Steal 2.0 and why it seemed so tiny

Compared to 2020, Steal 2.0 hardly affected the outcome of the presidential election. What my thoughts are on this, what other people think about it, and where we go from here are all topics to be discussed in this post. 

It appears, first, that I won't have to wait several weeks for election results. Despite some major foot-dragging by slowpokes Nevada and Arizona, poll-watching outlets like Decision Desk HQ have declared Donald Trump the election winner. Even Fox, the New York Times, and AP, despite not having finalized the results for Nevada and Arizona, still show an electoral-vote tally of 295-226 in favor of Trump and have declared the race for him. Meanwhile, Decision Desk HQ (et al.) has the final tally at 312-226 in favor of Trump because they decided to call it for Nevada and Arizona even though those two states continue to dawdle. Nevada has around 90-92% of its votes totaled. Arizona is at around 69-71% totaled. Why Arizona is taking so long is a mystery.

Cynics, however, think Arizona is taking so long because of sneaky Maricopa County, the huge, Dem-heavy county that contains Phoenix, which they claim is trying to spirit illegitimate votes into the count. Maybe this is true; maybe it's not. In Arizona, there's more riding on the count than just the presidency (which has already been decided): there's Kari Lake's Senate race. Now, Lake (who ran for governor against Katie Hobbs and bizarrely lost) seemed to be losing pretty badly when I checked a day or so ago; the three maps I have up currently say that Republican Lake is indeed losing to Democrat (Ruben) Gallego by almost 50,000 votes, but this article hopefully speculates that Lake still has a chance of winning. But even Decision Desk HQ is currently showing Lake behind by about 50,000 votes. I don't think she has much of a chance, and if Maricopa is doing a Steal 2.0 on her, she's got no hope of overcoming fraud. What reason is there to think the rest of the untallied votes are GOP-leaning? This does also leave us with the strange question of how Arizona as a whole could tilt for Trump, a Republican, while also tilting for Ruben Gallego, a Democrat. There's something schizophrenic going on.

Anyway, this year, the Steal may be more about Kari Lake than about Trump. As I'd noted before, the Heritage Foundation has a site with a state-by-state chart, plus rankings, to show which states have implemented anti-fraud measures (and to what degree), and which haven't (i.e., bottom-tier states, almost all blue). It's a disappointingly small number of states that actually care about election integrity, but it may have been enough to stanch most of the fraud in the presidential election if not in the down-ballot elections.

As for my thoughts on what this general lack (or feebleness) of fraud means, I wrote the following comment on Instapundit on Wednesday:

Trump's on track for the magic 312. I'll be damned: the poll-watchers I'd been seeing on YouTube have been right for weeks (hat tip to Gold Crown Politics, Red Eagle Politics, and On Point Politics).

And even if that means we didn't have as much in the way of shenanigans to deal with this time, (1) there's already proof of scattered 2024 shenanigans, and (2) there's no logical reason to apply this insight—that shenanigans were relatively minor—retroactively to 2020. I still think Biden's "81 million votes" were an utter sham, the 3 a.m. trucks were real, the faux-ballot printers were indeed doing their thing, etc. If we've swerved somewhat away from 2020's fraudulence, good. May we continue to swerve. But we're not out of the woods yet—not by a long shot. I hope the new administration comes down hard on election integrity. After freeing the J6ers, of course.

So that's my attitude in a nutshell. I've already covered some of the shenanigans obliquely mentioned in the above paragraph, so you don't have to go back too far into my archive to find the evidence. Here's what others theorize may have happened. We'll start with this graphic, which has been circulating over the past 48 hours:

The above image shows quite distinctly that Joe Biden benefitted from a suspiciously high number of votes, or "votes." There are theories, and there's evidence the above "votes" came from the dead, from illegals, from fake and suspicious ballots, etc. I've already gone over a lot of this, so I won't repeat it here. Kamala didn't benefit from a similar wave of fakery. One theory is that the Dems knew from the beginning that she was cooked, so why waste the effort? Here, gathered from Instapundit's generally over-60 commentariat, is a smattering of opinions and conjectures as to what might have happened:

1. Maybe there was no big steal to begin with, and maybe all it was was traditional fractional-percentage fraud that had an impact in a close election. [i.e., a rightie is saying there simply was no steal.]

2. The margin was too big, not because they would not cheat: the GOP changed laws and changed ENFORCEMENT. [True, but only for some states.]

3. The 2020 election steal was not a haphazard, decentralized conspiracy. Vote counting was simultaneously stopped at 10 PM in the swing states. The cabal calculated how many votes they needed to win. Ballot dumps were made early in the morning to tabulate Biden's 81 million votes. In 2024, 15 million votes disappeared. Trump should order the FBI to track down anyone, starting with Obama, who participated in this conspiracy. [serious accusation]

4. This time around, I think the Dems realized that their own candidate was a dumpster fire and backed off, recognizing that her administration would be a disaster that would cost them everything in 2026. Besides: out of power, they could keep the TDS gravy train and all its fundraising possibilities going for another four years, and that's too lucrative to pass up.

