This
might be the most embarrassing document created by a White House staffer
By
Dec. 18, 2020 at 1:10 p.m. CST
The first thing I did
when I cracked open White House trade adviser Peter Navarro’s 30-page compilation of President Trump’s voter-fraud
greatest hits was check a footnote. The introduction claimed that, as of
midnight Election Day, Trump looked to be “well on his way to winning a second
term,” given that he “was already a lock to win both Florida and Ohio.”
“[N]o Republican has
ever won a presidential election without winning Ohio,” the document notes,
“while only two Democrats have won the presidency without winning Florida.”
I was curious about
the source for that claim, so I checked footnote 3. And, lo and behold, the
source was … me, writing in 2016.
Of course, my point
wasn’t that winning Ohio and Florida were a guarantee of victory. Instead, I
was pointing out that there were certain states that Democrats and Republicans
usually won before winning the presidency. Navarro’s right that no Republican
has won the presidency without winning Ohio — but plenty of Democrats have,
rendering his point entirely moot. And that’s even assuming that his point was
useful at all anyway, which we shouldn’t. Bill Clinton lost Florida in 1992
while winning the presidency. President-elect Joe Biden did it this year,
meaning that in one-fourth of the past elections it has happened. Hardly
something particularly remarkable.
But this, in broad
strokes, is how Navarro’s document operates. It throws out as near-certainties
things that are unfounded, misrepresented or unimportant.
What makes his claims
about who won what states one of his better points is, first, that it’s
accurate and, second, that his source for it was a reputable news organization.
His footnotes cite the blatantly-pro-Trump Epoch Times more than The
Post and the New York Times combined. In fact, he celebrates his
reliance on biased and flawed sources of information.
“From Steve Bannon’s
War Room Pandemic and John Solomon’s Just the News to Raheem Kassam’s National
Pulse, to Newsmax, and One America News Network,” Navarro writes, “Americans
hungry for facts and breaking developments have been able to find such critical
information only by following this alternative coverage.”
Put another way,
Americans seeking dubious or debunked information are only able to find it from
outlets willing to publish and air dubious and debunked information.
One of the hallmark
characteristics of rhetoric from the White House is the substitution of volume
for value. Trump himself offers dishonest statements with abandon, hoping that
his audience will accept as true at least some small percentage of his blizzard
of nonsense. But it also uses presenting a lot of accusations as somehow being
evidence supporting the accusation, as though getting 500 people to say they
believe aliens invented pistachios makes it more likely to be true than if one
person said it. He does this exact thing explicitly at one point, in fact,
hyping widespread belief that something dubious occurred — belief fostered by
Trump and the above-named media outlets — as evidence that it did.
The goal of Navarro’s
document was largely to elevate unfounded suspicion by creating a catalogue of
various false claims about the election, many of which have been similarly
elevated by Trump himself. That includes most of the claims that we’ve not only
debunked but also compiled as having been debunked. It includes analysis of the
voting in Michigan from the guy who at one point erroneously presented
Minnesota data as having come from Michigan.
It’s not a report. It’s
a garbage dump.
It includes
statements like this:
“At midnight on the
evening of November 3, and as illustrated in Table 1, President Trump was ahead
by more than 110,000 votes in Wisconsin and more than 290,000 votes in
Michigan. In Georgia, his lead was a whopping 356,945; and he led in
Pennsylvania by more than half a million votes. By December 7, however, these
wide Trump leads would turn into razor thin Biden leads — 11,779 votes in
Georgia, 20,682 votes in Wisconsin, 81,660 votes in Pennsylvania, and 154,188
votes in Michigan.”
Right. Because they
counted more votes — mail-in votes, which heavily favored Biden and which
couldn’t be counted before Election Day in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and
Michigan.
If you are still
making claims such as the one above, you should not be taken seriously. It
can’t be said more plainly than that. It is the flat-Earth theory of election
fraud, something that maybe people long ago were justified in believing but
which, by now, has no place being treated as a serious argument. If Navarro
sincerely believes this implies questionable activity, then his “report” should
be treated as inherently ridiculous since he hasn’t done his homework. If
he doesn’t believe his insinuations, then the report shouldn’t
be taken seriously because it’s obviously aimed at misleading the reader.
This is by no means
the only example of Navarro presenting as nefarious something which he can’t
actually prove to be anything outside the norm.
