At last week’s election, the only states in which one of the presidential candidates got less than 50% of the total vote were Michigan and Wisconsin. And even in those two states, the margin between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris was greater than the vote for any single minor party or independent candidate.
So much for the hype over child abuse supporter Chase Oliver.
I’d like to point out that those were the only two swing states where RFK Jr. was still on the ballot. The argument could still be made that he had an impact on swinging the election, by dropping out. At the time RFK Jr. dropped out, he was polling around 4% in those states. If only half of his supporters switched over to Trump (and most of his remaining supporters voted for him anyway or went somewhere other than Harris, such as to Jill Stein, for example, or simply didn’t vote) then that 2% that switched their vote to Trump would still be larger than Trump’s margin of victory in either state.
Also, by remaining on the ballot (against his choice) the 0.5% that RFK Jr. did get was enough to keep Trump from reaching 50%, which is significant in and of itself. That means that Trump can hardly claim to have a mandate from voters in those states (although he will claim that anyway) and RFK Jr.’s votes also would have been enough to force a runoff, if we actually required a majority vote in each state to win that state’s electoral votes. That is one electoral reform that every state should seriously look into, so that we never get another Ross Perot 1992 scenario again, with Bill Clinton getting elected with only around 43% percent of the popular vote.