The following were among the words and phrases coated with dubiousness by the typographical marks: “by mail,” “make their vote count,” “harvested ballots,” “drop boxes,” “counted vote” — and, of course, “lost.”
You can see where this is going. Using Pennsylvania as an example, Calabresi points to changes in the law and surprising shifts in vote totals to explain why “many Republicans, myself included, thought that the 2020 presidential election was probably stolen, even though that fact could not be proved in a court of law.”
He will no doubt be reassured to learn that his concerns are demonstrably unfounded.
His essay begins by declaring that “the Left in 2020 massively changed the way presidential elections are held in this country” because of the pandemic.
He then juxtaposes numbers in Pennsylvania: that “Donald Trump exceeded Barack Obama’s 2008 vote total in Pennsylvania by 101,311 votes” but still — scare quotes! — “lost” the “counted vote” because of the “astonishing” 3.5 million votes Biden received in the state.
First of all — as has been understood at least since another attorney, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), similarly attempted to call Pennsylvania’s results into question in early January 2021 — the expansion of absentee and mail-in voting in Pennsylvania had nothing to do with the pandemic. It was signed into law in October 2019, and passed by the state House and Senate on the strength of Republican votes. It wasn’t the capital-L left sneaking around in their face masks. It was Republican legislators acting months before covid arrived in the U.S.
Second, the results in Pennsylvania were not “astonishing” or even particularly weird. There are several ways that presidential elections differ from one another. Two important ones are that the population changes — that is, the number of eligible voters goes up or down — and interest in voting in elections change.
For all of the incessant marveling at how many votes Biden got in 2020 relative to Obama’s 2008 total, there’s not a lot of recognition that there were 22 million more registered voters nationally at the time of the 2020 election, including nearly 900,000 more in Pennsylvania, according to the Census Bureau.
If we visualize the election results nationally in Pennsylvania over a longer time frame, we see that the registered voter population nationally and in the Keystone State have generally trended upward, as have the total number of votes cast.
There was an increase from 2016 to 2020, yes. That’s in large part because the totals for votes cast in 2012 and 2016 — both nationally and in Pennsylvania — were lower than the total cast in 2008. The trend from 2000 to 2020 is pretty clear, mirroring the increase in registered-voter totals.
Why were vote totals lower in 2012 and 2016 than in 2008? Because turnout fell.
Michael McDonald’s U.S. Elections Project shows the shifts since 2000, with Pennsylvania turnout trending ahead of national turnout.
In Pennsylvania, turnout for the highest office on the ballot was 64.2 percent in 2008 but 63.6 percent in 2016. Add in the third-party vote in 2016 (which pulled in 270,000 votes) and turnout for Trump’s first election was down slightly.
Then turnout surged in 2020, thanks to a deeply unpopular incumbent president. Turnout was up in every state, by an average of 6.9 percentage points. The increase in Pennsylvania, by contrast, was only 6.5 percentage points. That was the average in states that voted for Trump, for what it’s worth.
Relative to 2000 instead of 2008, Pennsylvania saw bigger increases in Republican vote totals even though the increase in Democratic votes was larger nationally.
Calabresi’s argument is that Trump managed to surge past that Obama spike in 2008 but still lost. This is a bit like being confused that you beat the 1996 100-meter Olympic record but somehow still lost to Usain Bolt in 2012. As it turns out, there were changes over time.
“I do not myself believe that there was fraud in the counting of ballots or voting machine malfunctions,” Calabresi wrote. “I do believe, however, that the unprecedented use of mail in voting over a period of many weeks, with the loss of the secret ballot, and drop boxes, produced a fundamentally illegitimate Biden victory in 2020 in Pennsylvania and elsewhere.”
This is how Calabresi tries to distance himself from something for which there’s no evidence (election fraud) in favor of something that can’t be proven (the election was illegitimate). His dubious argument is that so much voting at home meant that voters were subject to influences from nefarious door-knockers or their own family — as though Trump supporters were cowed by their relatives into voting for Biden. For what it’s worth, this is not the public reputation that accompanies Trump supporters, nor is there any evidence this occurred to any significant degree.
At its heart, Calabresi’s argument is a familiar one: that Biden supporters are dull sheep who were not sincere in their support. Since he can’t imagine that Biden could have gotten so many votes, it must be that Biden didn’t get so many votes. So the election was necessarily illegitimate, for reasons that he cobbled together after the fact.
