Trump runs in 2012

[Jackson Lennock]

You make a guess down to the last individual vote, but that is neither here nor there if we don't know where the ballots ins question would be cast. We have seen twice in our lifetimes a candidate to the US presidency win the race with fewer votes than their opponent.

And in 2012 the brain rot was very much there. Birtherism was in full swing, the right wing echo chamber was waxing apocalyptic (just look up the old threads at places like FreeRepublic from that time), and conservative pundits predicted an imminent descent into dictatorial socialism. I remember that Orson Scott Card claimed that Obama would set up a national law enforcement agency (to be called NaPo) staffed with ghetto thugs whose job would be to round up his political opponents. And then he's get around the 22nd Amendment by having Michelle run as a proxy.

In between you quoting me and me responding to this I continued/edited that post.

I got those figures with those some back of the napkin math based on 2008, 2012, and 2016 numbers. Trump basically did about as well as you could while losing the popular vote to win the electoral college (maybe lose by 3 or 3.1 points tops?) in 2016. Trump would motivate a lot of voters who OTL didn't show up in 2012, but Obama also motivates voters who OTL didn't show up in 2016. Often they were in the same states. I also made my calls based on comparing 2008, 2012, and 2016 state by state numbers on Wikipedia. Obama wins easily.


The brain rot wasn't as big in 2012 as it was in 2016 or 2020. Being popular with the people obsessively watching TV and consuming political news all day isn't the same as the rot being totally in the rank and file. In 2020 Fox Primetime got about 4.7 million views nightly (not all of whom vote in GOP primaries) compared to over 30 million people who voted in Republican primaries in 2016. There's always cranks on internet forums (FreeRepublic)or weird cranks (Orson Scott Card), but that's not the same as those people and attitudes being very widespread. A May 2011 Gallup Poll found that 13% of American adults (23% of Republicans) believed the birther conspiracy, for example. That's a bigger number than anybody reasonable should like, but very different from 2/3 of Republicans as of summer 2021 thinking the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump.