SATURDAY: He made a "very important" point!

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 2024

There is no cure for hapless: In all candor, it would be hard to be more clueless.

It was 9:25 on Friday morning. On Morning Joe, Joe Scarborough was describing the lay of the American land.

Through no fault of her own, Jen Psaki was forced to deal with his remarkable cluelessness. At any rate, in a striking display, the cable news star said this:

SCARBOROUGH (11/8/24): I'm a huge believer in humility in victory and humility in defeat...I just want to follow up on something you said, because what Democrats need to be asking is, "Why did so many people stay home and not vote?"

PSAKI: Yes.

SCARBOROUGH: Two numbers. The first number is, 12 million less people voted for Kamala Harris than Joe Biden.  

But here's the kicker. Are you ready?

Already, the youthful analysts were glancing around in a state of pre-despair. What was the cable star talking about? Did he actually think that all the votes, nationwide, had already been recorded?

It almost sounded like his did! And then, quite quickly, sure enough! His oration continued as shown:

SCARBOROUGH (continuing from above): Two numbers. The first number is 12 million less people voted for Kamala Harris than Joe Biden. But here's, here's the kicker. Are you ready for this?

Donald Trump got four million votes less, Jen, this year than he got four years ago. If Democrats had turned out, and Independents and Republicans... 

He blathered a bit at this point. But as you can see by clicking here, this was the gist of his speech:

SCARBOROUGH: Two numbers. The first number is 12 million less people voted for Kamala Harris than Joe Biden. But here's, here's the kicker. Are you ready for this?

Donald Trump got four million votes less, Jen—

PSAKI: Yes!

SCARBOROUGH: —four million votes less this year than he got four years ago. If Democrats had turned out, and Independents and Republicans—

[...]

And Jen, how shocking is it that, again, Donald Trump got four million votes less, and now Democrats are going, "Oh my gosh, this is the greatest landslide of all time. How did this happen?"

It happened because they stayed home, or because a lot of voters that voted for her last time stayed home. Forgive me for going on, but this is an important point.

As you can see if you click that link, Scarborough continued making his astonishing misstatement. On a vastly brighter side, the Internet Archive is back on its feet, a full month after being taken down by a cyberattack. 

For that reason, we're able to link you to videotape of this fuller pseudo-discussion.

As for Psaki, she gently tried to mention the fact that many votes were still uncounted. But in accord with Hard Cable News Law, she didn't tell her cable news host that he didn't know what he was talking about—that he seemed to be astoundingly clueless.

It's hard to know less than Scarborough did as he made his important point. It's as we've told you in recent days:

There's never been a cure for human. That becomes especially true when very large corporate salaries are handed out to cable news stars in search of larger cable ratings and higher profit margins.

It would be hard to know less than Scarborough did that day. Today, with millions of votes still unrecorded, let's take a look at the actual record as it currently exists:

As of today, Candidate Trump has in fact received more votes than he did in 2020. Here are the nationwide vote totals for the past three elections, even as millions of votes remain unrecorded this year:

Nationwide popular vote, 2016 election
Clinton: 65,853,51 (48.2%) 
Trump: 62,984,828 (46.1%)
(Turnout: 60.1%)

Nationwide popular vote, 2020 election
Biden: 81,283,501 (51.3%)
Trump: 74,223,975 (46.8%)
(Turnout:  66.6%)

Nationwide popular vote (to date), 2024 election
Trump: 74,263,792 (50.5%)
Harris: 70,355,827 (47.9%)
(Turnout: To be determined)

As you can see, Trump's vote total has already surpassed his total from 2020. It's true that Harris trails the Biden total from 2020, but she's now eleven million votes behind that total, with millions of votes to go before we get to sleep.

At this point, a bit of unintentional comedy comes in. 

If you click the kink from the Internet Archive, you can see the chyron producers were playing even as their host kept misstating. Their own chyron was showing Trump with more than 73 million votes. 

Sad! He was already very close to surpassing his 2020 total.

Even as we type today, how many votes remain uncounted and unrecorded? Out in some of the western states, the wheels of vote-counting grind slow.

According to the AP's current (ongoing) tabulation, the state of California's vote is only 63% reported. That suggests that as any as three or four million votes may still be unrecorded in that large state alone.

Other states in the laid-back west are reporting their votes at the usual leisurely pace. According to the AP tally, these are the percentages currently reported:

Percenatge of votes already reported:
California: 63%
Oregon: 84%
Washington: 90%
Arizona: 82%
Utah: 80%
Colorado: 91%

For the record, it isn't just the western states. Right here in Maryland, on the east coast, the percentage stands at 85%. 

By the way:

Does that mean that 15% of Maryland's total vote remains unreported? Or does it mean that the vote in 15% of Maryland's jurisdictions hasn't yet been reported?

What does that percentage actually mean? The AP tally doesn't say! We humans are strongly inclined to blow past such distinctions. We're disinclined to notice the fact that such distinctions exist.

All in all, across the nation, millions of votes remain unrecorded. It happens this way every four years. Every four years, people like Scarborough don't seem to have grasped this fact.

Meanwhile, full disclosures:

As those votes are added to the total, Candidate Trump's victory margin will likely move toward two percentage points, or possibly even less. It's even possible that his share of the nationwide vote will drop below 50 percent.

This isn't exactly the major landslide you'll see some cable stars cite, especially (but not exclusively) in Red America's cable landscape.

That said, Candidate Trump has already surpassed his 2020 total, and he'll likely add several million votes to his total before the counting is done. Candidate Harris will still lose the nationwide vote, but the margin by which she lost will almost surely grow smaller.

Scarborough's one point will remain true. If Harris had matched Biden's total vote from 2020, she would have won the election. 

(Eventually, this year's turnout figure will even be known!)

At some point, we'll actually know what the real numbers actually are.  But the shortfall will be much smaller than the self-assured cable news star was saying as Psaki played along. 

That said:

On Friday morning, there he sat, the most clueless man on the planet. He had an important point to make—and he seemed to have no earthly idea what he was talking about. 

Just a guess:

He'd probably watched the Ravens and the Bengals with Jack on Thursday night. As a general matter, this is the way this cable news program had gone all through the course of this White House campaign.

There is no cure for such conduct. Major experts, now in hiding, describe this remarkable detachment from fact as "human all the way down." 

They insist that it's unlikely to change. "For better or worse, we're built this way," these experts hotly proclaim.

Coming next week: The endless stream of endless examples of Blue America's endless paths to self-defeat