Larry Johnson on the 2016 numbers

(In light of insistance on the left that HC won the legally non-existent "national popular vote" I have decided to re-publish this piece by the vanished Larry Johnson.  pl)

What the Numbers Really Say About the Trump Victory–UPDATED

By Larry Johnson - 

Wednesday, 9 November 2016

Drudge was wrong. Yesterday’s blaring headline that turnout was on pace for 140 million turned out not to be true. In fact, the breathless media reporting about massive turnout is a bit misleading. The total votes cast this year, including third party candidates Stein and Johnson, stands at  123,724,157 million. That about  6 million less than voted for all candidates (including third party) in 2012–129 million.

The number show that Hillary Clinton has 1,322,095 more votes nationally than Donald Trump (as of 8 December).

The difference in the popular vote is entirely because of California. Hillary polled 5,589,936 while Trump trailed with 3,021,095. Hillary had 2.5 million more votes in California than Trump.

However, total votes in California dropped fairly dramatically compared to 2012. There were 2 million fewer votes. That was an exception what was going on in the other battle ground states. If you compare the number of votes in battle ground states this year to the votes in 2012 you see that the vote was basically the same with the exception of Florida, where there was a significant increase:

	Obama	Romney	All Others	Total 2012
FL	4,237,756	4,163,447	72,976	8,474,179
IA	822,544	730,617	29,019	1,582,180
MI	2,564,569	2,115,256	51,136	4,730,961
OH	2,827,709	2,661,437	91,701	5,580,847
PA	2,990,274	2,680,434	82,962	5,753,670
WI	1,620,985	1,407,966	39,483	3,068,434
			TOTAL	29,190,271
	Clinton	Trump	Others	Total 2016
FL	4,485,745	4,605,515	206,007	9,297,267
IA	650,790	798,923	57,322	1,507,035
MI	2,265,935	2,278,621	172,937	4,717,493
OH	2,317,001	2,771,984	168,599	5,257,584
PA	2,844,705	2,912,941	142,653	5,900,299
WI	1,381,923	1,409,282	106,434	2,897,639
			TOTAL	29,577,317

I think it is clear that Trump did generate enthusiasm among those who voted for him. But Trump and Clinton also turned off a lot of voters. A lot of people stayed home, especially in California. The number of voters who “did not show up” looks to be about the same as what happened in 2012 with the exception of California.

Hillary bombed with the African American community and generated little enthusiasm among the Latino community. So much for the “Ola Latina” (that’s Latin Wave in Spanish).

Trump’s victory saves the Supreme Court for tilting sharply to the left and signals to dead beat allies that the United States is no longer going to provide cost free defense assistance. I think those will be two of the significant changes we will see under President Trump.

So, fire away with your thoughts:

Comments

[ked]

I've seen the vote differential being measured around 2.5 mil (w/ not all state's numbers yet official). This was written up in the NYT (suspect source, I know / who isn't?). What's your source for the 1.3 mil figure?

I wouldn't be so sure Trump will keep the SCOTUS from doing much of anything but centralizing power... power is intoxicating & I think he likes that drink. I also think people (of all stripes) are over-sensitive to cultural aspects of SC decisions and overlook the power-centralizing consequence of the Federalist Society's judicial philosophy. He may throw one selection to the Christianist / anti women's right wing of his base.
We may also find defense spending to be more a real-time reward & punishment tool of the Office of the President than a means of implementing shifts in long-term policy.

I think it's interesting that there are those calling for Electors to vote for the good of the nation rather than for who won the vote in their state... via the argument that it is a sacred constitutional responsibility to do so, understood as such our nation's Founders in perilous times.

