In one of his last-ditch efforts to wrest the electoral college away from President-elect Joe Biden, Donald Trump spent big on a partial recount in Wisconsin. The effort focused on two of the largest blue counties in the state.
Spoiler alert: it didn’t go as intended.
The Trump campaign paid $3 million up front, as required by state law, to finance a recount in the Democratic strongholds of Milwaukee County and Dane County. A full recount would have cost $8 million. Still, 460,300 people voted in Milwaukee; Dane County recorded 338,946. If you’re going to go looking for troves of uncounted votes in a state with 3 million voters, these are the two counties you’d select.
Dane County’s recount did deliver for Trump, to the tune of 45 votes. But Milwaukee’s recount found 132 more votes for Biden. Net result: Biden gained 87 votes. Biden’s statewide margin of victory, which has not yet been certified, now stands at 20,695, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
That means for each of the 87 votes that Trump essentially gave to Biden, his team spent $34,482.
You can probably think of a better way to spend that money, especially during a pandemic that has left millions of Americans unemployed. Indeed, according to the U.S. Census, median personal income in the country was just below that number — at $32,621.
It wasn’t like Trump wasn’t warned by his allies. Former Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, a GOP stalwart, said the day after the election that the president would not find success in a recount in his state. Prophetically, he suggested that the number of votes shifted would be in the hundreds.
Trump, of course, isn’t giving up. In a tweet on Saturday, the president claimed that the partial recount wasn’t about gaining votes. It was actually about discovering votes from people who voted illegally.
Of course, voter fraud is extremely rare. But this reality hasn’t stopped Trump from attempting to throw out 238,000 votes in the state.
The Wisconsin recount is not about finding mistakes in the count, it is about finding people who have voted illegally, and that case will be brought after the recount is over, on Monday or Tuesday. We have found many illegal votes. Stay tuned!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 28, 2020
Trump can continue to spend money on recounts and lawsuits, even though they’ve failed to turn the election in Trump’s favor in 39 out of 40 cases. But increasingly, it’s looking like a bottomless pit of wasted money.