by Sharon Rondeau
(Nov. 7, 2024) — Reflecting on Tuesday’s presidential election on his Thursday program, podcaster Dan Bongino observed that the total reported votes cast nationwide fall far short of those reported from the November 3, 2020 presidential election.
Trump has always maintained he won the 2020 race despite the mainstream media declaring Democrat Joe Biden the victor after four days of extended counting.
Remote voting saw an unprecedented surge in 2020 purportedly from the COVID-19 pandemic wherein the public was discouraged from congregating in large groups or engaging in unnecessary contact with others.
On the evening of November 3, 2020, Trump had been leading in the “swing” states of Pennsylvania, Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, Wisconsin and Georgia. At some point in the early morning hours of November 4, however, “hundreds of thousands of mail-in ballots” suddenly poured in for the Biden/Harris ticket, erasing Trump’s leads in all six.
On November 7, 2020, CNN reported:
As he watched his hopes of reelection being strangled with each tranche of votes in Pennsylvania, Trump lashed out on Twitter during the tense vote count, attempting to undermine democratic institutions with demands like “STOP THE COUNT.”
The President falsely claimed the election was being stolen from him as many mail-in ballots, which were often counted after Election Day votes, landed in the column of his opponent.
North Carolina, another swing state, was ultimately placed in Trump’s column in both elections.
Trump challenged the outcome in multiple lawsuits, none of which was heard on the merits. A 17-state case filed at the U.S. Supreme Court, Texas v. Pennsylvania, claiming certain “non-legislative actors” in the states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Georgia “repeatedly stripped away the statutory safeguards that the ‘Legislature thereof’ had enacted to protect against fraud in voting by mail,” was rejected.
Trump and 18 others were prosecuted by Fulton District, GA Attorney Fani Willis for allegedly engaging in a “conspiracy” to derail Biden’s reported victory and similarly by the U.S. Justice Department through its appointment of Special Counsel Jack Smith.
Now that Trump has been declared the president-elect, according to Justice Department guidelines, he cannot be prosecuted criminally while in office, and Smith has reportedly been instructed to close his office.
Willis’s case, also, appears to be ill-fated. “…prosecuting Trump for the eight 2020 election-related charges he is facing appears to be an impossibility while he is in office,” The Washington Examiner reported Thursday.
The Federal Election Commission (FEC), which compiles its statistics from the states, reports that in 2020, Biden received 81,283,501 votes vs. Trump’s 74,223,975. Both numbers were record-setting.
CNN’s final numbers were slightly different, with Biden reportedly receiving 81,284,666 votes and Trump 74,224,319.
Tens of thousands of votes were cast for third-party candidates, the FEC reported, from the “Green” “Unity,” “Bread and Roses,” Independent, Constitution and other political parties.
Bongino told his audience he personally believes Trump was the rightful winner of the 2020 election. Ironically, he said, had that been the case, Trump would be nearing the end of his second term, which he said would have been to the great relief of Democrats.
“…because of this anomaly, now they got four more years, and if [Vice-President-Elect] JD [Vance] goes on to win four more years, you could have 12 more years of the Trump dynasty,” he concluded his thought.
Though initially commenting on the reported presidential popular vote totals, at approximately the 20-minute mark, Bongino launched into an explanation of the Electoral College, the mechanism whereby the U.S. president is actually elected.
The total number of votes cast, Bongino presented in a graphic he located on “X,” formerly Twitter, increased dramatically between the 2016 presidential election and the 2020 election, from 128,838,342 to 155,507,476.
As Bongino did not identify the precise source of the graphic, The Post & Email checked the corresponding FEC reports, whose figures precisely match those in the “X” graphic.
In 2016, the FEC reported, Democrat Hillary Clinton received 65,853,514 votes, while Trump, who lost the popular vote but won the electoral vote, received 62,984,828 votes for a total of 128,838,342.
In the 2012 contest between incumbent Barack Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney, the FEC shows a total of 126,849,299 votes cast.
In 2008, a total of 129,446,839 presidential votes were reportedly cast.
The 2004 re-election campaign of George W. Bush gave him 62,040,610 votes to John Kerry’s 59,028,444 for a total of 121,069,054.
“You wonder why a lot of Republicans are like…” Bongino said, gesturing with a head-scratching. “So you got this pandemic thing; you do a mass mail-in ballot election for the first time…You’ve got states like Pennsylvania that randomly change the rules at the last minute. You’ve got the emergence of these drop-boxes all over the place. All of a sudden something like close to 20 million new votes show up; 18, 20 million new votes show up; they don’t appear again, and liberals are like, ‘Man, where did all those 18 million votes come from? I don’t know, man; I have no idea.’ If there was ever a vindication day, this should be it.”
Tuesday’s election appeared to have few, if any, of the problems arising in 2020, with most states declaring their totals later that night in keeping with the local time their polls closed. Early Wednesday morning, Trump had earned 267 electoral votes and was leading in the swing states of Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada and Michigan, which were still to be finalized but in a scenario in which Democrat nominee Kamala Harris had no path to victory.
At approximately 4:24 p.m. EST on Wednesday, Harris gave a concession speech, and no legal challenges have been mounted to Trump’s popular and electoral win.
Former Trump senior strategic adviser and “War Room” host Steve Bannon, who was recently released from a four-month federal prison sentence for failing to testify to the committee allegedly investigating the January 6, 2021 “insurrection” at the U.S. Capitol, also began his Thursday show by pointing out the vast difference between vote totals in 2016 and 2020.
Excoriating certain members of the mainstream press for their Wednesday headlines, which included describing Trump’s “comeback” as “improbable” or claiming he “lost” 2020, Bannon said, “He didn’t lose it, Wall Street Journal; they stole it from him, and the math — there’ll be a lot of blowback from my staff — but the math is 12 million votes short. Where are they? They stole it in 2020, and we have to have an investigation of that.”