Day 985: Trump tweets fake electoral map, dares House to impeach it
One of the right’s favorite tools is using an electoral map to show wide swaths of red with tiny dots of blue. The implication is there are a lot of Republican voters and few Democratic voters in the country.
That argument is knocked down by things like common sense and facts. Land can’t vote and just because there are many rural red counties that are next to each other, doesn’t mean there are many voters there.
For instance, on these maps, Carbon County, Wyoming is worth one red box. One blue box would be Kings County, New York. Carbon County, at 387 square miles, is a much larger box than that of Kings County and their 69 square miles. But in the 2016 election, Donald Trump won Carbon County with 4,409 votes. Hillary Clinton won Kings County with 640,553 votes. So despite Clinton winning by 145 times the amount of votes, a red-blue, two-dimensional map would look like a five-and-a-half times Republican advantage based just on land size.
On top of all of that, Democrats have won four of the past five popular votes. No matter how red the map is, the fact is there have been more Democratic voters in every national election except one since 2000.
It should be no surprise that with Trump facing the rising prospect of impeachment, he’s using anything and everything to play defense. That includes those red-blue electoral maps. Only he added message on it: “Try to impeach this.”
Not only is Trump trying to say the same absurd thing that so many on the right are falsely claiming — that more land somehow equals more votes — but he had to lie to do it.
That map isn’t from 2016.
It’s not from any other year either. It’s literally a fake map. It shows Trump winning counties he did not win.
The Clinton-won counties the map wrongly shows as Trump-won counties include Orange County, California; Washoe County, Nevada; Lake County, Minnesota; Gallatin County, Montana; and Whitman County, Washington.
It was also not the first time Trump has displayed an inaccurate county-by-county election map; he also displayed one in early 2018.
Trump has a history of using fake maps to promote his own delusions, as he did with Hurricane Dorian last month.
The House of Representatives is undertaking an impeachment inquiry that is not focused on a map. Or a party. Or even voters. They are trying to make a determination, based on the Constitution and laws of the U.S., if one man committed offenses that should result in his removal from office.
985 days in, 477 to go
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