About Me

In writing the "About Me" portion of this blog I thought about the purpose of the blog - namely, preventing the growth of Socialism & stopping the Death Of Democracy in the American Republic & returning her to the "liberty to abundance" stage of our history. One word descriptions of people's philosophies or purposes are quite often inadequate. I feel that I am "liberal" meaning that I am broad minded, independent, generous, hospitable, & magnanimous. Under these terms "liberal" is a perfectly good word that has been corrupted over the years to mean the person is a left-winger or as Mark Levin more accurately wrote in his book "Liberty & Tyranny" a "statist" - someone looking for government or state control of society. I am certainly not that & have dedicated the blog to fighting this. I believe that I find what I am when I consider whether or not I am a "conservative" & specifically when I ask what is it that I am trying to conserve? It is the libertarian principles that America was founded upon & originally followed. That is the Return To Excellence that this blog is named for & is all about.

Sunday, October 13, 2024

A Data Professional's Analysis Of The 2020 Presidential Election

It was only minutes after the Trump-Harris debate on September 10 that Trump appeared outside the media spin room saying that two unidentified polls he had checked showed he won the debate 92 to 6 & 88 to 11 respectively.   Although neither Trump or Harris said anything of substance during the debate, when real statistical results came out on average it was Harris 67 - Trump 33.  But Trump persisted saying it was his best debate performance ever.  When his friend Lindsey Graham was asked in the spin room which part of the debate he liked best Graham replied "Trump's closing statement," many thinking Graham was indicating he was glad the debate was over.

A mini-parallel can be drawn between Trump's debate claim & his false claim about the 2020 presidential election being stolen.  According to Trump he never loses.  A golden thread in all the claims is that no evidence to back up his claims is ever produced.  

For instance, a few days after the 2020 election a story surfaced that a truck delivered hundreds of thousands of ballots for Biden from New York to Pennsylvania.  The ballots, the truck, or the driver were never produced.  The story just faded away.

Now there are plenty of stories about election claims that are not as well known as the above mysterious truck claim & Ken Block did a very good job in his book entitled Disproven of explaining the ones he was hired by the Trump campaign to work on.

  Click on image to enlarge

Ken has a degree in computer science from Dartmouth & is an expert in database technologies & data analytics whose specialty is digging into a large data set, figuring out what questions can be answered by the data, & then letting the data take him wherever it leads.  Ken's analysis has been used in multiple lawsuits regarding the conduct of elections.  See page 15 of Disproven.

Ken was approached the day after the 2020 election, unsolicited, by Alex Cannon, a lawyer for the Trump campaign, to have Ken's firm Simpatico Software Systems investigate the claims of massive fraud that the Trump campaign thought existed in the 2020 presidential election.  On November 5, 2020 Ken signed a contract to look for voter fraud in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada, & Wisconsin.  The list soon expanded to include Michigan. 

The work consisted of data mining (i.e., the process of searching & analysing a large batch of raw data in order to identify patterns & extract useful information) for voter fraud.  In the initial assignment Ken was to concentrate on deceased voter fraud & finding people who voted in multiple states.  Ken assured Cannon that the work done by Simpatico would be of sufficient quality to stand up in a court of law.

It didn't take long before the initial assignment expanded again to include the investigation of specific claims presented to Ken by Cannon.  Obviously, like the above mysterious truck claim, the new ones presented by Cannon were hashed out @ campaign meetings following the election.  Members of Team Trump drew up or worked out the new claims as more information, reliable & unreliable, became available.

There was a second firm, the Berkeley Research Group (BRG), that had produced voter data work directly to the White House instead of the campaign.  BRG found no massive fraud that would have changed the election result.  Obviously Ken did not know this during his investigation which was conducted simultaneously.

An example from Ken's original assignment was to investigate the claim that 16,097 voters had cast ballots in the battleground state of Nevada plus other states - i.e., double votes.  A lawsuit was being prepared that would be based on Ken's data analysis if it supported the claim.  Ken  found there were 299 confirmed exact matches with the same voter in Nevada & another state.  This number was too small to affect the election result in Nevada & the lawsuit was never presented.

