I don't know the answer. I don't know much about Kentucky at all. But from far away it seems odd. (Kathy in Kentucky, any insights you can share would be appreciated. And, btw, it turns out my post on when states can count wasn't totally accurate. Kentucky wasn't last in vote counting. Alaska, while legally allowed to count ballots starting after the polls closed, chose to wait a week to do so. Or maybe Kentucky just chucked all the mail-in votes.) [UPDATE Nov 8: Be sure to see Kathy's comments below. It answers a bunch of my questions.]
Biden got just 771,884 votes in Kentucky.
Here's the official vote tally from the LA Times:
And from the Kentucky election website, here are the numbers of registered voters. There are 1.67 million Democratic voters. I cut it off so the numbers would be large enough to see here, but you can go see the original at the Kentucky website.
That means less than half the Democratic voters voted for Biden.
Given that this is Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's home state and he's shown he's willing to do anything to keep his seat and his majority to thwart Democrats since Obama was first elected, I think this ought to be looked into to be sure that there wasn't serious election irregularities.
"Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell squashed two bills intended to ensure voting security on Thursday, just one day after former special counsel Robert Mueller warned that Russians were attempting to sabotage the 2020 presidential elections "as we sit here."
McConnell said he wouldn't allow a vote on the bills because they were "so partisan," but, as previously reported, earlier this year McConnell received a slew of donations from four of the top voting machine lobbyists in the country."
Here's a longer New Yorker article entitled Mitch McConnell is Making the 2020 Election Open Season for Hackers
This post was in response to a Tweet that pointed out the numbers.
[Note: There are so many things to write about on the election. I'm resisting my natural tendency to try to integrate 20 different threads into one comprehensive post. Instead I'll just post on relatively discreet topics. I'll either let the reader pull them all together or maybe at the end I'll figure out a way to connect all the dots.]
OK Steve, you asked...
ReplyDeleteIn Kentucky "Democratic" doesn't mean the same as it does in most other states. Yes, there are liberal/progressives in Louisville, Lexington, and some of the university towns, but in the rest of the state "Democratic" means what it meant 50 years ago. Namely, segregationist, conservative, suspicious of outsiders, defensive about being undereducated and underemployed, devoted to political spoils in the form of jobs. DINO all the way. The demise of coal mining was hard on the Democratic party, not that Republicans have actually done anything to keep miners employed but they have done a better job of bitching and moaning and pretending to "protect" mining jobs. Obama made an excellent scapegoat for Republicans in KY, because of the alleged war on coal, and because the general rank and file voters here are too dumb to understand that Obamacare was good for them, and because -- wait for it -- he's black.
I have no idea why so many voters have maintained their Democratic registration while voting for Trump and McConnell (and don't forget our other wackjob senator, Rand Paul). Maybe for old times sake. We do have a Democratic governor, elected last year, but he won only because our previous governor, who was running again, was universally despised. Every other state elected official is Republican.
It's difficult to run as a Dem in Kentucky. Amy McGrath, who had huge gobs of money, experimented with running as a Trump lover and said she would have voted to confirm Brett Kavanaugh. (She got tougher as the campaign wore on, after that didn't work too well.) The last person to run against McConnell, also a woman, refused to answer when asked if she had voted for Obama!!
Both my husband and I were raised in the north (Michigan and Wisconsin) and many people there were not well educated, but they all would think "I want my children to be better off than I am, so they have to go to school." Here a whole lot of people think "I'm ignorant and uneducated, and I'm just as good as you are, maybe even better, and my kids are going to be ignorant and uneducated and they'll be just as good as you are, you damn elitist pig." So we never spend money on education, because that would require raising taxes, and we stay dumb from one generation to the next.
I moved here in 1966, planning to work here for a year or so and move on to a more glorious career. We often discuss why we keep living here. It's never going to change, I'm afraid.
Thank you for your insightful explanation, Kathy. The choice of Amy McGrath was curious, but anyone more "liberal" would have stood even less of a chance. (I still do not trust Mitch in any way, however.) Combination of the voter mindset you mention and the corruption, IMO, of the GOP.
DeleteI grew up in Orange County, CA and understand something about the fierce, arrogantly ignorant alt-right bubble -- altho O.C. (since Obama) has shifted enough to elect Blue. But I would still not talk politics there when I visit my family, or put "Libtard" signage near me.
You're right not to trust Mitch. He is one of the most effective and evil tools of the dark-money cabal and wouldn't know a principle if it shot him in the head.
DeleteThanks Kathy. That clarifies a lot.
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