Why I think Trump won the rust belt in spite of being the terrible person he is

[ucrdem]

12. I can't argue with your feelings, but the lack of quantification

in your OP and reply above suggests to me that you're simply trying to justify your impressions of the Clintons, which CNN and the rest of the media are all too eager to help you do. However, the numbers suggest that your thoughts on the Nov. 8 election are incorrect. All the WI polls were wrong, and Trump, the candidate despised by his own party, leapt 7.6 points on Nov. 8 to claim a WI lead he'd never previously enjoyed?

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/wi/wisconsin_trump_vs_clinton_vs_johnson_vs_stein-5976.html

That's very implausible. And you haven't answered my question of what happened to those early and provisional ballots, which in WI are accounted for nowhere in the state's official results, which were wrapped up 3 days after the election, despite pre-election headlines like this:

Latino Early Voters Set Milwaukee Record
Wednesday, November 2, 2016, 3:35pm
http://www.wpr.org/latino-early-voters-set-milwaukee-record

So where are all those early and provisional votes accounted for? Nowhere that I could find on WI's Election Commission site, which oddly enough, notes in a Dec. 22 memo that it might be a good idea to count them now, so they can see if their new photo-ID requirement had its intended effect:

Please remember to update the status of provisional ballots in WisVote. We need to account for the outcome of outstanding provisional ballots and there is a strong interest in attempting to evaluate the impact of the photo ID requirement on the number of provisional ballots and whether they were ultimately counted.

http://elections.wi.gov/node/4832

And how did all WI's precincts manage to wrap up their counts by Nov. 11?

http://elections.wi.gov/sites/default/files/County%20by%20County%20Report%20President%20of%20the%20United%20States%20Recount.pdf

http://wisconsinvote.org/results/president-general

The answer I'm afraid is related to the fact that a Republican state administration illegally sought to restrict early voting and disenfranchise WI voters via ID laws so unconstitutional they were struck down in July by a federal judge:

Judge strikes down Wisconsin voter ID, early voting laws

Madison — Finding that Republican lawmakers had discriminated against minorities, a federal judge Friday struck down parts of Wisconsin's voter ID law, limits on early voting and prohibitions on allowing people to vote early at multiple sites.

With the presidential election less than four months away, GOP Attorney General Brad Schimel said he plans to appeal the sweeping decision by U.S. District Court Judge James Peterson. Peterson also turned back other election laws Republicans have put in place in recent years.

"The Wisconsin experience demonstrates that a preoccupation with mostly phantom election fraud leads to real incidents of disenfranchisement, which undermine rather than enhance confidence in elections, particularly in minority communities," U.S. District Judge James Peterson wrote.

http://www.jsonline.com/story/news/politics/2016/07/30/judge-strikes-down-wisconsin-voter-id-early-voting-laws/87803408/

And if the Walker administration was so eager to prevent early votes from being cast, what makes you think they made any effort to count the ones that were?