But there is more.  Although Ken did not have the time working for the Trump campaign in November 2020 to check further he did come back to this example in writing Disproven.  Ken suspected that the 299 exact matches were duplicate registered voters which is not illegal because a voter can legally have active voter registrations in two states.  It is only a crime if that voter casts a ballot in each state,

After Ken did a deeper statistical dive regarding the matter, the bottom line is that a total of four people cast double votes in Nevada & California & all four people were registered Republicans in both states.  Not 16,097.  Not 299.  But four people double voted in Nevada & California - & all four were registered Republicans in both states.

An example from Ken's expanded assignment list (to address claims the Team Trump campaign members brought up as time moved along) involved the application of Benford's Law - the mathematical observation that in large datasets the first digit in those numbers is likely to be closer to 1 than to 9.  For instance when counting from 1 to 25 the number 1 is the first digit 11 times, the number 2 is the first digit 7 times, & the numbers 3 to 9 are all the first digit once each.  If the data being analyzed is large enough Benford's Law is a mathematical certainty & "the American court system accepts Benford's Law as a tool to highlight fraudulent transactions." - Disproven page 56.

In short, Benford's law describes the relative frequency distribution for leading digits of numbers in datasets.

Click here to see the mathematical derivation of Benford's Law done @ the Naval Academy.  The derivation result is that Benford's Law shows the probability that the leading digit of a number N can be calculated as log (1+1/N).  Example for N = 1: log (1+1/1) = log (2) = 30.1% when expressed as a percent.  See graphic below for the entire distribution of the nine digits 1 to 9.  

    Click on graphic to enlarge

Specifically, Ken's work involving Benford's Law started on November 11, 2020 when Attorney Cannon called Ken to ask him to analyze Pennsylvania county vote totals because some members of Team Trump did not believe the data followed Benford's Law - which, if true, & if applicable would mean voter fraud had occurred.

Ken analyzed the Pennsylvania county vote counts & found it indeed did not follow Benford's Law's distribution when plotted on a graph like the one above.  Further analysis found that Pennsylvania county populations also did not plot in accordance with Benford's Law & neither did the registered voter counts by county.  Lastly, Ken plotted the first digit of every street number for every address (over 8.75 million) in the Pennsylvania voter registration file & found it matched the Benford Law distribution.

The next day during a conference call Ken presented his conclusion that the claim was false by telling the group "since the population sizes by Pennsylvania counties don't conform to Benford's Law, no one could credibly expect the county vote totals to conform."  Page 62 of Disproven.

Ken knew the disappointment the people on the other end of the call had because they so wanted to believe they had found some real evidence of fraud that would help Trump.  The call, & any possibility of a legal claim, ended when someone on the conference call said "We are done here."

On page 58 of Disproven Ken writes "Benford's Law must be applied against sets of 'appropriate' data.  The data against which the theory is used should be random, & the data set should be large."  Team Trump members were not qualified or equipped to evaluate the validity of highly technical claims which is why Cannon hired Ken in the first place.

In Disproven Ken details other false claims he worked on for the Trump campaign such as: 1) did 740,070 voters in Wisconsin double vote? - once by mail & once by machine; claim made by a group of volunteers who analyzed Wisconsin's voter data file, 2) whether or not voters in Pennsylvania voted by mail after they had died, 3) were nearly 100,000 mail ballots in Pennsylvania fraudulently requested?, 4) did noncitizens vote in Arizona?, & 5) was there a legion of votes cast by both dead & double voters.

In summary, Ken wrote on page 114 of Disproven that "every voter fraud claim presented to me by the Trump campaign was disproven."  The lawyers working on the Trump campaign who hired Ken dropped the claims Ken refuted but Trump held to the stolen election assertion - even today.

