean that almost exactly two thirds — 66.5% — of the eligible voting population did not vote against Donald Trump. That should be a sobering statistic for anyone reaching for a lost shaker of salt.