Rallies Don't Decide Elections

One of the most common arguments that the 2020 election was stolen concerns Trump's rallies.  In particular, it is commonly asked how Trump could have lost when he had huge rallies and Biden didn't.

To answer this question, we should first note that it is true that Trump had many rallies of up to 20000 people, while Biden had almost no rallies at all.  However, it is important to remember that elections are decided by voting, not rally attendance.  The overall electorate of 150,000,000 people is far larger than the number of people who go to political rallies.

The size of rally crowds is an imperfect proxy for voter enthusiasm.  But enthusiastic votes and reluctant votes both count the same.  A candidate can have very enthusiastic supporters without having a large enough base overall.  For example, in 2008 and 2012 Ron Paul had large rallies, but he ended up with 11% of the popular vote in the 2012 primary.

Also, comparing rally sizes is unfair given that Biden never tried to hold any large rallies.  Aside from the fact that Biden wasn't inspiring, a major reason for this was the fear of COVID, which by mid-2020 was more pronounced on the left than on the right.

The focus on rallies seems to reflect flaws in the strategy of the Trump campaign.  While rallies have some value, they tend to primarily fire up people who were already going to vote for Trump.  Meanwhile, the Biden campaign was focused on getting people to vote using early voting and mail-in ballots.  Trump's campaign actually discouraged people from using these measures due to overblown (though not entirely baseless) election security concerns.

But why did so many voters turn out for Biden?  Because they weren't for Biden, they were against Trump.  To return to rallies, while there were essentially no pro-Biden rallies, there were many anti-Trump rallies.  Early in 2017, the Women's March drew 3-5 million people nationwide.  Then the March for Science drew hundreds of thousands nationwide.  Both these rallies were explicitly against Trump and his administration.  In May 2020 and following, the Black Lives Matter movement had thousands of protests attended by millions of people nationwide.  While BLM was not explicitly about Trump, it certainly was not friendly to him.

Thus we find that anti-Trump protests dwarfed pro-Trump rallies.  Even by the metric of rally sizes, the result of the 2020 election should be no surprise.