[DSource]

The news article below is maddening. It isn't enough that this Loafer-in-Chief doesn't realize he was elected because of Affirmative Action-esque political virtue-signaling, but then has the audacity to start blaming his laziness and incompetence on racism by whites. This crap is not new to me, I've worked in government in Washington, D.C. and P.G. County. When I tell family members I had GS-15's come up and ask me, "What do [sic] expenditure [sic] mean?", they think I'm exaggerating. I'm not. The last 8 years I marveled at just how dominating an emotion that virtue-signaling is. Apparently it trumps the future of your kids and your country. It's sort of like the EU official whose daughter was recently raped and murdered by the 17-year old refugee and her parents used her funeral to raise donations for refugee causes. How virtuous. /sarcasm

Anyway, here's the story from the U.K. Daily Mail:

I 'absolutely' suffered racism in office, says Obama: Some Americans' 'primary concern about me has been that I seem foreign'

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4014260/I-absolutely-suffered-racism-office-says-Obama.html

-President Barack Obama says the color of his skin has 'absolutely' contributed to white Americans' negative perceptions of his time in office

-'I think there's a reason why attitudes about my presidency among whites in Northern states are very different from whites in Southern states,' he said

-

[b]

"provide cost free defense assistance"

The U.S. has never done that. If you think Europe/NATO - NATO defends against a threat that would not exist without it. It is a racket for the U.S. defense industry. Likewise in South Korea and Japan.

[turcopolier]

b

"NATO defends against a threat that would not exist without it." I would agree with that since the fall of the USSR but not before. having inhabited the NATO world I know that it was entirely a defensive alliance without the capability or plans to do otherwise. OTOH the sheer mass of GSFG and the other WP forces argues for something more than a defensive intent on their part. pl

[crf]

The national election results at the congressional district level would be interesting to see. I can't find the data for this (yet).

This would allow us to answer the question of what the election result would have been if Maine/Nebraska electoral college delegate rules were used nationwide.

Breaking down each of the districts might also be interesting to see what effect gerrymandering could have on the election, if it were run under Maine/Nebraska rules.

I suspect strongly that Trump would still have beaten Clinton in that case, and that gerrymandering (to the degree reasonable people might suggest exists) played little part. Clinton's support is too concentrated in its city enclaves.

[Nancy K]

I think you will find that many Americans will feel as negatively towards the grifter-in-chief as you feel for President Obama.

[turcopolier]

Nancy K

"grifter-in-chief" That is merely an ad hominem attack for which you have no evidence. Mere name calling. pl

[turcopolier]

All

In 2012 there were 10 million votes cast in California. In 2016 there were 8 million votes cast but HC won the state by almost 3 million votes. HC's margin of victory nationwide in the non-existent popular vote was 1.3 million votes. IOW Mike Barnicle, an obvious traditional New England liberal was right this AM on MJ when he remarked that the Democrats truly are a "coastal party." pl

[Lemur]

Yeah places like the Conservative Treehouse predicted the Monster Vote (virginal voters) for Trump. In their self-debriefing after the election, they admitted they were half right and half wrong.

https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2016/11/10/post-election-night-data-did-the-monster-vote-show-up/

The monster vote showed up only in particular areas, but they were the vital swing states and the blue states Trump flipped. Michael Tracey put it best when he pointed out that Trump's brand of Nationalist new rightism lost him votes in sure fire red states in exchange for voters in swing and blue states that would otherwise react with hostility to a market fundamentalist Bible thumper like Ted Cruz.

Trump's brilliance was that he turned out the right people to vote in the right places. What's the point of getting an extra 500 thousand votes from evangelicals in Alabama, which you will win regardless, instead of 500,000 socially moderate white Reagan democrats in Ohio or Penn? Now the dems are whining they got beaten playing by the rules of a game both sides agreed to beforehand. Domain specificity escapes the intellectual yet idiot class, as Taleb would say. Had Trump needed to win the popular vote, he probably would have worked out a way to do it. We know now Kushner's firm was generating data that told Trump exactly where he needed to be, and which demographics to target based upon winning electoral seats.

Thanks to liberal and Hispanic population concentration in their 'thriving' coastal centres (https://mpcdot.com/forums/topic/3519-recommended-images-for-the-concerned-citizen/page__st__1960#entry307688), the Democrat plan for an urban, Hart Celler, 'coalition of the fringe' hegemony over the rest of America has run up against a structural obstacle. Hopefully Trump will deliver an economically centrist, pro-worker nationalist capitalism which permanently divorces the white working class from the democrats, who have doubled down on their championing of the minority coalition against the white 'other'. That would deliver an enduring Republican advantage for decades, breathing space for the Historic American Nation to start growing again through birthrates and the suppression of immigration from the global south. The USA is now clearly in post-technocratic tribal struggle. Sanders was attacked as a white supremacist ('The Unconventional Fascism of Bernie Sanders') by the dems for merely suggesting his party should talk to whites on their own terms, and not in anti-white terms. Trump of course is not 'pro-white' in some dog whistle white nationalist sense that his enemies like to imagine - he was simply not anti-white after eight years of leftist demonization. That's why white districts in Ohio who voted TWICE for Obama plumbed for Trump.

