As if we needed even more evidence that the system has been fractured like a giant egg having fallen off a wall, both major candidates in the November 8 elections are demonstrating bad form in the aftermath.
Donald Trump is a poor winner. Hillary Clinton is a sore loser.
If third graders exhibit this behavior they are sent to the back of the classroom for a time out. And deservedly so.
Hillary Clinton -
SIDEBAR
I Tweeted over the weekend
The larger the popular vote margin for @HillaryClinton, the more embarrassing to the campaign strategists who so mismanaged her time.
END SIDEBAR
- is the only major political figure in the nation would could possibly have lost to Donald Trump.
Green Party candidate Jill Stein has launched a fundraising appeal - which has produced over $6 million on line - to conduct recounts in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. In Wisconsin, Stein is not challenging for first or second or even third. She finished in fourth place with a whopping 1.1 percent of the approximately 2.9 million votes cast there.
Trump ended up with 1,409,167 votes in Wisconsin (47.9%) to Clinton's 1,382,210 votes (46.9%). That is a difference of 26,947 votes.
Recounts, according to an article on the fivethirtyeight.com website, "typically don't swing enough votes to change the winner."
Vox.com, a left-leaning website cited one of the computer scientists who suggested that an early analysis pointed to vote manipulation, recanting his view saying:
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"Were this year's deviations from pre-election polls the results of a cyberattack? Probably not. I believe the most likely explanation is that the polls were systematically wrong."
Yeah. Well. Maybe a little time out in the back of the classroom might help your critical thinking skills.
In a remarkable example of being in denial of the results - and trying to obscure that denial, the general counsel of her campaign, Marc Elias, said they are "participating" in Jill Stein's scam.
Elias said that if there is a recount, the legal rights of the Clinton campaign needed to be protected. But fivethirtyeight.com quoted Elias as saying:
"the number of votes separating Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in the closest of these states - Michigan - well exceeds the largest margin ever overcome in a recount."
Please join the computer guy in the back of the classroom.
On the other side of the ballot, Donald Trump is quickly eroding whatever modicum of forbearance many Americans - even those of us who didn't vote for him - have been willing to grant.
Rather than being a gracious winner [pausing for coffee to shoot out of 40,000 nostrils] Trump Tweeted his own version of vote manipulation:
"In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally"
Only American citizens are allowed to vote in federal elections. Green card holders do not have that right.
Trump won in the only arithmetic that matters, but he cannot abide any hint of a loss so he decided to charge up the old Twitter machine and make a fool of himself.
Elections, as we've said dozens of times, are conducted on county-by-county basis. According to the Census Bureau
The United States has 3,007 counties and 137 county equivalents for a total of 3,144 counties and county equivalents. The number of counties per state ranges from the 3 counties of Delaware to the 254 counties of Texas.
I live in a "county equivalent," Alexandria, Virginia. We have a city police department and a county sheriff's department, but the city council is the only legislative body and the Mayor is the only executive.
Allowing three million (to pick a number out of a hat) voters to have illegally participated would have required the collaboration or at least malfeasance to allow about 1,000 illegal voters in each of the 3,000+ counties to cast votes.
Did SOME people vote who were not supposed to? I guarantee it. Was it more than 2.2 million? Not a chance.
In addition to the arithmetic. If more than 2 million people illegally voted for Hillary, they were some pretty sophisticated voters.
They had to have voted for Hillary then crossed to the other side of the ballot to vote Republican for Governors, State House and State Senate seats, for U.S. Congress, and for U.S. Senate. Republicans picked up seats (or lost fewer than projected) in each of those categories.
Donald. Drag up a chair and join those other two gentlemen.
On the Secret Decoder Ring today: Links to the Vox, the fivethirtyeight, and the Fox News report on Trump's claim.
The Mullfoto is of the best Thanksgiving present anyone could ever get.
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