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Notes -
Popular vote counts for Democrat candidates since 2008, per Wikipedia:
What is the steelman for why I shouldn't take Biden's anomalously high vote count in 2020 as evidence of fraud? I never looked too closely into the details of the 2020 fraud claims, and I'm sure that this issue has already been discussed at length previously, but it seems like it would be reasonable to revisit that discussion in light of Harris's vote count dropping back to be more in line with the historical average. (The votes are still being counted, but we can safely assume that her total vote count won't go too much higher than 70 million. Biden got over 10 million votes more than that.)
Trump's vote total of 74,223,975 in 2020 was also elevated compared to what would historically be expected of a Republican candidate, but it seems less anomalous in light of the 71,352,277 votes he's received so far this year. Whereas Harris has drastically unperformed Biden while simultaneously performing more in line with other Democrat candidates.
It's not exactly a formal statistical analysis, but this does somewhat increase my credence that there was substantial fraud in 2020. It just doesn't pass the smell test that there were ~15 million people who were that excited to vote for Biden, who had largely never voted Democrat before, and then they all just failed to materialize again in 2024.
I firmly believe the 2020 elections were the least secure ever and definitely opened opportunities for voter fraud, while 2024 has probably been one of the most secure elections due to the amount of R oversight funded by the Republican party and coordinated with modern R leadership.
That being said, 2020 was also a referendum on Trump and COVID response - something that was largely unpopular in how it was handled and was the worst administrative goof of Trump's previous tenure as president by far. On top of that, the multiple investigations, the constant drama and controversies of the Trump cabinet (and Trump himself) heavily motivated voters, including old school conservatives, to buck the party line in a hope old Joe would bring some semblance of 'normalcy' to the presidency.
So, the larger question which will never be answered is how many votes were potentially voter fraud, and how many were motivated by unpopular administrative actions.
The media had also successfully painted Trump's handling of COVID as inept, enough so that when Trump said the vaccine was likely to be out before the end of the year that was treated as just another lie.
In reality Operation Warp Speed did succeed, and it was only via shenanigans that vaccine approvals were delayed until after the election.
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