Regarding the original assignment to in general look for voter fraud in six swing states Ken found that Trump overwhelmingly won the smaller (even tiny) population counties across the county but lost 80% of the large population counties.  Ken found that "Trump took a smaller percentage of the votes compared to his Democrat challenger almost everywhere in 2020 compared to 2016," performing "more poorly in 2020 in all but three red states (Arkansas, Florida, & Utah)."  Ken called this "bleeding support."  See my table of such results for Arizona, Georgia, & Wisconsin below.

Ken found that Libertarian Party presidential candidate Jo Jorgensen earned more votes than Biden's margin of victory in Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, & Wisconsin. 

The idea that Trump motivated new voters to vote for him in 2016 & motivated even more voters to vote against him in 2020 is borne out by Trump receiving over 11 million more votes in 2020 than in 2016 but Biden receiving over 15 million more votes than Hillary.  There were over 4.6 million fewer third party candidate votes in 2020 than in 2016.  The Trump increase in percent of total vote from 2016 to 2020 was 0.69% while the Democrat candidate increased 3.04% (see page 130 of Disproven).  Ken used this national data as a backdrop as he analyzed all 50 states & DC, drilling down to the county level in the six swing states, to see the dynamic that led to Biden's electoral college victory.  Trump's 2020 vote margin in the six swing states averaged 2.58% lower than his vote margin in 2016 (see page 134 of Disproven).

There is a chapter in Disproven devoted to analyzing mail fraud - how the mail ballots were handled, the total number of mail ballots that were spoiled, the total number of mail ballots rejected & why (e.g., missed deadline, missing or bad signature, no witness signature, multiple ballots in an envelope, required ID not provided, voter deceased, & mail ballot rejected because a vote had already been cast).

Ken summed up this section of Disproven on page 137 saying "I was paid by the Trump campaign to look for evidence of massive fraud in the election data & that I found nothing that came close to proving that large-scale voter fraud occurred in those six states.  I have shown that Trump took a performance hit literally across the nation when looking @ statewide election data."

After finding no massive voter fraud Ken wondered why Trump continued (continues) to claim there was.  His answer is the same as mine presented in the referenced post below when I wrote "Starting in July 2020 Trump set the stage for his post-election claims of fraud & court appeals when @ one of his signature rallies he presented an out of character scenario in which he raised the possibility of him losing the election - he gave the excuse of losing because of voter fraud.  I remember, watching live, thinking to myself, if he knows all of these details of potential fraud why doesn't he do something about it now - months before the election?  This way he could win."

Ken wrote on page 122 of Disproven that "this sagging support (i.e., shown by all of Ken's extensive work & the examples I provide in the table below) must have been known to Trump's campaign team well before the 2020 election."  

I believe it was known & wrote in the reference post below "But one poll after another had continuously & repeatedly shown Biden winning the presidency by large margins.  I believe Trump's internal polling showed him losing also, especially in the important swing states that he had won in 2016 by very narrow margins.  It makes sense that Kellyanne Conway not only told him that he lost after the election, as she wrote in her recent book, but most likely also told him that he was going to lose before she left the White House in August 2020 - why else would the only woman who had successfully guided a presidential campaign to victory resign shortly before her chance @ a second victory."

Ken also felt the time to do something about suspected fraud was before the election.  Ken writes on page 85 of Disproven "States where the margins of victory are expected to be close should be identified well in advance of the election, & their voter registration data should be carefully examined; problems with the data can be corrected & potentially have a meaningful impact - before votes are cast.  Of course, no preparatory work occurred before Election Day to help the Trump campaign evaluate the election results in the search for voter fraud.  The entire effort, from my vantage point, was reactive & unplanned."

But not having the qualifications to analyze large datasets did not stop people like Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, Jenna Ellis, Mark Meadows, Maria Bartiromo, Jeanine Pirro, & the late Lou Dobbs from doing so.  As time went on & one claim of excessive election fraud after another fell through, Rudy & Sid's claims became ever more preposterous & desperate.  Out of what today looks to be a cult-like loyalty to Trump these people pitifully, blindly, & willingly put their professional reputations on the line for virtually "anything that could impugn the election & create a narrative that massive fraud occurred." Page 63 Disproven.

