Irrefutable Point II: Trump Won the Bellwether States

Topic: Elections

In yesterday’s article, I explained to you why the national bellwether counties are still relevant indicators of a candidate’s strength with working class voters, who have decided the fate of national elections for many decades.  That won’t stop Trump haters and fraud defenders from dismissing the expiration of all but one national bellwether county in the same election because of “COVID.”

The second irrefutable point regarding the anomalous 2020 election finds its significance in the very foundation of our national elections. The writers of the Constitution conceived of the Electoral College because they wanted to encourage the formation of political coalitions, rather than having Virginia (the California, in terms of prominence, of their day and once dubbed “the birthplace of Presidents”) dominate the national popular vote.

The media spent the entirety of Trump’s term convincing the electorate that he was losing his working class base (which he would need to maintain to win re-election), moderate Republicans, suburban women, and minorities. In other words, he was portrayed as a weak candidate on his way to a defeat on par with those suffered by George H.W. Bush or Bob Dole in the 1990s. 

Despite the dishonest predictions of doomsayers, Trump managed to carry Iowa and Ohio in landslides, Florida by a larger margin than in 2016, and North Carolina (with the latter two containing substantial election fraud).  Ohio and Florida are well-known national bellwethers, with Ohio failing to predict the winner only twice since 1896 (in 1944 and 1960, with the latter being a controversial Kennedy win).

I expanded my research to look for larger combinations, because I believe, just as I indicated in my column yesterday with regard to counties, that states eventually can lose bellwether status. Ohio appears to be on the way, with the right moving in an economic nationalist trajectory, and the left on the way to socialism, to becoming a heavy GOP state. I believe with fair elections, Pennsylvania will be much more predictive nationally. 

I found that when North Carolina, Florida, Ohio, and Iowa all fall to the same candidate, they have aligned with the winner in every such instance since 1896, regardless of party – a total of 13 occasions.   As such, Donald Trump became the first candidate to carry all four and “lose” an election in over 124 years.

When aligned together, those states represent a formidable “poker hand.”  Winning all four suggests dominant traction with working class voters, strong performance with standard partisans, and sufficient performance with minorities and independents. All four states present a strong cross section of the American electorate – black, white, Hispanic, Asian, urban, suburban, rural, union, white collar, blue collar, college educated (or not), military, and everything in between. 

Opponents of this theory will counter with other combinations of states that suggested a Hillary Clinton win in 2016, but the tipping point states, and not coincidentally, the heart of the Trump coalition, are working class states that all formed together to show the incumbent with a dominant hand that was spoiled by the corruption in three key working class states, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.

Ask the skeptics in your life if they believe the illogical expiration an indicator that predates the formation of Major League Baseball or the Spanish American War warrants a further investigation into the beliefs and claims espoused by a strong majority of Americans, almost a year-and-a-half after the 2020 election. 

SK