If, in the aftermath of a decisive (if narrow) victory for Donald Trump in the just concluded presidential election, anybody expected Republican-minded folks to put aside their “stop-the-steal” concerns from 2020, that was a premature hope.
It turns out that numerous believers in a stolen 2020 election still believe in it, and a fairly significant controversy regarding the matter continues to fester on social media.
One local believer is former Shelby County Republican chairman Lee Mills, who has carried on a brisk online conversation about it on Facebook.
“Now that it’s officially over,” Mills wrote on his page last week, “can we revisit 2020 for a moment?”
Whereupon he reproduced a dubiously sourced bar graph that’s been making the rounds in MAGA circles.
Crude and simplistic, employing blue and red bars, respectively, to indicate Democratic and Republican vote totals, it purports to compare the results for both parties in the presidential elections of 2012, 2016, 2020, and 2024. Strikingly, it seems to show the Democratic vote holding to virtually identical levels in 2012, 2016, and 2024, while the Republican vote is represented graphically as steadily rising through the respective campaign years, finally out-distancing the Democratic vote total this year.
The year 2020 is seen as an anomaly, with the blue bar representing the Democratic vote vaulting high above the red bar representing the GOP presidential total. Both bars show an increase over previous years.
The blue bar is depicted as coming back to “normal” for 2024. The red bar is somewhat lower as well.
Mills feels emboldened to comment: “This is a rhetorical question, but who can explain this anomaly?”
And he supplies some numbers, after a fashion. “So l’m not misconstrued by the Trump haters: The 2020 election saw a huge turnout spike — 159 million people voted, with Democrats getting nearly 80 million votes, which is a massive 23% jump from previous years. Statistically, that’s a total outlier.
“A big factor was the sudden expansion of mail-in voting, which went from 21 percent in 2016 to 46 percent in 2020.
“Here’s the issue: A lot of these changes were made by unelected officials, bypassing the state legislatures. When you change the rules to allow massive non-in-person voting [sic], it opens the door for fraud to run rampant.
“While this doesn’t flat-out prove fraud, it definitely raises red flags about how secure the process was with all these last-minute changes.”
Response on Facebook was forthcoming. William Albert Mannecke agreed: “They learned to cheat on an industrial level.”
As did Ellen Ferrara. “They stole 2020, 100 percent.”
Randy Higdon probed a little further: “We will find out he [presumably Trump] won all 50 states. Only states she [Kamala Harris] won were ones that didn’t require voter ID. Then this goes back to 2020. Many, many heads are gonna roll.”
But a demurrer would come from Cole Perry, a local statistician with both solidly Republican bona fides and a well-earned reputation for accurate analyses of election results: “Harris is going to end up with somewhere near 76.5 million votes, and Trump will end up [with] close to 78.5 million. That’s almost exactly the same total turnout as 2020. If they really did cheat in 2020, why did they suddenly forget how to do it?”
A telling point. Another one is this, apropos the effects, such as it was, of write-in votes, which were disparaged by a suspicious Trump in 2020, the Covid year, but actively encouraged by him for his supporters in 2024.
That might be as good an explanation as any for the supposed “anomaly” of the 2020 electoral outcome.
