2024 Election Roundup: Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics

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Back in 1907, Mark Twain first used in print the now-famous phrase, but was careful not to take credit for coining it. He attributed it to former British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli as he was talking about his opponents' use of statistics to make a point. 

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Figures often beguile me, particularly when I have the arranging of them myself; in which case the remark attributed to Disraeli would often apply with justice and force: 'There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.'

As we continue to pour through all of the exit polling and hard data from Election 2024, measuring the width, depth, and left-wing carnage in the wake of the red tsunami that took place Tuesday night, there are some big takeaways and projections to make...provided that President-Elect Donald Trump and the incoming 119th Congress deliver on their promise to fix things in the country a vast majority of Americans care about. But the biggest among them is now objectively true: 2020 was a mirage. It was the political equivalent of Dallas, the 80s soap opera, during their strike-plagued replacement actor season. The country is not a 50/50 country. It's a center-right country. Just how much so and whether it continues to move to the right remains to be seen. 

Donald Trump not only thumped Kamala Harris in the Electoral College, earning 312 votes, he won the popular vote by close to five million once everything is counted. There are still a third of California votes to be counted, many in Republican-leaning areas of the state, as well as many pockets of rural Nevada and Arizona. For those who like visuals, here is a map of reported counties on Tuesday night when the election was called. These are counties and/or townships compared to where they were on Election night, 2020. A red, right-pointing arrow shows stronger Republican margins, blue left-pointing arrows show that area moved more Democratic. 

That's what a wave looks like. The other big takeaway? Regime media now is as broken and untrusted as the federal health agencies became after the COVID pandemic and resulting lockdown and school closures. Once the truth was revealed that there was no science behind the COVID policy, trust in the alphabet agencies - FDA, NIH, HHS, and CDC, evaporated. That trust may not be restored for decades. Regime media now is viewed by most of the country in the same low regard. 

In the wake of the Republican wipeout of Tuesday night, the lies from regime media can be categorized as those lies that they're telling themselves on the airwaves to keep from facing the truth that they blew it and are way out of touch with the American people. Those types of lies are quite comical to those of us on the right. Here are a few examples: 

Joe Scarborough on MSNBC's Morning Joe kicked off Wednesday's wall-to-wall wake by claiming he's been against men playing in women's sports all along, trying to maintain he's always been the voice of moderation for the Democratic Party. 

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Of course, Joe Scarborough being the voice of reason on Morning Joe is a lie, but one that is laughable because of the availability of tape showing Joe Scarborough days before the election. 

Ben Rhodes, one of the architects of Barack Obama's abjectly failed foreign policy in the Middle East, appeared on MSNBC the day after, and naturally spoke on behalf of what he views as the majoritarian viewpoint. 

Of course, half the country doesn't feel that way. More than half the country is thanking God that democracy actually works. Those people that Rhodes represents are those that want to regulate speech, want to strip Elon Musk of his ownership of X and deported, want punitive damages to entities and people they determine to be disinformation. It's just a lie that Americans have lost faith in the system. 

And speaking of faith, want to see a statistic that will blow your socks off? Hispanics, male and female, voted almost 50/50 in this election. Harris held a small edge, but nowhere near the advantages Barack Obama and Joe Biden had in previous election cycles. And of those Hispanics who came out to vote, exit polling asked them about their faith. 

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Kamala Harris killed it with Latino atheists and/or agnostics. Those with a professed Christian or Catholic faith went for Trump in a big way. And that's just a microcosm that mirrors the entire electorate. In fact, as soon as Donald Trump finished his acceptance speech in West Palm Beach Tuesday night, in the foyer of the arena as people filed out into the early morning hours of Wednesday, this spontaneously happened. 

It's just a lie how much Rhodes is generalizing where he thinks Americans are. Here's former Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill choking back the tears on the MSNBC set with Nicolle Wallace Wednesday afternoon. 

People don't realize how hard it is for Kamala, because it hasn't been hard for her, Senator McCaskill claims. Well, I live in California. It's a Democratic state. In the time of Harris' rise to power here, the state was only a 60-40 Democratic state. Every lever of power in state government and the legislature is controlled by Democrats, including supermajorities in both chambers. It's truly a one-party state. Kamala Harris became district attorney because she was former Assembly Speaker and former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown's paramour. Period. He opened doors for her and threw his weight around in California Democratic circles to clear the field for her. Once she parlayed that to get the nomination for the Democratic Party for Attorney General, she won a narrow contest statewide. She won by dominating, but underperforming, in Los Angeles County and by carrying the Bay Area. The rest of the state went for her Republican opponent, Steve Cooley. She has underperformed at every stage of her political life, and it's not because life is hard on her. It's because she's always been a very bad campaigner. McCaskill's tears aside, it's just not tough stuff for a Democrat to get elected to offices in California. It's just not. 