Because of Rudy's misplaced loyalty to Trump he has been forced to file for bankruptcy (defamation case in Georgia) & has been disbarred in both New York & Washington, D.C.  Sid pleaded guilty in the Georgia election subversion case.  As part of her guilty plea Sid faces six years of probation & will be required to testify @ future trials, write an apology letter to the citizens of Georgia, pay nearly $9,000 in restitution, & turn over documents.  Jenna Ellis, after being censured by a Colorado judge, signed a plea deal & legal acknowledgement that she "made a number of public statements about the November 2020 presidential election that were false" & did so with a "reckless state of mind" & with "a selfish motive."  Ellis admitted in state disciplinary proceedings that she made at least 10 false statements about the 2020 election as part of an effort to mislead the public, according to court documents.  Mark Meadows has signed immunity deals regarding future litigation.  FNC made a $787 million settlement payment for deliberately & knowingly presenting false information on air regarding Dominion voting machines rigging the 2020 presidential election for Biden.  Newsmax & One America News have made undisclosed settlement payments to Smartmatic for similar charges - Smartmatic has a pending lawsuit against FNC.  Dominion has ongoing defamation lawsuits against Newsmax, One America News, & individual Trump supporters.

It is obvious that none of these people's lives will ever be the same.

Brad Raffensperger, Georgia Secretary of State, wrote in the Foreword to Disproven that Trump lost Georgia because he received less votes than the fourteen Republican congressional candidates in the general election.  Many readers will remember I made a detailed tabulation (see referenced  post below) of congressional district voting not only for Georgia but for Wisconsin & Arizona as well.  See tabulation below.  Click here to see the Table entitled Presidential & House Vote Count By Congressional District - 2020. 

Presidential & House Vote Count By Congressional District - 2020
Wisconsin
CDCongressman% of Vote# of VotesTotal Congressional Votes CastTrump% of Vote# of VotesTotal Cast for President
1Steil59.3238,271401,75453.9220,668409,363
5Fitzgerald60.1265,434441,59956.8255,803450,097
6Grothman59.2238,874403,33356.8232,820409,886
7Tiffany60.7252,048415,00759.2248,822420,340
8Gallagher64.2268,173417,83857.2241,140421,811
Totals1,262,8002,079,5311,199,2532,111,497
Trump received 63,547 fewer votes than the total votes received by the five winning Republican congressional candidates in WI.
Biden received 64,880 more votes than the total votes received by the three winning Democrat congressional candidates.
Georgia
CD
1Carter58.3189,457324,695Trump55.5184,846332,905
3Ferguson65241,526371,31862235998380,895
8Scott64.5198,701308,01362195,867316,121
9Clyde78.6292,750372,54776.4291,992382,279
11Loudermilk60.4245,256405,88256.9234,930413,230
12Allen58.5181,038309,54455.8177,142317,584
14Greene74.7229,827307,62573.4235,008319,995
Totals1,578,5552,399,6241,555,7832,463,009
Trump received 22,772 fewer votes than the total votes received by the seven winning Republican congressional candidates in GA.
Arizona
CD
4Gosar69.7278,002398,623Trump68280,122411,938
5Biggs58.9262,414445,65756.5262,810465,598
6Schweikert52.2217,783417,42751.4222,166432,328
8Lesko59.6251,693422,46757.3251,443438,952
GOP Totals1,009,8921,684,1741,016,5411,748,816
1O'Halleran51.6188,469365,178Biden50.1187,186373,570
2Kirkpatrick55.1209,945381,05454.5213,408391,436
3Grijalva64.6174,243269,83762.8174,882278,497
7Gallego76.7165,452215,73273.7165,129224,168
9Stanton61.6217,094352,27460.8224,192368,798
Dem Totals955,2031,584,075964,7971,636,469
Weak performance by Trump & Biden but Biden had 2,945 net more votes than Trump over respective congressional totals.
Biden won Arizona by 10,457 votes - not shown on above table.
Misc
CD
CA -12Pelosi77.6281,776362,950Biden86.1337,517392,046
MN - 5Omar64.3255,924398,26380.3328,766409,330
NY - 14AOC71.6152,661213,10173.3161,973220,982
Totals690,361974,314828,2561,022,358
Strong performance by Biden receiving 137,895 more votes than the total received by three popular congresswomen.

