That’s what the Trump supporters are saying. Again, his supporters are irrelevant. Every candidate has their core supporters. What matters are the majority, not the minority. And among the majority, what matters is the swing. So we’re talking about a potential ten percent in the middle and/or on the fence, not the ten percent on the extreme right end of the Trump spectrum.
Remember, he lost. The only reason he’s POTUS is because of an outdated technicality, not because he convinced a majority of Americans that he’s the better person for the job. There never was a “red wave.” When you cheat, it isn’t a “wave.”
Trump voters matter.
Core supporters do not. As I said, every election generates 10-15% on the extreme right and left. They cancel each other out and are irrelevant. All elections come down to the center and from the center the swing. Move the swing/center and you win, usually.
What happened in 2016 was a statistical anomaly. Nate Silver gave the chances of what happened happening only
10.5%. In his methodology, that’s essentially “no way in hell.” It all hinged on a less than 1% vote differential. That is so statistically insignificant that it literally could be achieved if a candidate were to sneeze at the wrong time (thus triggering fears of sickness/death).
This country has a very strange pyschology when it comes to “winning” or “losing.” It is always binary. If you don’t come home with the trophy, then nothing you did during the game matters. That’s just immature, two-dimensional nonsense. It’s playing checkers at a chess match. Most American brains can’t seem to process the idea that someone can win and lose at the same time (or lose and win at the same time). It just doesn’t compute for some bizarre reason, but only when it comes to the concept of a competition.
Stranger still, however, is that the one exception to that rule of “whoever holds the trophy is the winner” is when someone cheats. And that’s what happened here. Trump cheated. When you put it in those terms, immediately people snap to attention. That’s precisely what Trump did. He immediately went on the defensive to insist he didn’t cheat, in spite of the revealing fact that, no one was really accusing him of cheating.
He was the one to interpret “collusion” with him cheating.
We were saying his actions were treasonous and all he heard was “you cheated.” Because, of course, he was guilty; he cheated. He knows this and that’s why it’s so revealing. But he also knows that most bullies—aka, “republicans”—can’t stand cheaters (regardless of whether or not they have ever been guilty of cheating themselves), so that is what he focused on, instead of the far more serious problem (to us, the bullied), which was criminal activity.
It’s part and parcel to their two-dimensional thinking.