Now we get to the damned lies. These are lies Democrats, in regime media or public office, are telling to cover up why the election was lost and deflect away from their credibility now in tatters. Here's Rep. Maxine Waters on News Nation with Chris Cuomo.

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She's still calling 51% of the country that voted for Donald Trump racist. They're not. That's an egregious lie. If you look at the coalition of voters that made up Donald Trump's 50.9%, it's the most racially-diverse Republican electorate in history. 

25% of Trump's base were men and women of color. Waters' copium is not only a lie, but it continues to offend those former Democrats-turned-Trump voters that this type of rhetoric helped drive away in the first place. 

Sara Haines on the black-clad set of The View Wednesday offered up the Scooby Doo villain lie. 

"I would have gotten away with it if it weren't for you meddlesome kids...and that dog..or squirrel." 

Haines claims Harris would have won if it hadn't been for social media. The solution? We need to regulate it into submission. I believe the 1st Amendment would like to have a moment. It's a lie. Again, Harris lost because she was a horrible candidate and a worse communicator with no discernible vision or coherent agenda. But for all this talk about how Trump Hitler and the Republican Party Brown Shirts are going to dictator this and that, it's the left that are openly pining for stomping on the Constitution to preserve their last grasp at power. 

What utter nonsense by Rachel Maddow. So when a year goes by and Democratic reporters haven't been stacked up like cordwood or disappeared in the middle of the night, who's going to go back to Maddow and ask her to apologize for gaslighting everybody hysterically?

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Van Jones has been entertaining at times during this cycle because he speaks from his heart. Now his heart is as left-wing as they come, but he's at least genuine with his feelings. This, however, is just a preposterous lie. Only Republicans have called Trump Hitler and fascist? Seriously? Come on, man



This is the most disappointing of the post-electoral damned lies told by regime media. CBS' John Dickerson, otherwise the most rational voice on the Tiffany Networks' news team, appeared on Stephen Colbert's Late Show and claimed Trump is now boundless by norms associated with the presidency. That's just nonsense, and I have to believe deep down underneath the emotion, he knows that's nonsense. The Constitution remains as strong as ever. The Judicial branch is just as robust as it's ever been, specifically because a Republican majority of originalists are on the bench. And if Donald Trump steps out of line, this Court will have no qualms about stepping in. If Donald Trump overreaches his authority and ushers in a Constitutional crisis, there are plenty of voices within the Republican Senatorial Conference that would rise to the challenge and uphold the Constitution over party preference. Talk like this is not just untrue, it's reckless and dangerous. 

A couple of closing pieces of data to chew on taking you into a celebratory weekend. Remember the Jewish vote that wasn't going to budge very much, even though Kamala Harris was the most hostile to Israel candidate for president this country has produced in generations? In Pennsylvania, here's how Tuesday shook out with Jewish-Americans.

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Harris carried Jews...by 7. By comparison, Joe Biden won the Jewish vote in 2020 nationally by 38. I guess playing Footsie with the antisemitic wing of her Democratic base wasn't the right play. Neither was bypassing Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro for the number two job. 

Now we wrap things up with the doom loop out there on the horizon for the Democratic Party. Donald trump swept the swing states. He won both the Sun Belt and the Rust Belt states. Tuesday was a rout. But lost in all of this is the continuing migration of people in this country from blue states to red states. If the trends in the first half of this decade continue for the second half, by the time we get to the Census in 2030, and the resulting Congressional reapportionment, here is what a proposed generic Electoral College map could look like in 2032. Again, this is one for a non-controversial election. Whoever the Republican nominee wins states they should win, the Democrat wins the states they should, which include the Blue wall of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. 

Even with nothing unusual, the Electoral College map is headed to a place where Democrats can't win without stealing multiple red states. Continuing to support men competing in women's sports, abortion on demand up to the point of delivery, amnesty for tens of millions of illegal aliens, all these policies that cut 80/20 against Democrats are issues that the left embraces to their electoral peril. 

As of now, there's not a lot of indications that the Democrats have learned this lesson. Maybe a few years in the wilderness will convince them to shed their progressive base and make a play for the center of the country again. I'm all for getting that trek underway. 

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Ed Morrissey 10:00 PM | December 10, 2024
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David Strom 4:40 PM | December 10, 2024
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