So Trump continues, four years later, to discount all of the above information & not only say he won the 2020 election but demand that his vice president say so also.  Vance not only supports the stolen election lie but has indicated he would not have done what Pence did on January 6 & presumably as vice president would have found a way for Trump to have won the 2020 presidential election.  Vance outrageously said that "I would have told the states . . . that we needed to have multiple slates of electors, & I think the U.S. Congress should have fought over it from there."  This malady ruined Vance's October 1 VP debate performance when @ the end of the debate he would not answer whether or not Trump lost the 2020 election in what Tim Walz called a damning non-answer.

We have no reason to believe that if Trump wins on November 5 he will not continue the disgraceful way he left office in January 2021.


Sunday, September 22, 2024

Abortion & Covid - Trump's Two Achilles' Heel Issues

 "I surprised them." - Donald Trump speaking about the 2016 presidential election that Democrats thought they were going to win right up to Hillary Clinton's cancellation of the planned fireworks display over the Hudson River the night before the election.


Democrats vowed to never again be surprised by Trump & in the 2024 Trump-Biden rematch each party thought they had the one opponent they could beat.  Nikki Haley astutely pointed out that the first party to drop their aging candidate would win.

When the Democrats started getting cold feet about Biden's cognitive capacity & falling poll numbers they sucker punched Trump into agreeing to a June 27 debate - over three months earlier than the usual first debate.  Biden did so miserably in the debate that he dropped out of the presidential race but has been able to continue with what must be the less important job of actually being president.   Just imagine the state of the race if Trump had not agreed to that debate - it would still be the Trump-Biden rematch with Biden's incapacity suspected but not admitted.  But Harris has quickly regained Biden's lost polling ground & in many polls it is now Trump who trails & slides a little more each day.

Trump won the 2016 presidential race 304 to 227 electoral votes.  He received 46.5% of the popular vote.  Three states provided the margin of victory: Wisconsin - 10 electoral votes by a 22,748 vote margin out of 3 million votes cast; Michigan - 16 electoral votes by a 10,704 vote margin out of 4.8 million votes cast; & Pennsylvania - 20 electoral votes by a 44,292 vote margin out of 6.2 million votes cast.  If Hillary had overcome this cumulative 77,744 vote deficit she would have won the presidency 273 electoral votes to 258 - there were seven faithless electors.

In 2020 Biden won the presidency by an almost identical electoral college margin 306 to 232 with three states providing an even closer margin of victory: Wisconsin - 10 electoral votes by a 20,608 vote margin out of 3.3 million votes cast; Arizona - 11 electoral votes by a 10,457 vote margin out of 3.4 million votes cast; Georgia - 16 electoral votes by an 11,779 vote margin out of five million votes cast.  RTE posts since the 2020 election have shown how Trump suffered this 42,844 cumulative vote deficit - for example, Trump received less votes than winning congressmen down ballot in many cases with the difference totaling more votes than Trump lost the state by.  If Trump had overcome these three infinitesimal deficits in 2020 the race would have been tied 269 electoral votes each.  Students of the Constitution know what would have happened to Trump & Biden as well as Pence & Harris.

A good indicator I go by in analyzing a presidential election is to subtract the California & New York totals from the national popular vote.  In 2016 Trump won the popular vote of the total of the other 48 states by over three million votes while in 2020 Trump still won by this metric but by only 44,590 votes so there definitely was a stronger anti-Trump movement in 2020 in the other 48 states.

