Seismic Shift

The heart of the matter untouched by the campaign

Enchanted Wave, photogravure etching

Buyers’ regret: Which State’s voters ‘migrated’ toward Trump in the highest proportion between 2020 and 2024? ‘How much did lockdown and mRNA regret drive voters toward Trump?’, asks Alex Berenson. ‘A reader email suggests one reason the link may not be coincidental.’

Let’s assume here that the amount of cheating (dead, non-resident, non-citizen, or otherwise ineligible voters, and dodgy Dominion vote-weighting algorithms) was about the same in 2020 and 2024. Time-series data reveal trends with greater clarity than any one poll or election, which is only a momentary snapshot. The table below shows change over time, regardless of electoral result in each State. Even in States that Trump apparently lost, the margin of loss dwindled, and that signifies a notable trend. In which State, then, did the greatest move toward Trump occur in 2024?

California! (The picture above is a view of Ocean Beach, San Francisco.) He lost California by 29% in 2020, and by 17% in 2024, marking a 12% gain, the highest in the nation. This gain occurred despite the departure of hundreds of thousands of Trump partisans to other States such as Texas and Florida. Second greatest gain: New York, at 11.6%! New Jersey, Massachusetts, Maryland, and Illinois also posted solid gains for Trump in 2024 over 2020. Here are the margins of Trump’s gains, regardless of whether he won or lost the State:

California: 12.0% (-29% to -17%)

New York: 11.6% (-23.1% to -11.5%)

New Jersey: 10.9% (-15.9% to -5.0%)

Maryland: 10.4% (-33.2% to -22.8%)

Florida: 9.7% (+3.4% to +13.1%)

Massachusetts : 8.8% (-33.5% to -24.7%)

Illinois: 8.6% (-17.0% to -8.4%)

Mississippi: 8.4% (+16.5% to +24.9%)

RI: 7.3% (-20.8% to - 13.5%)

Alex Berenson’s alert reader suggests this correlation means that the States with the most interfering officialdom generated the highest degree of rejection, relative to 2020, of failed covid policies. Specifically, the most draconian restrictions on medical freedom and on business and religious assembly, led to the most dramatic voter movements toward Trump. This was not a casual decision to substitute one brand of politician for another brand equally distant from personal concerns. No, something happened in the intervening years that moved very large numbers of voters in the most personal of ways: They got sick, and family and friends died. After covid peaked, they still got sick, and saw others die — and it obviously wasn’t from covid. The sickness and death were from the covid shots that they were forced, pressured, or cajoled into taking. And in the States most subservient to these demands, with the highest ‘uptake’ of covid shots, the most vociferous defense of authoritarian behavior — it was precisely those States whose voters registered the greatest shift toward Trump. They finally accepted the implications of their own experience of sickness and of otherwise inexplicable deaths all around them. They voted for someone who, like themselves, was fooled by official quackery and malice; who (they hoped) regretted it, guided by Robert F Kennedy Jr to correct that horrible mistake. And not incidentally, they voted for someone who survived two assassination attempts, exemplifying the courage of a flawed human being.

Berenson’s reader comes from the Beltway, that area around Washington DC full of people and companies that do business with the Federal Government. He describes the ambiance:

I work for a DC-based software company and I sell to the Federal government. My colleagues and clients are "We Believe" yard sign people who posted pics of their COVID shot cards on social media. In 2022, these same people raced to get their booster, most got sick from the shot, got COVID two weeks later, and spent the rest of the fall bragging about how all that made them smart.

After several years, despite the most fervent belief in the covidian cult, they began to doubt their faith in this new-found religion:

Flash forward to 2024: It seems to me that an unusually high number of my colleagues and clients have been very sick this since Labor Day. The duration and severity of the illness has made this notable; multiple cases of pneumonia and colds/COVID so severe they cannot even work from home and the severity lasts for days. Persistent 102+ fevers for adults, ER visits, etc.

Not through argument and not through any conscious change of philosophy or affiliation, but through their own personal experience, common-sense gained ascendency over what had been repeatedly drilled into them by authorities, media, and associates. They wished to avert illness and death. They voted for Trump not because they liked his personality — most in the Northeast and Pacific Coast States did not — but because they did not want to get sick and die. As Berenson’s WDC observer wrote:

And for the first time, people are questioning if the COVID shots are playing a role. I have had multiple ‘I think these COVID shots may have messed up my immune system’ conversations. As you know, in these parts, until very recently, that statement was about as acceptable as dressing up as Robert E. Lee for a Halloween party. And these people are not MAGA people or openly political in casual conversation at all. But they seem genuine, and, candidly, they seem a little scared, especially for their kids.

As Berenson notes, the data connecting personal experience to voting behavior in 2024 has not yet been gathered. Nor could it be, since the choice in 2024 sprang from the most fundamentally private concern — survival of oneself and of one’s family and friends. Ever since survey research was first applied to political campaigns, by Paul Lazarsfeld and associates in the 1940s (and before), Personal Influence exercised in small intimate groups has always been proved to be decisive. Yet what is personally salient changes in unpredictable ways. Each time, it must always be re-discovered. The pollsters and focus-groupers peer into their rear-view mirrors and miss what’s going on all around them. In 2024, not even the many appeals to national sovereignty, restoration of freedom, replacing the wellsprings of prosperity, and so on, made as much of a difference to voters as Trump’s constituents hoped. In retrospect, for all the billions of dollars spent on this campaign, for all the messaging about the national and international importance of this choice, the campaign and its voluminous commentary rarely if ever got to the heart of the matter: survival and health.