Count On Me
From a piece on the new book Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign:
"Mr. President, I'm sorry," she said, according to a Washington Post review of the book due out today.
The White House urged Mrs. Clinton to concede as Mr. Trump claimed battleground states--some by slim margins--because Mr. Obama wanted to avoid a messy recount.
They simply didn't want a messy recount? And because the White House didn't want that, Hillary complied?
I'm certain Hillary wouldn't have minded a messy recount if she thought it could have made a difference. Same for the White House. If they urged her to concede, it's because it was over.
Let's recall the margin of Trump's victory. Electorally, he won handily. The three surprise states that put Trump over the top were Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. He could have lost any two of those (assuming no faithless electors) and still taken the Presidency.
He won Michigan by over 10,000 votes. He won Wisconsin by over 20,000. He won Pennsylvania by over 40,000. Close elections, but not really recount close.
Reminds me of the 1960 election, which some Republicans are still whining about. The popular vote was close, but not the Electoral College. Even if Chicago chicanery handed Illinois to Kennedy, that state alone wouldn't have swung the election.
posted by LAGuy @ 11:18 AM
4 Comments:
Were Florida and Ohio mere bygones? I wouldn't have thought so.
I agree about the 1960 election. "Daley bragged that Nixon's victory was sitting at the bottom of Lake Michigan" -- a great line, often repeated, but as you said even if Illinois had gone for Nixon he would still have lost.
There is a variation of the 1960 complaint that take this into account: it claims that voting irregularities in Illinois and Texas, together, were responsible for JFK's victory. The math is correct (if both of these large states had switched to Nixon, he would have won). But Texas was a solid Southern Democrat state for a century: from Reconstruction to 1960, the only times it voted Republican were 1928 (because Al Smith was Catholic) and 1952 and 1956 (for Eisenhower). In 1960, the most powerful Texan in the nation was on the Democratic ticket. Because of Kennedy's liberalism, it was still close -- JFK/LBJ won the state by 2.00% -- but even though that's "close", it's not close enough for ballot stuffing to be a plausible culprit.
Do you pay ColumbusGuy to miss the point, or does it just come natural?
Why, Anonymous, what do we pay you for? Though come to think of it the checks haven't cleared . . .
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