In addition to Nikki's remarks about each party changing out old candidates, after the June 27 debate Nikki also recommended that Republicans prepare for the Democrats replacing Biden with a "younger" & more "vibrant" candidate which of course is exactly what happened on July 21 - right on cue three days after the Republican National Convention concluded to minimize the news coverage positive bounce coming out of the convention.  Quite clever timing.

Neither Trump nor Vance has handled the switcheroo well from the inept Biden to a black woman whose strongest issue is abortion rights.

Abortion is the issue that gets credit for thwarting the 2022 Republican midterm red wave congressional victory.  The November 2022 midterm election was held less than five months after the Supreme Court overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that had made abortion legal throughout the U.S.  Trump bragged about appointing three justices with known anti abortion views but now backs away from this fact.

Previous posts have pointed out how Trump stumbles regarding abortion.  Trump's June 27 debate statement that everyone wanted Roe v. Wade overturned with abortion policy returned to the states is delusional.  No one seeking an abortion wanted Roe overturned, meaning they would have to travel out of their home state to get an abortion let alone wanted its legality decided by 50 different state government officials.  Unbelievably Trump repeated this ridiculous claim virtually verbatim @ the September 10 debate with Harris.

The Florida citizen-led ballot initiative that would amend the state constitution by explicitly blocking the implementation of laws that "prohibit, penalize, delay, or restrict abortion before viability" has found Trump more than once on every side of the ballot initiative.  Since he is a resident of Florida Trump is being pressured to say how he will vote on the measure that will undo the six week abortion ban signed into law on May 1.  Trump originally criticized that law as "a terrible mistake," a thinly veiled attack of Ron DeSantis, but now says he is voting in its favor.  In an ultimate irony, if the initiative passes, abortion in Florida, after the Roe overturn, will have gone from a 15 week ban to a six week ban to a 22 - 26 week ban meaning a longer period to get an abortion than even before the six week ban was signed into law.  The ballot initiative needs 60% of the vote to pass.

More trouble for Trump & down ballot races - there are nine other states (Arizona, Nevada, Montana, South Dakota, Colorado, Nebraska, Missouri, New York, & Maryland) that have abortion measures on the ballot in the 2024 election cycle.

But Trump's pandering position on in vitro fertilization (IVF) as told to Tulsi Gabbard in Wisconsin the last week of August is the most pathetic: "The government is going to pay for it or we're going to mandate your insurance company to pay for it."  Republicans campaigned for years to overturn ObamaCare because, among other things, it forced insurance companies to cover pre-existing conditions.  Does this make Trump the ultimate RINO?  Also, does this seemingly desperate position take into account that the average IVF cycle in 2023 cost $12,400 - not counting medications & testing?  With fertility medications & genetic testing the cost could range between $15,000 to $30,000 per cycle.  Source GoodRx.

Based on the above, abortion has all the potential in the world to once again work against Trump & Republicans up & down the ballot.

The handling of Covid was an issue that hurt Republicans in 2020 so Harris has made it the basis of her answer regarding why the economy & inflation have been constant problems for people under Biden/Harris.  Harris claimed during their September 10 debate that Trump handed Biden/Harris such a bad economy - including "the worst unemployment since the Great Depression, the worst public health epidemic in a century, & the worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War - that "what we (Biden/Harris) have done is clean up Donald Trump's mess" @ least implying that it has taken this long to do so.

The following graphic shows that 50% of voters in 2020 understandably rated health concerns (41% Covid & 9% healthcare) as the most important issue in the 2020 presidential election - & Trump was on the defensive for most of 2020 regarding one aspect of Covid or another as described below.










  Click on graphic to enlarge

Right out of the box, in March & April 2020 Trump regularly disrupted the daily Covid TV briefings-updates by getting into arguments with members of the press over minutia while vulnerable senior citizens, who were interested in the updates as a matter of life & death, only saw non-productive sparring matches day after day.  The Covid TV briefings were supposed to be handled by Pence, & Drs. Fauci & Birx.  Trump did himself no favors the way he appeared in these briefings.

