Topic: Liberal Fascism
Not only is Senator Elizabeth Warren (Bolshevik, MA) dumb—she thinks that you and I are dumb, too.
The other day Princess Pocahontas was ranting on the floor of the Senate, her subject being the recently concluded election and her argument being that the Democrats actually won. She noted, first, that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in the presidential contest. Now of course that’s true as far as it goes, which really isn’t very far. As Senator Warren may know, a US presidential election isn’t about the popular vote. It’s about the electoral vote and presidential candidates campaign accordingly. In 2016 both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump pursued strategies designed to get them over that magic number, 270 electoral votes. Broadly speaking, such strategies are formulated by dividing states into three categories: sure things, battlegrounds and goners. Trump, for example, categorized Indiana as a sure thing, Pennsylvania as a battleground and California as a goner. Thus the Hoosier State got minimal attention, the Golden State got none but the Keystone State got plenty. This proved to be a winning strategy: Trump raked in his sure-thing states and prevailed in enough battleground states to carry him to victory.
If he’d bothered to campaign in California, Trump would probably have managed to improve his performance there. But what was the point of that? Additional votes from California would have done nothing to boost his all-important electoral vote total. And it was this strategic decision, not the popular appeal of the Democratic Party, that led to Clinton’s meaningless popular vote victory. If US presidential elections were decided by a straight popular vote, Donald Trump would have spent significant time in populous blue states like California. But they aren’t, so he didn’t, rendering Warren’s claims hollow and baseless.
But it gets worse. In the same speech Warren pointed to the popular vote totals in the 2016 Senate elections—more Democratic than Republican—as further evidence that the former actually won. If her reasoning at the presidential level is dubious, here it becomes plain idiotic.
As Senator Warren may recall, in the US Senate all the states are treated equally. Both diminutive Delaware and colossal California have two senators. Moreover, in any given election year one-third of the Senate (33 or 34 seats) is up for election. Thus the popular vote totals in Senate elections are dependent on the actual states in which Senate elections are taking place. In 2016, as it happened, Senate elections occurred in California, Illinois and New York, all populous blue states in which the Democratic candidate was a sure thing. In addition, there were Senate elections in a couple of midsized blue states where again the Democrat was a sure thing: Oregon and Washington. The three largest states that went red at the Senate level were Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Thus the configuration of the 2016 Senate election, not Warren’s claimed popular preference for the Democratic Party, accounts for the popular vote outcome.
Oh, and the Senator neglected to mention that in the House elections, which covered every state, the GOP outpolled the Dems by more than 3 million votes.
Some in the media claim that Elizabeth Warren is the bright and shining star of the Democratic Party: a dauntless populist advocate for everyday Americans, etc. and so forth. But on the basis of her election analysis I’d have to assess her as both stupid and malicious: the former because she apparently thought that no one would nail her lies and distortions, the latter because her lies betray her contempt for those everyday Americans she claims to champion. In short, she’s an insufferable twerp: Exhibit A for the proposition that Donald Trump is fortunate in his enemies, indeed.
