Coyote Blog

I really thought I would never post this, as I think Kamala Harris is in the dictionary next to "extreme Peter Principle," but she was right when she said that her loss to Trump was the closest Presidential loss this century, at least when looking at the popular vote.  John Hinderaker tries to argue otherwise:

I suppose Harris was referring to the irrelevant “popular vote,” but her claim isn’t true there, either. By far the closest of the seven elections in terms of popular vote was 2000, where the margin was only around 500,000 votes. By that yardstick, the 2024 election was a distant second, with Trump’s margin over Harris being around 2,300,000 votes.

Sorry, but the year 2000 is not in this century.  It was the last year of the last century.  Yes, I know this has already been litigated around Y2K in the court of public opinion and my side mostly lost because we just pissed everyone off who wanted to celebrate a round number, but that does not mean I am wrong.

When you were born, you started out as age 0.  After one month you were age 1/12 a year.  At your first birthday you were one year old.  On your hundredth birthday you have lived exactly a century.  People analogize the calendar to this, but they are wrong.

The reason is that there was no year 0 on our calendar.  The first day after BC times (or BCE if you are up on modern academic jargon) was January 1 of the year 1.  That means that the post-BCE world was not one year old until January 1 in the year 2.   The era turned one but we call it year 2.   The first decade did not end until December 31 in the year 10, and January 1, 11 was the beginning of the next decade.  The first century did not end until December 31 in the year 100 and the second century began on January 1, 101.  In the same way, this century (and millennium) began January 1, 2001 (queue:  Also Sprach Zarathustra).

Now, I am pretty sure this was NOT Harris's reasoning but I really, really hope she adopts it because I would love to see her try to explain it in an interview.