People went nuts in NYC on Saturday, right after the larger media outlets made the call for Joe Biden as president. I had been planning on taking a nice, long walk around Central Park but decided Monday would work just as well. The jubilant crowds didn’t appear to be out of control but in a giddy, low-grade party mode. This song was playing in my head all morning.
It wasn’t lost on me that I was running into just as many
maskless dildos on the street, with the virus preparing to shift into overdrive
most places in the country (but not here, yet). I find it hard to feel ecstatic
knowing the hammer is getting ready to fall, and I suspect will be worsened by
Trump being a sore loser over the next 10 weeks. I must admit, it was a
pleasure watching him burst into the nightly news on Thursday to bitch and moan
like a hurt teenager on Twitter. It was like watching a broken old man,
convinced he was going to hell, fart and shit his death bed so hard that mourners
in the room were vomiting and wailing from the profound stench and unbridled
despair. But that impish fever dream has been tempered with the possibility of
what damage he’s planning on the way out.
Once again, Pennsylvania played a key swing-state role in
the election, this time the deciding state with its large volume of mail-in ballots
to count after election day. Like many Americans, I was despondent watching
Trump take a sizable lead in my home state on Tuesday night and went to bed
thinking the country was doomed. But it became obvious over the next two days
that so many Democrats, being sensible during a pandemic, mailed in their
ballots, particularly in and around Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, thus there was
a massive number of ballots yet to be counted, skewing heavily in Biden’s
favor. The last four days have been like watching a flower slowly bloom with
the realization that Biden was going to take the state with ease.
One thing I’ve noticed with liberal musings is the concept
of “Philadelphia and Pittsburgh saving the state” for a Democratic presidential
victory. Not true. They were the last voting precincts tabulated due to the
massive number of ballots to be counted. But they didn’t “save” the state. It’s
always expected that they will skew heavily towards the Democrats, along with a
few other key “blue” counties. I suspect not much has changed since 2016 in
terms of counties taken by their respective Republican/Democrat candidates.
The issue is the state’s final vote tally is not an
electoral college. Each vote cast feeds into the overall state tally, regardless
of which way a particular county skews. Those blue counties will probably go on
being blue due to their economics, colleges, industry, population centers, etc.
It’s my take, and probably not a popular one, that the state was won for Biden
in the red counties with their smaller, less-diverse populations.
How? Take a look at the simple statistics I came up with,
based on numbers pulled from the Pennsylvania state voting chart that shows
votes by county. (These numbers surely aren’t final tallies, but close enough
to make my point. If you click on each state, voting by county numbers appear.)
Pennsylvania has 67 counties. Of them, 13 ended up as “blue
counties” in terms of voting for Biden, thus Trump took the remaining 54
counties (and usually by a sizable number). I listed each “blue county” and its
vote tally, added all of them up to derive a “blue county” total. I compared
this to Biden’s overall vote tally for the state, subtracting the “blue county”
vote to determine how many votes for Biden were cast in the “red counties.”
Once I had those numbers, I noted Trump’s overall tally in
Pennsylvania. I then show what happens when you add Biden’s “red county” votes
to Trump’s overall tally and subtract them from Biden’s overall tally. If this
voting scenario had played out, Trump would have taken Pennsylvania by roughly
2 million votes: a landslide.
To extrapolate even further, I determined the minimum number of votes
Trump would have needed to take from Biden to win Pennsylvania by subtracting
his total vote count from Biden’s and adding one vote (41,224). Breaking that
number out by county (dividing by 67), I found that if Trump had won 615 more votes
in each county, he would have won the state. If that’s not a realistic proposition
I broke out the 41,224 by only red counties (dividing by 54 instead) and found
that if Trump had won 763 more votes in each of those red counties, he would have
won the state.
It’s an over-simplification that I’m showing for a reason.
Most liberal pundits over-simplify Pennsylvania to the extent that there’s
“nothing” between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. I’ve seen this land area
compared unfavorably to rural Alabama. A nowhere place filled with angry, uneducated,
working-class white people no sane person would want to live around. Yes, there
are people like this there, but bad news, I got people like that living on my block
in Queens. In one form or another, they’re everywhere, and very often they’re
not white, or working-class.
Two major facts become apparent here:
- Just under half of Biden’s PA votes came from
far less populated “red” counties
- If a vast majority of the Biden votes from those “red” counties went to Trump, PA would have been a landslide in Trump’s favor
In other words, it’s not accurate to portray rural
Pennsylvania as a wasteland of any sorts. Anyone who understands the whole
state knows this, but it seems like an ongoing liberal trope to paint
Pennsylvania with this broad political brush. Doing so is detrimental to the
Democratic party, and as we saw in 2016, can swing an entire election away from
them. Yet, liberals will go on seeing not just this state, but all rural
areas in America this way.
