TRUMP’S URBAN MYTH IS DESTROYED
Detroit, Milwaukee, Atlanta didn’t produce suspicious Biden returns
It’s become a mind-bending challenge to keep track of all the myriad “election fraud” claims propagated by Donald Trump, his various legal representatives, and his legions of ardent supporters. There is generally no consistent throughline to be discerned, except for the reflexive presumption that the election was irreparably corrupted in some extravagant, egregious fashion.
Some of the claims are downright hallucinatory. For instance, messianic attorney Lin Wood declared at a rally in Georgia on Wednesday that Trump “damn near won every state including California.” Little needs to be said about how self-evidently ridiculous that is, so long as you have even the most rudimentary knowledge about the political geography of California. (Wood was fresh off proclaiming his support for the imposition of martial law.) Fellow rally attendee Sidney Powell, who may or may not be a member of Trump’s legal team at any given moment, has spun an elaborate tale positing an international Communist subversion conspiracy to deprive Trump of the presidency using a computer algorithm.
However, other claims have the veneer of superficial plausibility. One that has gained purchase is the notion that Joe Biden outperformed Hillary Clinton in the select major metropolitan areas of Philadelphia, Detroit, Milwaukee and Atlanta, while underperforming Clinton in all other major metropolitan areas. As recently as last week, Trump has tweeted videos containing this claim, which of course then leads to it being repeated far and wide across the internet. (Although one of the right-wing websites where the claim first appeared has since retracted it, but not before Trump blasted out the link to tens of millions.)
The not-so-veiled implication is that some targeted scheme was employed to artificially and fraudulently boost Biden’s numbers in four Democratic-controlled cities that were key to the Electoral College — with the malfeasance seemingly made all the more apparent by what is alleged to have been Biden’s poor performance everywhere else in the country. Unsurprisingly, Rudy Giuliani has also been an unrelenting purveyor of this impression.
It should be acknowledged upfront: The whole concept of “fact-checking” Trump has long been a largely fruitless and self-indulgent exercise, too often done so the media “fact-checkers” themselves can feel morally superior. Especially when they try to rebut Trump’s plainly subjective claims under the tedious guise of “fact-checking,” the shtick is doubly pointless.
But sometimes fact-checking really is acutely necessary — and not just to get a cheap one-up on Trump. Demonstrable falsehoods that go unrebutted will inevitably coalescence into accepted dogma among certain segments of the populace, and that is harmful not so much for any reason having specifically to do with Trump, but because it obscures the reality of what truly went on in the 2020 election. And having something approaching a rational understanding of what happened in the election is useful regardless of where one lives on the political spectrum — or so you would think.
So let’s begin. For starters, there are a huge number of metropolitan areas beyond the aforementioned four in which Biden overperformed Clinton — and by any conceivable metric. He received a greater percentage of the vote in every single one of the 11 counties that comprise the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area, and he won Tarrant County (Fort Worth) outright — which no Democrat had done since 1964 — by garnering a whopping 43% more total votes there than Clinton did. Again, by any conceivable metric, Biden significantly outperformed Clinton in Dallas-Fort Worth.
The same is true for a whole diverse cross-section of metropolitan areas nationwide, most of which are ignored by “election fraud” advocates because these areas have no direct relevance to the final Electoral College margin. But when viewed in totality, the results completely undermine the idea that Biden’s alleged “over-performance” was centralized in those four swing-state hotspots.
Again by any conceivable metric, Biden over-performed Clinton in the following metropolitan areas: Jacksonville, Houston, Austin, Boston, Buffalo, Washington, D.C.., Phoenix, Omaha, Indianapolis, Denver, Nashville, Raleigh, Seattle and Anchorage. And there are more. But you won’t hear much about them, because it wouldn’t be conducive to any frantic, retweetable talking points.
And upon closer inspection of the four cities themselves — as opposed to their far more expansive surrounding metropolitan areas — the wild “fraud” theories fall even further apart.
Biden actually received a lesser percentage of the vote than Clinton in the city of Detroit, for example, whereas Trump notably improved on his 2016 performance there.
Insinuations of suspicious Biden over-performance in inner-cities are usually tethered to the claim that he was magically more popular than Barack Obama among urban Blacks, which is supposed to rouse angry incredulity. But Biden got more than 100,000 fewer votes in the city of Detroit compared