Giraffe's Can't Climb Trees or Steal Elections

No matter what you might have heard.

Extremely fake, extremely Photoshopped image of a giraffe in a tree already debunked by Snopes. But in case you don’t believe Snopes, then believe this: THAT is not what a giraffe’s facial expression of terror looks like. A giraffe’s facial expression of terror looks more like AAAAAAAAAAIIIIIIIGH!!!!! Picture it now? That expression ain’t THAT one above.

Cassidy Steele Dale forecasts and contextualizes the present to equip us to make a better, kinder future…

… and one of those ways to talk about electoral giraffes and the populations of red states and blue states.

So a few months ago I had a dream in which I was arguing with a Republican conspiracy theorist about whether or not giraffes climb trees to eat leaves and steal elections.

In the dream I said that No, giraffes do NOT climb trees — if they could climb trees they wouldn’t have evolved to have such long necks and long legs and long tongues and facial expressions of superiority and condescension; they’d instead be the Corgis of the Serengeti up there in trees — and the Republican conspiracy theorist pointed up into the absolutely empty tree in front of us through which the sun was shining and he said The reason I can see no election-stealing giraffes up there is because election-stealing giraffes are so good at hiding. Democrats are stealing our elections and our proof is RIGHT THERE. THAT EMPTY TREE IS ACTUALLY FULL OF INVISIBLE NINJA GIRAFFES.

At which point I questioned his theology and then he ran away to organize another Capitol Riot.

• These are the dreams I have when I’m sick. And I have an active inner life. Clearly. So of course that’s from whence my great wisdom comes. In influenza, veritas.

Anyway:

1. It took me a long time to realize that presenting facts gets you nowhere with a radicalized person unless you first dismantle whatever underlying belief remains in their cognition that sabotages their ability to accept something that’s true.

2. And it took me a while longer to realize that one of the underlying beliefs that’s causing the problem is NOT that Trump is the only one who tells the real truth or Democrats steal elections or whatever; it’s the wrong belief that there are way more Republicans in the country than Democrats.

In the cognitive reality of some Republicans from rural, deep red areas, the United States is actually <wiggles/waves hands> 70-80% Republican and only 20-30% Democrats. Why do they believe that? To oversimplify, because they’re so isolated that they’ve almost never met any Democrats (and/or their local Democrats are closeted for survival reasons) such that they honestly believe they’re the overwhelming electoral majority in the country. To them, in their minds, the Electoral College map looks <waggles fingers> something like this:

Just oceans of amber grain with some liberal pockets at the edges of nowhere. And those liberal pockets are cities — but those cities couldn’t possibly be larger than a really big Texarkana, Texas, right?. Like so big it might have two whole Bass Pros.

• None of that is true, of course. And I’m not saying these folks are rubes; I’m saying that their impressions are limited by what they can conceive of. And what they can conceive of depends on what they can see. Just like all of us.

• (I have now fulfilled a lifelong dream of ending a sentence with a preposition which is a circumstance up with which I shall not forthwith put.)

But when you think the country actually looks like that you can almost ONLY conclude that Democrats can ONLY possibly win elections via voting-machine-counting-theft and via voter fraud committed by millions of illegal immigrants.

So more recently I’ve taken another tack with deep red state Republicans. I just sidestep the election fraud debate altogether and go after a less threatening topic/underlying belief instead and say: the American electorate doesn’t actually look like that oceans-of-red version you think is true. When you weight red and blue voter populations within all of their counties the Real Map of Real America actually looks like this:

2020 election results by county weighted for population from Engaging Data

Why all that blue? Because the population of American cities dwarfs the population of entire red states. The population of the District of Columbia is the size of the entire state of Wyoming (but gets no representation in Congress). And that enormous blue bubble in the bottom left? That’s Los Angeles County. That’s one county.

Here’s the population of Los Angeles from over a decade ago overlaid onto an equivalent area of a random section of the middle of the country.

From Slate. From 2014. Great online tool with which to play.

But OK, let’s be fair: let’s spread all those bubbles out so the blue ones don’t cover up the red bubbles the way they do in real life so we get a better picture of how-much-is-who.

Also from Engaging Data.

So now it looks sorta more like a fair fight but not really. In the Actual, Real America there’s more blue than red.

• Oh, and look at Alaska. Look at alllllll of Alaska.

If Democrats are stealing elections then they’d also have to be defrauding every other single data measure in the world and Democrats do not think to do that, don’t want to do that, and do not have the time while sitting in traffic. Democrats cannot pilot their Jewish space hurricane lasers from their phones while sitting in their cars at the intersection of Why-Is-All-This-Traffic-Here-Today? and Who-Are-All-of-These-People-and-Where-Are-They-Going-at-2pm-on-a-Tuesday-Don’t-They-Have-Jobs?

What all this means is that Democrats aren’t stealing elections; elections are accurate representations of the American electorate.

And all election officials and election experts around the world know this. All of them. Even the Trump Administration officials who went scrambling around right after the 2020 election investigating voter fraud claims concluded the claims were bullshit. The Heritage Foundation knows this (though they misrepresent it here). None of the Trump allies’ claims in court — none of them — held up because (1) they had no evidence and (2) because all the judges know the population data and voting patterns basically match.

So when you see Democratic, Republican, and nonaligned state and federal civil servants say Our elections are accurate, secure, and fair it’s not because they’re part of some Democratic cabal it’s because they’re actual sentinels of the truth and process integrity no matter where the truth may lie. Hence interviews like this (which is excellent, really frickin’ bipartisan, and will make you feel better):

But that’s just one wrong underlying belief upon which shallower, more surface wrong beliefs are stacked. There are also other, further underlying beliefs/myths/misimpressions. Like the idea that Red states make money and things and jobs and blue states take them — the “Makers and Takers” myth. But that’s a story for another day.

Because right now I need to go get a wiggly-butt Corgi out of a tree.