The biggest vote swings against Trump were in the traditionally Republican states (File)
Simple voting data contradicts Donald Trump’s wild claim that the Democrats have selectively manipulated the votes in certain key states and turned a huge (“huuuuge”) loss into a false victory.
US election analysts seldom use the ‘Butler Swing’. Perhaps it’s too British? However, in analysing the 2020 US elections, the Butler swing reveals interesting voting patterns. And exposes the Trump wild hypothesis. Consider these two simple data arrays.
First, let’s examine Trump’s claim that the Democrats focused on Swing States to generate a huge number of bogus votes. The data shows that’s just not true.
The biggest vote swings against Trump were not in the Swing States but in the traditionally Republican states. In fact, the swing against Trump at -2% in Republican states is almost twice as high as the swing against Trump of -1.1% in the Swing States. And even more revealing perhaps, the states where the Democrats would hypothetically be most able to manipulate votes would have been the traditionally Democrat states where they have better control of the levers of power. Instead, the Democrat states had the least swing, only -0.2% against Trump.
Note: What is a Swing in Votes: A swing is simply the change in the % vote of a party from one election to the next. If there are only two parties, the positive swing towards one party will, by definition, be equal to the negative swing away from the other party. The Butler Swing in a two-party system is half the change in the margin of victory. For example, a swing of -2% means a party’s vote has dropped by 2% from one election to the next. The Butler theory of ‘uniform swing’ says that if there is a swing away from a party, there will tend to be a negative swing in all/most regions of the country.
Second, Butler’s theory of ‘uniform swing’ also tends to refute Trump’s view that bogus votes in some states led to a sharp increase in Democrats’ votes and that is why the Democrats cheated and won those key states (these are the states where Trump’s legal team have gone to court to overturn the voters’ decision).
In fact, quite the reverse is the case: this 2020 election has seen a remarkably ‘uniform swing’ across the states of America – there are no ‘bumps’ or manipulated anomalies in the state-wise voting data.
The overall swing against Trump since 2016 was negative 0.9% – and in a sure sign of uniform swing, as many 45 of the 51 states had a negative swing against Trump. Only 6 states had small swings in favour of Trump.
The voting patterns in Swing States were not anomalies at all – on the contrary, only one Swing State stood out against the nationwide uniform swing against Trump (Florida had a small 1% swing towards Trump) – all other swing states followed the uniform all-America pattern with swings away from Trump.