It’s not reality, nor a very intelligent point of view, held
by people who see themselves as intelligent, probably are in many ways, but
have this perverse blind spot that will go on tanking elections in Republicans’
favor (if not this one).
I remember when Jeff Bezos launched his campaign to find two
new campus headquarters in America for Amazon’s rapidly expanding empire. Municipalities
all over the country submitted their plans, with tax cuts galore and all sorts
of enticing propositions to sweeten the pot for Amazon to choose them. Tens of
thousands of high-paying jobs would be drawn to an area, changing it in
numerous positive ways, mainly financially, higher tax base, more educated
employment pool, increased residential values, etc.
What does Amazon do? As one of their picks, it chooses Long
Island City, New York, just across the East River from Manhattan, a
neighborhood that has gone from a sleepy, under-privileged warehouse and
taxi-cab dispatch district to Blade Runner-style skyscrapers in the past
20 years. Never mind that city planners warned this would dangerously strain
the neighborhood’s resources, make living there impossible for working- and
middle-class residents in terms of inflated rents and real-estate values, and place
serious stress on an already over-burdened public transportation system.
Amazon received so much flak from local politicians that
they hedged on their plans. They simply spread out their planned expansion
among already-existing locations (and the other location chosen in Crystal
City, Virginia), including two Manhattan offices.
I gather Jeff Bezos, like most tech leaders, is a liberal.
He didn’t buy The Washington Post for kicks. I was left wondering why he
wouldn’t choose places like Scranton/Wilkes-Barre, Harrisburg or
Allentown/Easton in Pennsylvania for expansion. All these areas already have
reasonable business/industrial centers, are close to both New York City and
Philadelphia to attract talent and, most importantly, are located in a state
that routinely plays a crucial role in national elections. A tech-based
corporation with tens of thousands of new employees would draw a
liberal-leaning work force, and most likely attract other like-minded tech
businesses to do the same. It might not seem like much, but national elections
are often coming down to less than 10,000 votes in states like Pennsylvania due
to its electoral-college strength. If not Pennsylvania, then Wisconsin, or
Michigan, or North Carolina. Until liberal-minded business leaders start seeing
rural America this way, “rust belt” states will go on deciding national
elections, sometimes in unpleasant ways to liberals that make them sound like
Archie Bunker in reverse.
Pennsylvania is not as clear-cut as it seems, something I
know from growing up there. My parents were working-class, FDR-era Democrats,
not necessarily liberals. They raised us with that same FDR “can do” sense of
democracy, values learned in a depression, tempered by war, banding together for
a larger cause. Mom was fretting Vietnam carrying on long enough so her sons
might get drafted, which had her righteously angry (but the war luckily petered
out before any of us were old enough). I still recall my parents receiving
gentle ribbing from neighbors for being “liberals” for voting for Jimmy Carter. I
guess we were liberal in some small respect, but far from leftists and
comfortable with Republican friends. You had to be in rural Pennsylvania. Politics
didn’t mean that much to us as kids and rarely was an issue.
By the same token, I recall Mom’s fury at Clinton for pushing
NAFTA and her voting for Bob Dole. I’m certain both Mom and Dad voted for
Reagan the first time (but not the second). Or the times she voted for in-state
Republicans for governor, senator, state or local representative, etc. She
emphasized voting for the person over the party, which usually panned out to
the Democrats, but you can’t live in rural Pennsylvania without running into
relatively decent and sane Republican candidates along the way.
I’ve always respected that open sense of give and take. It’s
why rural Pennsylvania presents such a problem to a political world senselessly
gravitating towards dogma and extremes. I don’t doubt a small but crucial
number of rural Republicans got into the voting booth, quietly marked the box
for Biden, then filled out the rest of the ballot straight Republican.
The hardest part of this presidential election for me has
been wondering why anyone would vote for Trump, much less nearly half
the voting populace. His past nine months have been a pathological attempt to
damage and destroy key institutions in our society (like the postal service,
Social Security via payroll tax deferment, the CDC during a once-in-a-lifetime
pandemic and the integrity of our election process) and have included criminal
indifference to a pandemic that has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans
and severely damaged the health of millions more. Before this, my attitude towards
Trump was laissez faire – didn’t like him but often found myself bored whenever
a liberal friend would go on a passionate anti-Trump tirade. After the virus, I
found myself thinking that if Hitler and a chimp were running against Trump in
a presidential election, that I would dye my hair blonde, brush up on my German
and start hoarding bananas.
But now it’s over, thankfully. To anyone I know who voted
for Trump, I don’t know what you were thinking, nor do I want to. He surely did
drain the swamp. And replaced it with a sewage treatment plant that didn’t work
and left us up to our necks in his shit. It was a moral imperative that he lose
this election, and I’m glad my home state turned a corner on Thursday morning
and slowly hammered in the last nail. If you don’t want a place like Pennsylvania
making this sort of decision for an entire nation, then you should understand
why it does, and will continue to do so.