Another democrat weakness was that the fufu effect did not replace the 'first black president' effect. Blacks sunk back into apathy this election without the personal inducement of a black man to vote for. Women didn't fill that gap. The majority of white women voted for Trump. Hispanics were not motivated to vote against Trump anymore than they would another GoP candidate despite the best efforts of Univision.

[Hood Canal Gardner]

Larry, does this fit here:

If Trump wants to stoke the hell out of serious good paying job numbers pronto, Trump is going to have to put his balls on the Buy America Act/Amendments re DOD equipment/internals, ordinance, software & retrofits and make it happen. The MIC bigs have been getting pass for way too long especially on black system components.

[Lemur]

The Supreme Court is where the checks and balances of the US governance structure resolve themselves. Centralization is inherent to its function. It's the major weakness of 'higher law' polities. There's no structural solution to the liberalism's power regression problem. Whoever has the power to decide what constitutes law (Hart's Rule of Recognition) has an advantage no set of checks and balances can properly address. Hence why the founder's drew heavily from Plato's aristocratic ethos in The Republic. I would argue what ultimately secured a viable, free, and prosperous Republic in the minds of the founders was a virtuous elite. Since America replaced Republicanism with managerialism (the idea society is a bunch of inputs and outputs elites can manipulate at will for their own ends), the organic morality of your politics collapsed leaving only the legacy brute force of constitutional prohibitions that can be subverted by an amoral political class.

And the founding father's didn't intend the electoral college to be a veto on the Overton window moving right btw. Those people are calling for a constitutional coup on the basis Trump obliquely challenges their core assumptions in the way basic bitch GOP 'conservatives' do not (who merely trail the Democrat party by a decade or less and function more as a foil than 'opposition'). Such a move would precipitate the disintegration of the union.

[JohnsonR]

"I would agree with that since the fall of the USSR but not before. having inhabited the NATO world I know that it was entirely a defensive alliance without the capability or plans to do otherwise."

Kissinger, in 1999, identified the Kosovo war as a key turning point in that regard. He wrote:

"The rejection of long-range strategy explains how it was possible to slide into the Kosovo conflict without adequate consideration of its implications ... The transformation of the NATO alliance from a defensive military grouping to an institution prepared to impose its values by force ... undercut repeated American and allied assurances that Russia had nothing to fear from NATO expansion."

And Solzhenitsyn, in a 2007 interview with Spiegel, explained the profound impact of that war on the Russian view of the US and the countries of the US sphere in Europe, and how Russians responded to subsequent US policies:

"When I returned to Russia in 1994, the Western world and its states were practically being worshipped. Admittedly, this was caused not so much by real knowledge or a conscious choice, but by the natural disgust with the Bolshevik regime and its anti-Western propaganda.

This mood started changing with the cruel NATO bombings of Serbia. It’'s fair to say that all layers of Russian society were deeply and indelibly shocked by those bombings. The situation then became worse when NATO started to spread its influence and draw the ex-Soviet republics into its structure. This was especially painful in the case of Ukraine, a country whose closeness to Russia is defined by literally millions of family ties among our peoples, relatives living on different sides of the national border. At one fell stroke, these families could be torn apart by a new dividing line, the border of a military bloc.

So, the perception of the West as mostly a "knight of democracy" has been replaced with the disappointed belief that pragmatism, often cynical and selfish, lies at the core of Western policies. For many Russians it was a grave disillusion, a crushing of ideals."

[Nancy K]

Is not loafer-in-chief not also name calling?