5. In Pennsylvania, Centre County voting officials tried to suspend vote-counting like many counties did last time (in order to ship in fake ballots). This is absolutely against state law, yet they tried to do it anyway. The GOP had their lawyers there threatening immediate legal action, and the count resumed. Just look in Lancaster County. Several days before the election, the DA went on record to announce that a Democrat-run group submitted 2,500 voter registration forms, of which 60 percent (of the ones they counted and investigated) were fake. This was a group sent out from Arizona that's run by Mark Kelly. And there were at least 5 other counties reporting the same problems. And that's just a few of the scams they've been running. The Democrats have been spending years and millions of dollars baking vote fraud into the system. But this time, they couldn't steal the election.

6. This time, unlike previous elections, the Republicans had monitors in place, fully spun up on what to watch for, and ready to film anything spooky. It was an aggressive, very visible operation. I think that factored in. By comparison, in 2020, we weren't prepared, and certainly not ready for the amount and sophistication of The Steal™. If anything, the Demmunists overplayed their hand and practically invited the degree of oversight we put in place this time. [While this sounds plausible, the Heritage Foundation page makes it look as though only a minority of states, including red states, bothered to ratchet up their security. So while I agree there was extra vigilance, there wasn't much of it.]

7. [In 2021,] [people] were also preoccupied and distracted by Covid, which offered the Dems a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to steal the election, especially in justifying the use of the boxes, ballot harvesting, etc.

8. Pet theory, we didn't get the steal this time because Shapiro and Whitmer didn't want to have to take a back seat to Kamala for 8 years before getting their shot at the oval office. [This sounds crackpotty.]

9. Don’t know if it’s specifically those two, but I do think the powers that be pulling the Democratic Party strings decided Kamala was not the horse to back and therefore did not go full-on cheat. The reality is Trump got far more votes than any other candidate in history, which would require a lot of cheating. They would rather save that cheat for a better candidate. It wasn’t just Kamala but also Walz (who proved to be a terrible candidate in a different vein from Kamala). Shapiro, Whitmer, (some other Democrat) want their chance to move up, and Kamala and Walz were just bad horses blocking the path.

10. Trump absolutely worked the outreach to communities who either don’t vote or traditionally vote Democrat.

11. Is that why those 20 million extra voters didn’t materialize this time?

12. Let's wait a few days. One good point surfaced that California and Arizona haven't finished their vote count. California still has—as of Thursday morning—45 percent uncounted. Arizona has 30 percent. Oregon and Washington have 20 percent. Wait a few days and we'll see what that chart looks like.

13. Trump received 74 million votes in 2020 and so far has 72.6 million in 2024 with more to come as some states still receive, process, and count more ballots. Biden received 81 million votes in 2020 and Harris has so far received just shy of 68 million votes in 2024. Trump essentially maintained his level of support from 4 years ago while Harris lost some 13 million votes as compared to Biden. Does that seem odd to anyone?

14. [reply to the above] Biden clearly never really had 81 million legitimate votes.

The above adds up to a whole mess of theories, most of which I'd never have thought of myself. And the above quotes represent only a fraction of the opinions I've seen. There's general agreement that Biden's vote count in 2020 was never legitimate; there's also agreement that whatever happened in 2020 either didn't happen this time or was greatly reduced, in part because of measures taken to stop the Steal. I'm a bit skeptical of the idea that a lot of states took heroic measures in that vein; the blue states could be counted on to claim that electoral procedures were/are squeaky clean; what was disappointing to me was how the Heritage chart showed that many red states were also fairly blasé about shoring up election integrity. Some of the above rhetoric includes claims that there were packs of lawyers ready, this time, to pounce on any potential fraud. Maybe; maybe not.

I can't draw any definitive conclusions from admittedly limited data (which I've made no effort to group or to categorize scientifically, anyway), but I think it's safe to say that the field remains wide open for fraud later on. Maybe this was just an off year for the cheaters. Maybe this year really was either a cheat-free or cheat-sparse year for reasons having nothing to with any anti-fraud measures, real or imagined. The above comments, which drag out very little real evidence, point to vague likelihoods but no definitive answers. So I'd simply say that I still think we were done dirty in 2020, and we should be thankful that 2024 went more smoothly, but we need to be cautious moving forward because the Dems are always looking for newer and better ways to bypass security. Meanwhile, the Reps are far too quick to let down their guard and become complacent. I hope that, with Trump bringing much sharper minds on to his team this time around, something sturdy and semi-permanent can be done to protect election integrity in 2026 (midterms), 2028, and beyond.

As some people have noted, the count isn't actually over, though. What if we find out that Trump actually lost the popular vote because of places like California, a state that seems intent on enacting its own destruction? (The California tally is currently only at 60%, but quite reasonably, the state was called for Harris given its obvious 60-40 blue bias.)