It’s just bare motivated reasoning. Their football team had the ball so anything they do is okay. Meanwhile when Reagan started showing dementia symptoms they made him go get evaluated.
Of course I've heard him speak, he does press conferences every single day, sometimes for hours. He takes questions all the time including impromptu ones on Air Force One. He did 3 hour podcasts during the campaign, he's incredibly poised and this has been affirmed by everyone from Jensen Huang to Modi to Tim Cook to Bill Maher.
Biden was kept hidden and carefully managed and his staffers had to cut him off and remind him of the current year. You may not like Trump, but everyone that works with him closely, recognizes he is more intellectual than his public persona would seem to imply.
So why does he sound like an incomprehensible moron? And why are all of his plains straight up broken, like tariffs that would have been appropriate to stop the destruction of American industry twenty years ago, but at this point are just closing the barn door long after the horse moved away? If he's really some wise leader and only rambled incoherent word salad to appeal to the "common man" and get elected, he has now been elected. Shouldn't he be revealing his wise persona, leading, and bringing the skeptical into the fold with some intelligent policies?
Most elderly people are capable of sitting around for hours rambling, especially on political topics. In fact, what's difficult is getting them not to. Occam's says that affirming the emperor is definitely wearing clothes is just the type of politically correct fluffing that happens in every autocracy. Lying to ingratiate yourself with flattery certainly costs less than paying larger bribes.
LOL. Sure he can ramble for hours. But if you read a transcript of any of those conferences, he's literally incomprehensible, can't string more than two logical sentences together. It's just a jumble salad of key trigger words. And when he does present facts, it's either incorrect or an outright lie. It's an embarrassment, frankly.
Used GPT to get the numbers real quick and it came up differently. Definitely should have checked the sources.
Point remains though that 2020 is a statistical outlier election that resulted in a 22 million total vote count increase over 2016.
Joe Biden had signs of dementia in 2020 and barely campaigned publicly. Somehow this old bag with not one inspiring historical speech or rally, riveted voters to turn out in numbers higher than any president in history.
Somehow these same voters that were motivated to stop the orange man in 2020 disappeared in 2024, when orange man runs for a 3rd time.
2012 Obama and 2016 Clinton got roughly the same number of votes (~65M), somehow in 4 years time Biden was able to rally an additional 16 million to the polls, with his sheer intellect and brilliance and inspirational qualities.
And then his VP comes up 7 million short 4 years later against the same "existential threat", despite all the same provisions for mail in ballots etc being in place. It's like Covid restrictions were used as cover for massive voter fraud.
Well, first of all, you've moved the goalposts quite a bit. 14 million down to 7 million cuts the supposed problem in half.
I don't think it's particularly complex, most people vote based on the tangible issues they're experiencing. It shouldn't be surprising that they voted against the incumbents each time. In 2020 they didn't like Trump's handling of COVID so they voted against him. In 2024 they didn't like Biden's handling of inflation so they voted against his VP. Just as some people were motivated to vote for those reasons (among others), many people lost their motivation to vote at all.
Regarding the difference between 2012 Obama and 2020 Biden, Trump also received more votes in 2020 than Obama did -- in fact, he surpassed Obama's vote total in 2024 as well. Trump in 2020 and 2024 even surpassed Obama's vote totals from 2008, even though Obama received 3.5 million more votes in 2008 than in 2012. Really, it's pretty simple, there were 16 million more people in the US in 2020 than 2012. Of course the raw vote numbers went up.
The vote totals aren't a strong point. In 2020 there were 152,320,193 votes cast between the two main candidates; in 2024 there were 155,508,985 votes cast. That is, more people voted in 2024 than in 2020, so claiming that 2020 was some statistical outlier with a bunch of extra votes doesn't really make sense.
