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There are a lot of people who dislike Trump. Biden’s victory is unlikely, but not implausible.
A path to victory? Possible. A path to the most votes ever in history again?
Well, like I said. I'd have questions.
Population keeps increasing. It would not be at all surprising if the election winner got the most votes in history.
With a TFR of 1.786, our population of citizens is not increasing. On the other hand...
Like I said... questions.
I encourage you to state your thesis more clearly.
The number of US citizens has been steadily increasing. I doubt I need to find a citation for that. US fertility is below replacement, but net positive (legal) immigration combined with long lifespans and a demographic bulge have led to the total citizen population increasing.
If turnout remains constant, then, we would expect every election to set a new record for votes cast for a presidential candidate.
(I'm aware that turnout does not remain constant, but 2020 was a high-turnout election and I expect 2024 to be as well.)
You linked a graph indicating that illegal immigration has spiked, which may well be true, but illegal immigrants by definition can't vote and don't factor into the figure we're discussing. You might argue large-scale illegal voting, but if so that seems like it would require its own evidence, not merely the existence of a significant illegal population.
In general what I'd like to ask you to do is to not bother darkly hinting at shadowy conspiracies, but rather state your questions clearly and unambiguously. The Motte isn't going to kick you out for having weird or unpopular takes. Nor do you have to be certain of something to say, "Here's what I suspect to be the case".
But repeating 'questions'? What's the point of that?
Say what they are. Be clear. Be right or be wrong, I don't care, but be clear.
Illegals can’t legally vote. That doesn’t mean they don’t vote. If you design a system that doesn’t validate legal status, then you will get illegals voting— especially if one party is adamantly for them and the other adamantly against them.
Non-citizen voting is a crime that would be easy to catch if it was happening on a large scale, that Republican governors and secretaries of state have the tools and an incentive to catch, and which nevertheless you don't see large numbers of people getting caught for.
There have been a few serious attempts to investigate non-citizen voting, and they generally catch a low-double figure number of illegal votes per state.
I've mentioned this before (because I never tire of referencing my history nerd reading), but Robert Caro's description of the Texas senatorial election in 1948 was illuminating.
Short version is that both parties trucked large numbers of illegals across the border to vote. This was known. Even relatively honest politicians knew that that's how things worked in Texas and if they didn't get involved directly and kept it arms-length enough to have plausible deniability, they still knew.
Presumably Texas was not the only state in which this happened (it's just the state Caro was interested in because he was researching Lyndon Johnson).
Could such a thing happen today? It would be more difficult, what with more surveillance, more information systems, more people with phones, more data analysis, etc. I doubt you could have party officials literally trucking hundreds of illegals across the border and herding them through polls without someone noticing. But would it be impossible for some operatives to plan and execute an operation large enough to influence a tight election? With enough plausible deniability that if caught, they could be disavowed by whoever they were benefiting? No, I don't think it's impossible. There are still a lot of remote counties without a lot of monitoring.
I am not saying this is actually happening (and I doubt it is, at least on a large scale), but I wouldn't dismiss concerns about illegal voting, even if they are frequently exaggerated for political purposes. The fact that it could be done means we should take serious precautions against it.
The point I am making is not about which forms of voter fraud could be done - we all agree that it is easy for a non-citizen to register and vote in most states. The argument I was making is that non-citizen voting (unlike certain other forms of voter fraud, like filling in your wife's postal vote) is easy to catch if anyone wants to catch it. For example, the fraud in Texas in 1948 was caught, but the authorities declined to prosecute because they were fine with that kind of thing. Attitudes to democracy in America were different then - Illinois practiced blatant ballot-rigging (actual ballot-rigging, in that the published vote counts did not match the votes cast) - again on a bipartisan basis and as an open secret - into the 1960's.
The claim I am making is that: Premise 1) If large numbers of non-citizens were voting, this would be easy to detect. Premise 2) In the current year, there are numerous red state officials with the means, opportunity and motive to investigate non-citizen voting. Some actually have done. Premise 3) We don't detect large numbers of non-citizens voting, even when red state officials go looking for it. Conclusion: There are not, in fact, large numbers of non-citizens voting in American elections.
Bussing illegals into Texas in 1948 is a case where 2 and 3 didn't apply - nobody bothered to investigate, and the perps were caught (but not punished) anyway. In the current year, that isn't happening, and if it was the perps would be punished.
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