December 21, 2020
A viral tweet about the election may be wrong, but a viral poster matters
By
Andrea Widburg
On Sunday, one tweet and one poster sucked up a lot of the oxygen for conservatives. The tweet claimed to rely on a Washington Post article to reveal that millions of Biden’s votes were faked… . . .
. . . That does not mean that Biden won. If Biden got only 65 million or so votes (which is probably closer to what he really got), it would simply mean that the percentage of
living eligible voters who showed up was significantly lower than 66.2%. The tweet is wrong, but it’s a no harm, no foul situation.
What’s more interesting is that a series of memes are going around showing just how unbelievable Biden’s numbers are. The starting point is
a November 10 preliminary report from the Brookings Institution. Immediately upon learning about the report, Students for Trump put out an
Instagram poster with those rough data:
(
Please Note: This uploaded content is no longer available.)
Because Facebook owns Instagram, it appended a “fact check” to the above poster. When I went to
the “fact check” at USA Today (a toxically anti-Trump source), it emphasizes that the numbers in the poster are preliminary. The final numbers are
different . If you were to stop reading
USA Today at that point, you might assume that the final numbers are
waaaay different. They’re not.
The same article explains that, according to the Brookings Institution’s December 8 final report, Biden’s 81,282,903 votes came from 509 counties (that’s 16.7% of America’s) counties. Meanwhile, Trump, who incontestably won 74 million votes (and probably many more), won 2,547 counties. In other words, the earlier numbers were almost accurate, so the core point is unchanged. As even
USA Today concedes,
Biden won 16.7% of counties with finalized results. That represents a record-low proportion for a winning presidential candidate.
…the USA Today article added an interesting tidbit:
Obama set the previous record in 2012 – with 689 counties, equal to 22%. Before that, he also set a record in 2008 with just 28% of counties, per
NBC News.
The article tries to make it sounds as if Biden is just doing what Obama did. There’s a vast difference, though, between Obama having won 22% and 28% of counties and the 16% of counties in which Biden allegedly prevailed.
Just as importantly, there’s a vast difference between Obama, a charismatic new face who became the nation’s first Black president, and a doddering, corrupt old man who’s been around 47 years, has a record of lies and meanness, and a history of terrible political decisions…