Part of his report,
for example, includes the claim that “outright voter fraud” occurred in each of
the six states — fraud such as “bribery,” for which he includes a citation to a
legal definition of the crime. (This is another feature of the Trump-world effort to
prove fraud: making things seem more serious by injecting unnecessary efforts
to demonstrate authority.)
In both Arizona and
Nevada, Navarro alleges that bribery occurred. His evidence? Well, a report
that, in Nevada, a group held a raffle into which anyone who had voted could
enter. This, he says, was an attempt to buy votes from Native American voters.
The organization holding the raffle, though, responded by pointing out
that such raffles are legal. The Trump campaign included this
allegation in a lawsuit in Nevada — one of the campaign’s numerous legal losses
since the election. The judge in the case ruled that the campaign didn’t prove the allegation.
That happened two
weeks ago, yet here was the claim in Navarro’s document.
Anyway, that’s just
Nevada. What about the claim it also happened in Arizona?
“According to the
Epoch Times, such vote-buying schemes also may have occurred in eight other
states, including Arizona and Wisconsin,” the report states. Oh, well, if
the Epoch Times says so.
The document just
goes on at length in the same way, picking out the sort of cruft that’s been
littering Trump’s Twitter feed since Nov. 3 and tying it all into one stinky
package. It’s sincerely not worth running through the entire litany once again;
simply consider The Post’s fact-checker articles as an effective
rejoinder.
What we should do,
though, is consider the broader context for Navarro’s claims. He focuses on the
six states that have been targeted by Trump since the election. We’ve labeled
them as the “irregularity” states below, to translate them to Navarro’s
document, but one could also call them “swing states” — except that Michigan
wasn’t really all that close.
Anyway, the point is
that, if these were states where something demonstrably unusual happened, if
there was some exceptional fraud at play, they’d look different from other
states. But, as we’ve repeatedly demonstrated, they don’t.
For example, Trump
and his allies like to claim that it was fraud in big cities which led to
Trump’s defeat in states such as Michigan and Pennsylvania. Except that this
demonstrably isn’t what happened. In the swing states, the shift to Biden
relative to the 2016 vote was larger in more suburban counties than in urban
ones. This is the trend which gave Democrats the House in 2018, an erosion of support
for Trump among college-educated voters in the suburbs.
If we compare the
average shifts in counties in each kind of state, the average shifts to Biden
relative to Clinton were much larger in heavily urban counties in states that
voted narrowly for Biden or Trump (meaning a statewide margin under 10 points)
or heavily for Trump. But most of the shifts were to Biden, save in the most
rural areas.
There’s similarly not
any obvious difference in the county-level shifts when one considers education.
We took the density of college degrees among those ages 25 or older in each
county and put them in eight evenly-sized buckets. In the counties with the
highest density of college-educated voters, Biden saw bigger gains; in those
with the lowest density, Trump did. (There are only three states which Biden
won by less than 10 percent which aren’t in Navarro’s “irregularity” list, so
consider that line a bit iffy.)
Again, the
“irregularity” states don’t stand out.
Where things are
interesting is when considering race. The most densely White and the most
densely non-White counties shifted to Trump nationally, in part
thanks to shifts in states that backed Trump. It also holds true in Biden’s
best states, thanks to Trump’s better-than-2016 performance in some cities such
as New York City.
But there’s nothing
exceptional about the “swing states.” There’s no obvious pattern showing that
particular places overdelivered for Biden in any particular way.
Of the 1,495 counties
where the margins for Biden improved relative to Hillary Clinton’s margins in
2016, more than half were in states that voted for Trump. About two-thirds of
counties in non-swing blue states shifted to Biden, as did 58 percent of
swing-state counties. About 4-in-10 counties in red states did.
The burden of proof
here lies with Trump and Navarro, the ones claiming fraudulent activity for
which they have presented no credible evidence. The key word there is
“credible,” of course — they’ve presented lots of evidence which is the
electoral equivalent of shadowy photos of the Loch Ness monster. Navarro’s
report is the functional equivalent of one of those shows where ghost-hunters
bring various homemade electronic devices into abandoned townhouses before
declaring authoritatively that the photo they took of a dust mite is, in
actuality, a poltergeist.
And if you don’t
believe me, allow me to prove my credentials: Navarro finds my analysis so
reliable that he cites it in his report.
