Democracy Institute Director Patrick Basham appeared on Fox News over the weekend with a series of “statistically implausible” events regarding presumptive-president-elect Joseph R. Biden’s election performance.
The pollster told “Live, Liberty & Levin” host Mark Levin that “something very strange” happened during the 2020 presidential election, given his deep dive into the numbers.
“Everything suddenly went very strange in the middle of the night,” Mr. Basham said regarding President Trump’s performance, which up until then was tracking with “a dozen or more of these [non-polling] metrics … [that] have a 100% accuracy rate in terms of predicting the winner of the presidential election.”
Mr. Basham noted, for instance, that Mr. Biden under-performed in most of the country while simultaneously over-performing in key counties of swing states that he needed to win.
“That could happen,” the pollster said. “It’s just very, very unusual. And if this was an exceptional election as some people assert, and that’s why the numbers seems strange, then you would expect it to be — [to] have a uniformity to that exceptionalism. So Joe Biden would have increased his support not just in key precincts in key cities in key swing states and nowhere else, but he would have had a sort of uniform victory. He was the challenger. … And yet, he has done very poorly in most of the country except where it absolutely mattered.”
Mr. Levin’s guest then cited party registration trends, individual donation statistics, voter enthusiasm polls, Google searches, and other metrics that have historically predicted the Election Day winner until this year.
“So if we are to accept that Biden won against the trend of all these non-polling metrics, it not only means that one of these metrics was inaccurate this time for the first time ever, it means that each one of these metrics was wrong for the first time and at the same time as all of the others,” Mr. Basham continued.
One possible explanation offered by the pollster related to ballot rejection rates, which went from double-digits in the primaries to “less than 1 percent, often very close to zero” on Election Day in certain precincts.
Mr. Trump was quick to concur.
“SO TRUE,” he tweeted in response to Mr. Levin’s show. “NO WAY WE LOST THIS ELECTION!”
The president has vowed to take his legal case pertaining to allegations of wide-spread voter fraud all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
SO TRUE. NO WAY WE LOST THIS ELECTION! https://t.co/FC4XtNzuxo
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 7, 2020
• Douglas Ernst can be reached at dernst@washingtontimes.com.
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