Congress started throwing money @ developing a Covid vaccine in March 2020 & by May 2020 Trump ordered the drug companies to produce a Covid-19 vaccine in rapid fire order under Operation Warp Speed (OWS) - the goal was to deliver 300 million doses of a safe, effective, vaccine for Covid-19 by January, 2021.  A typical vaccine takes 5 to 10 years to develop.  The FDA approved the Covid-19 vaccines under emergency use authorization.  My doctor told me it was an experimental approval.  Nevertheless, many employers including the United States government mandated that employees get vaccinated thereby causing more division throughout the country. 

Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy & Infectious Diseases, provided the perfect example of what the administrative state produces to solve problems.  Fauci was wrong more than he was right with orders to wear masks & then not wear masks &/or to stand six feet apart before saying this is not important.  Fauci takes no responsibility for the shutdowns of either businesses &/or schools that occurred during Covid's worst time saying he did not have the authority to lock down anything - but while he was the top medical authority real GDP fell $2 trillion taking 15 months to recover (see graphic below) & PCE consumer spending declined $2.6 trillion taking eleven months to recover.  Seems Fauci forgot the federal government's leadership in "flattening the curve" to buy time so that healthcare facilities were not overwhelmed with patients.




Click on graphic to enlarge

With all of his wrong information no one, starting with Trump, ever suggested Fauci step down or be fired.  On the contrary, @ his salary, well into his eighties, he was the highest paid federal government employee during Covid's worse times & like Joe & Jill Biden had to be dragged off the job.

And all the while Congress was passing & Trump was signing into law $3.6 trillion of Covid welfare stimulus money that is the root cause of our 40 year high inflation problem that included direct cash payments to households ($1,200 per adult plus $500 per qualifying child under 17), an additional $600 per week in unemployment compensation plus increases in food assistance, tax credits for employers who offered paid sick leave, bailouts & loans for airlines & other industries, & loans & grants for small businesses.  In addition to the Covid stimulus money Trump signed a $1.4 trillion omnibus bill to fund the government.  All in all Trump is the biggest one term deficit spender in the country's history.

But Covid is different from abortion because Covid has culpability for both Trump & Harris while the two candidates could not be more different regarding abortion - Harris is full throated for it & Trump doesn't know what to do with it.

Harris bases many parts of her campaign on the premise that Trump left Biden/Harris a mess while acknowledging that the Covid-19 pandemic caused by the Wuhan coronavirus was partially to blame.  She also thinks Trump handled Covid poorly.  The truth is that more people died per unit of time under Biden/Harris than under Trump. See graphic below & notice the steeper slope of the line under Biden/Harris from 400,000 deaths to the first million Covid-19 deaths in America than the slope of the line under Trump's term from March 1, 2020 to January 20, 2021.  And yet Harris got away with this distortion in the September 10 debate because Trump just can't focus on anything other than his blather.










Click on graphic to enlarge

How much sharper would Trump have been in the September 10 debate if he had participated in the Republican primary debates with Pence, Haley, & Christy - three people who had worked for Trump & would have added great insight into the dialogue.  But Trump only wanted to debate the hapless Biden ("anywhere, any time, any place") & as of this moment wants no parts of a second debate with Harris who masterfully baited him time after time.

Harris was extremely well coached & prepared for the September 10 debate.  She responded to the questions each time exactly as she wanted to, telling just what she wanted, leaving out what she didn't want to bring up, but always ending her allotted time with a dig to stir Trump up like saying people leave Trump's rallies early out of boredom, the Wharton school scores Trump's economic plan poorly, or that Trump inherited millions of dollars to start his business.  In a failing junior high school type debate performance Trump was so distracted by Harris's maneuver that he never got around to pointing out the weakness of her response to the issue raised in the original question.  Trump could not resist talking about his crowd sizes or professors @ Wharton who he claimed think highly of his terrible tariff plans leaving Harris to smilingly go on to the next question only to repeat this mouse trap plan again & again.

Will any of this make a difference for the voters who are undecided?  Who knows what to think about an electorate who has given us this terrible choice for president?