YES, THERE IS A SIMPLER EXPLANATION.

The opening hour or so of the Clay Travis and Buck Sexton show today got into riling up the Trump voters probably over nothing.  Last week New York's Times did an analysis of voting patterns (now that most of the votes are counted) and concluded that losing Democrat Kamala Harris lost more votes than Donald Trump gained.

Donald Trump won the election by winning the most votes. He improved on his totals, adding about 2.5 million more votes than four years ago. But just as consequential to the outcome were Kamala Harris’s losses: She earned about 7 million fewer votes compared with Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s performance in 2020.

Ms. Harris failed to find new voters in three of the seven swing states and in 80 percent of counties across the country, a New York Times analysis shows. In the places where she matched or exceeded Mr. Biden’s vote totals, she failed to match Mr. Trump’s gains.

Mr Travis is puzzled by the large vote total Dementia Joe racked up (it's a common trope among the populists, see also Stephen "Vodka Pundit" Green's references to "President LOL 81 million") and asserts "Watch Clay dig into the New York Times story of the final election totals and ask how it’s possible that, in fair elections, Joe Biden outperformed both Kamala and Barack Obama. (Hint: It’s not.)"

Sorry, it is, and in "Conning the Median Voters to Protect Democracy," I broke down how it was likely to transpire.  That's a longish post from early July, 2024, before Mr Trump was shot at or Mr Biden abdicated the nomination.  The key is in the discontent of median-ish voters.

I submit, dear reader, that Mr Trump did a lot, both during his presidency and in the months after the election, to disgrace himself and, for the short term, make the reluctant voters who ticked the box for that mediocre politician comfortable with their choice.  It is what that mediocre politician did afterward, starting with the cancellation of the Keystone pipeline and the opening of the borders, that has made those reluctant Biden voters regret their choice.  Now the way in which that establishment installed that mediocre politician might have set in motion forces that will be more destructive to its continuance than the meanest of social media posts from Mar-a-Lago.

Put simply, some of those Obama-Trump-Biden voters from 2020 might have switched back to Trump, and some of them, having seen both Trump 1.0 and Biden 1.0 saw enough that was unsatisfactory in either presidency to have stayed home this time.  A Politico analysis of turnout and voting in six swing state cities (Atlanta, Charlotte, Las Vegas, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and Phoenix) suggests as much.

While there are differences across the cities, a POLITICO analysis found the greatest decline in voter participation in all six appears to be in predominantly low-income Black and Hispanic neighborhoods. There were some shifts toward Trump, but it was ultimately the turnout drop in staunchly Democratic precincts that had the greatest impact on urban margins.

The analysis of nearly 3,000 precincts — the most granular election results available for the biggest cities in six of the presidential battleground states — across Philadelphia, Atlanta, Charlotte, Milwaukee, Phoenix and Las Vegas paints a vivid picture for why Harris lost ground. (Complete precinct results for Detroit, the biggest city in Michigan, were not available as of Friday.)

How individual voters cast their ballots is not known, but stark residential segregation along lines of race and class suggests clear patterns in which voters swung toward Trump the most, and who stayed home this time.

For instance, Trump received nearly 3,400 more votes than he had in 2020 across the 476 “predominantly Black” precincts in the six cities, defined for POLITICO’s analysis as places where at least 85 percent of residents are Black. But Harris received about 17,500 fewer than Biden had, a far greater impact on the overall margins.

That decline in city voter participation does not alone explain Harris’ defeat — Trump improved on his 2020 margins all across the battlegrounds, including in purple suburbs and rural red counties. But the turnout slump prevented Harris from building an urban firewall in areas that have long been bastions of Democratic power, and it portends challenges Democrats will have to address in future elections.

The Times assessment also notes that drop in participation.

Larry Sabato, the director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, acknowledged that Biden voters who swung toward Mr. Trump played a part in Ms. Harris’s loss, but pointed to low Democratic turnout as the larger factor.

“They just weren’t excited,” Mr. Sabato said of Democratic voters. “They were probably disillusioned by inflation, maybe the border. And they didn’t have the motivation to get up and go out to vote.”

There's one further element, which contributes to the continuing claims from the populist Right that the 2020 presidential election was rigged, and that is a claimed trend-line from Mr Obama's 2012 total to Mrs Clinton's 2016 total to Mrs Emhoff's 2024 total, and Mr Biden's 2020 count is (LOL) way above that trend line.

I raise two objections.  First, if Democrats were manufacturing presidential votes, couldn't they have manufactured a bigger House majority in 2020?  Second, in the Times observation, "Both parties earned more votes in 2020 than in 2016," there's a further wrinkle.  It's possible, after more careful inspection of the final vote tallies, that the change in margin of plurality and in participation, from 2020 to 2024, is on the order of ten to twenty people in each precinct.  A proper comparison requires the final, certified total vote for each precinct.  Newsies have been known to call elections before all the ballots are counted, and that sometimes means before all the absentee and mail-in ballots have been counted.  Thus what you see in Wednesday's paper is often an incomplete total, and the counting and ballot verification continues until election officials submit a final total for certification.  In 2020, thanks to the corona shutdowns, there were a lot more mail-in, meaning absentee, ballots to count, and that delayed the calling of the election in some states.

Let's all enjoy Thanksgiving and the beginning of Advent and wait for those certified totals, generally coming in mid-December, before claiming anything more nefarious than more than a few 2020 voters staying home on Election Day this year.