Almost a year after the presidential election, and more than a few recounts in “suspect” counties that turned up no evidence of “fraud,” there are still those soldiering on in support of Donald Trump’s election lies—some, like My Pillow’s Mike Lindell, who seem entirely insensible to the fact that just because far-right news programming is allowing them to spout idiotic nonsense only makes themselves and the people giving them a platform an increase in their idiot quotient.
While much of the talk defending the integrity of the election has dealt with the lack of evidence of fraud, there doesn’t seem to be much discussion of the fact that Republican voters benefited from the same changes to make it easier to vote during the pandemic lockdown. Republican-controlled states were among those that permitted mail-in votes, extended early voting and hours. They didn’t do this because they thought it would boost the Democratic vote, but because Republican voters are older and/or more zealous in their eagerness to vote for Trump, and so why not make it easier for them to vote?
In such an environment, it was no “shock” that Trump received 75 million votes; but without the voting changes, Trump’s vote count would presumably have been less. Joe Biden’s vote would have been less as well (one assumes), but there is no reason to believe that without the voting changes, he wouldn’t have won the election. Mail-in voting doesn’t on the face of it “discriminate” against or inherently favor one party or the other. The state of Washington has had mail ballot-only elections for a decade, and only a half-dozen ballots have been found to be fraudulent in that time.
In the 2016 election, 3,317,019 votes were cast, with Hillary Clinton polling 52.5 percent to Trump’s 36.8 percent; Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson and “write-ins” accounted for over 8 percent of the vote in the state. In the 2020 presidential election, there were 4,087,631 votes counted, a substantial increase over the 2016 numbers only partially explained by population increase. A more important reason was that voters were more "decided"; neither Clinton or Trump were particularly well-liked or trusted by many voters, who decided to sit out the 2016 election, or simply chose to waste their vote in an expression of displeasure over the major party choices. This is borne out by the fact that although there was a slightly higher vote count in 2016 than in 2012, almost 100,000 more votes were cast for the major party candidates in 2012.
The results of the 2020 election in the state suggested that positions had also hardened for or against Trump. While Washington is technically a “blue” state, east of the mountains is solidly “red” save for Whitman County, home of Washington State University in Pullman. The more urbanized precincts west of the mountains voted heavily for Biden, but Trump won all but one of the counties he did in 2016, with the Democrats only “flipping” Clallam County, the only supposed "bellwether" county in the country to do so.
The Washington vote also showed that Democrats and independents were more “enthusiastic” about voting for someone other than Trump, with Biden receiving over 620,000 more votes than Clinton (of course, you have to be careful when choosing someone with a "D" next to their name, i.e. Kyrsten Sinema). The vote count also showed that while Trump lost by a wider margin than he did in 2016, his “base” of voters in the state are hardly less white nationalist in outlook as their compatriots in Idaho, and naturally they find a crazed bigot like Trump a “kindred spirit.” With libertarian Johnson out of the way as well as any further doubts about Trump put to rest, his vote also increased substantially in 2020, by about 360,000. Nevertheless, it was still substantially less than the increase in the Democratic vote.
All things being equal in voting-by-mail, the 2020 election was a referendum on the Trump presidency, characterized by the intense like or dislike of the man, and voters who just wanted something different. Nationally, Trump and his rabid supporters continue to be simply clueless about what the election meant. There had been no election this polarizing since 1860, the truth of which was evident in the Capitol Hill riot on January 6. It is being “suggested” by Trump supporters that voting changes in 2020 allowed Democrats to “cheat”; the reality is that the changes made it easier for Trump supporters to vote. Their insistence that the election was “stolen” is simply a willful refusal to comprehend just how much Trump is despised. They would willingly destroy the democratic process to fulfill their desire for an authoritarian who oppresses the people they want oppressed.
In 2022 and beyond after Republican governors and legislatures passed laws to disenfranchise voters, people who still believe we live in a democracy need to stand up for their right to vote and go to the polls to show Trumpists that their votes will not be stolen. Republicans have to be shown that if their aim is to silence voters they don’t like, they will lose.
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