NOTE: This analysis originally ran 11/9/20, re-running with revised text and final vote tallies, plus corrections to the Kanye West/Howie Hawkins ballot situations

The numbers have been finalized in Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin. In 2020 these three states were somewhat analogous to what the former-now-again Blue Wall of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania were to Trump in 2016, a triple tipping point on the electoral college map that were decided by painfully close shoulda-woulda-coulda type margins. It’s been obsessed over by many these last four years, but it’ll be a little less painful now to post it up again for readers, I would think.

Yeah, that sucked because as we all know it came down to a combined 77,744 votes in three states to make Trump the leader of the free world. Stein’s vote eclipsed Trump’s margin in all three of those states delivering a 306 to 232 electoral college win – which underscores the pretty obvious reasons why Republicans were trying all sorts of scams to get Kanye West and Green Party candidate Howie Hawkins on the ballot this year. They knew vote-splitting mattered for Hillary then, and it matters all the more for Trump now after the election.

For those interested, Biden’s margin of victory was larger than Jorgensen’s share of the vote in Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Nebraska’s second district – though just barely in Pennsylvania which was an 81,660 vote Biden win versus 79,397 for Jorgensen.

Anyway, it’s certainly satisfying to see the smug MAGA assholes having to watch their Orange Lord and Savior lose by a combined total of 43,735 across three states, but this was tight. If you look at the map and flip Arizona, then Georgia, then Wisconsin back to red, then you’re at a 269-269 tie, which might as well be a Trump win – lose NE-2 and Biden loses 270-268 outright. It’s a blessing that there is this 3-state buffer in the electoral college – if this were one or even two states Trump and his asshole friends would’ve fought much, much, harder to try and take them back for him. All of those “national meltdown” apocalypse stories we got before the election would’ve been a lot closer to being realized than they are now with Trump’s kicking and screaming yet pointless slide toward giving in to the inevitable.

I can’t speak to how many of these Jorgensen voters would’ve been Trump voters if Trump himself had acted like an adult these last four years, just as I can’t say how many 2016 Jill Stein voters would’ve gone with Hillary if they hadn’t been so butthurt over her defeating Bernie. Some people vote Libertarian because they simply like to vote Libertarian, same as some Green voters are actual Greens. But if you’re among the many who believe that Jill Stein did a lot to put Trump in the White House then it shouldn’t be a stretch to believe Jo Jorgensen did a lot to take Trump out of it. Personally I’m not sure, but I do absolutely think it happened in the 2019 Kentucky gubernatorial election, when the Dem beat an extremely unpopular incumbent Republican by about 5,000 votes that a Libertarian candidate pulled in 23,000 and change – and the only one of six statewide races that wasn’t a decisive win for the GOP that year.

There’s been a lot of backbiting among the Dems these days over who’s to blame for the party falling short in the Senate and losing ground in the House, but I think it’s time to acknowledge one thing they got right (not they didn’t get a lot of other things right, Trump is gone after all): aggressively fighting ballot access battles and successfully icing Kanye West and Howie Hawkins.

Aside from Hawkins in Michigan, neither of those clowns made it on to the ballot in any of the states that Biden 2020 flipped from Trump 2016 due to Republican and/or their own incompetence in the effort (West didn’t even bother trying in Georgia, Michigan, or Pennsylvania) – and Dems exploiting those mistakes in court challenges. One could even say that the GOP spent so much time and energy working to get leftist(ish) candidates on the ballot that they forgot to protect their own flank on the right. How’s that for cruel irony?