[turcopolier]

NancyK

It is. D Source you are admonished not to make ad hominem attacks here. pl

[Keith Harbaugh]

Wikipedia shows a difference of 2.66M:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_2016#Results
65,515,369 Hillary
62,853,327 Trump
as of 2016-12-08

[David]

Sir,

I would go beyond that and say that the
Democratic elite want it that way. I think
that attitude is a combination of laziness and
feelings of cultural superiority.

Recall that Dean when he was DNC head had a "50 States Strategy". I remember former Clinton adviser Paul Begala's responded by saying
something like why should I care about some nose picker in Arkansas. Of course Dean's strategy, despite having some success, was scrapped after he left the post. To the Democratic elite, such people are not worth appealing to and in a few decades, they won't matter anyway which
also includes the laziness factor.

[Edward Amame]

What the numbers tell me.

The plan to depress Dem voter turnout was successful, with an able assist from the "liberal media."

http://shorensteincenter.org/news-coverage-2016-general-election/?platform=hootsuite

Voter suppression (of Dem) was also successful.

http://shorensteincenter.org/news-coverage-2016-general-election/?platform=hootsuite

And whatever this suggests to you.

http://heavy.com/news/2016/11/2016-exit-polls-did-hillaty-clinton-win-presidential-election-voter-fraud-donald-trump-lose-rigged/

Pence and Ryan think they got a mandate. They didn't. This election was a squeaker.

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/pence-heritage-foundation-regulatory-rollback-232286

http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-medicare-ryan-20161114-story.html

And one final thought. SCOTUS tilting "sharply to the left" under Clinton. All things considered, I'd think "moving closer to the center" is what you really should have written.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-12-15/supreme-court-sides-with-big-business-again-

[pj33]

A comment on Hillary's margin in California. California has become a one party - Democratic - state. The process began in earnest when the Republican Governor Pete Wilson tried to insure his popularity with an anti-immigrant message. That backfired big time, hurting all Republicans, except those in solidly conservative enclaves. Then in 2010, a proposition was passed to have open primaries where only the top two vote-getters proceed to the general. This generally means that two democrats contest the general and there is little of interest to bring Republicans to the polls in November. Were the national popular vote count to elect the President, Republicans in California would suddenly be energized again. Until then, you have to take the presidential vote total in California with a few large shakes of salt.

[VietnamVet]

LJ

I agree that Hillary Clinton lost due to the lack of enthusiasm and a lowered total vote count. In my case, it was due to her corruption and war mongering. But, in particular, the 2016 electoral victory was due to Rust Belt voters who previously voted for Barrack Obama and then switched to Donald Trump. This is “it’s the economy stupid” effect plus the lowering life expectancy of Middle America. Starting in the 1980s, any scheme that makes money for the connected was green-lighted no matter the consequences to the little people. Money migrated to either coast. This is where the headquarters are that outsourced the jobs and evaded paying taxes by offshoring wealth. Identity politics was a means of winning elections while shafting the working class. It worked until it didn’t work anymore. There is no way 35% of the population can be ignored in a democracy. It takes just another 15% to be in the majority. Democrats are suffering from cognitive dissidence. They can no longer can continue to take globalist corporate bribes and be a majority party. The present western neo-liberal-con reign can only continue if they dismantle democracy.

[TV]

"Grifter in chief?"
Hillary didn't win.

[steve]

It may mean SCOTUS won't tilt heavily to the left, but it also probably means it will tilt heavily to the right. Some pretty old justices now.

Steve

[turcopolier]

Keith harbaugh

Yes, well, a lot of the stuff on me in Wikipedia is wrong. pl

[Andy]

Larry,

The date of information on the Politico results you linked to is 11/22/2016. Basically, Politico stopped updating their site.

For current totals, the New York Times has results up through today which is pretty much close to what the final totals are going to be:

http://www.nytimes.com/elections/results/president

The difference in the popular vote stands at just over 2.6 million in Clinton's favor and could rise to 2.7 million as California's final ballots are finally tallied.

Speaking of California, the total votes cast was actually just over 14 million, and the advantage to Clinton was massive - a 4 1/4 million vote advantage.

[Dabbler]

Great comment. Unusually perceptive. It's sadthat virtue is rarely retained over time.

[Augustin L]

Massive vote suppression operations and vote fraud from Diebold types and other private black box machines. The reckoning will be terrible...