Day 1,410: Trump: ‘Big, massive dumps’ cost me the election

Donald Trump’s decision to slander mail-in votes as untrustworthy may have cost him the 2020 election.

With razor-thin margins in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Arizona, Trump failing to realize the importance of locking in his base’s votes early — and avoiding things like Election Day laziness, conflicts, a change or heart or illness — could have been the difference between winning and losing.

The way that many states count their mail-in ballots varies. Florida, for instance, counts their mail-in votes before Election Day. Pennsylvania is prohibited from counting before Election Day begins. The result is that massive amounts of data are released in chunks in differing timeframes, which causes major and instantaneous swings in reported vote totals.

On top of that, rural areas, which are predominately Republican-leaning, tend to have far smaller numbers of votes to tabulate. Urban areas, which are predominately Democratic-leaning, see far more voters, meaning longer lead times to tabulate the votes.

The geographic make-up plus Trump’s insistence that his base not vote by mail meant that when large-scale data was released, it tended to favor Democrats. Trump railed about this set of facts on Fox News on Sunday morning in his first post-election interview.

Ignoring tens of millions of uncounted votes, Trump claimed he had the election won at 10:00 p.m. during the softball interview. Trump alleged that it was only after “big massive dumps in Michigan and Pennsylvania and all over” that he lost.

Trump is referring to legitimate votes cast by Americans that were aggregated due to how they were cast (mail-in versus in-person) or where they were cast (urban versus rural). Recounts have continued to find the same results as the initial counts.

At the end of the election, a democracy doesn’t demand that votes be counted in a certain order, just that all the votes be counted.

Trump made a strategic decision that backfired while also doing a poor enough job for four years that the American people decided to make a change. There has been no evidence of election fraud, as the Trump legal team has suffered continuous losses in courts of law.

Data “dumps” happen every election. They aren’t nefarious, and they didn’t change the results in 2020.

1,410 days in, 52 to go

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