We need to be prepared for many days of chaos and upheaval around this election. We know what they have planned. Still, it’s good to know when the polls close and what to expect for the election night returns. You can plan your drinking accordingly.
Trump and his little dog Brett Kavanaugh are out there saying that we must know the winner on election night because he doesn’t understand that “election night results” are based on media projections and the two campaigns agreeing on the outcome. That is highly unlikely to happen this time. Many states have never had to deal with this number of mail-in votes and the media is going to be very, very careful about calling any races. States have weeks to certify results and many times are counting results for many days afterwards.
The answer is yes. For me, it would be more fun to jam chopsticks in my ears. I’m not the only one. In fact, they are making him less popular than ever:
Last night, Trump held a rally in Omaha. His followers enjoyed it. As Tom mentioned earlier, then this happened:
President Trump took off in Air Force One 1 hr 20 minutes ago, but thousands of his supporters remain stranded on a dark road outside the rally. “We need at least 30 more buses,” an Omaha police officer just said, shaking his head at the chaotic cluster that is unfolding.
This is far from the worst part of it, but the district-level polls we're seeing suggest Trump is no longer competitive in Omaha's #NE02 anyway. https://t.co/wdcywVY0Sg
After seeing the spectacle this week of a Supreme Court justice installed just before an election for the express purpose of tilting the result in Donald Trump’s favor — and watching Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s evil threat of “what goes around comes around” take shape — it’s clear that the political battles we’ve been fighting for these past few years won’t be over once the election is decided even if Trump is defeated. The fight is just going to continue on new terrain.
The question then, is how the left and the Democrats will respond. After all, they’ve just spent the last four years focusing their energy on taking back the Congress in 2018 and then removing Donald Trump from office in 2020. The entire center-left, and a fair amount of the center-right, has unified behind this common purpose and it’s brought some impressive results. We’ll soon see whether that streak continues.
The grassroots organizing in this cycle is remarkable. For instance, according to The Connector Newsletter on democracy, organizing, movements and tech, Get Out the Vote activism since August dwarfs even that of the 2018 election — and that was unprecedented. “Resistance” groups, operating outside the Democratic party apparatus, have been active all over the country.
The question, of course, is what happens to all that if they win. You’ll recall that there was a ton of grassroots energy in the center left organized around Barack Obama’s campaign in 2008, which was promptly squelched by a combination of top-down direction from the administration and a foolish belief among many of the faithful that their work was done and they could just trust Obama. That’s the natural consequence of a “movement” that’s based upon a charismatic leader.
That’s not going to be an issue this time. Joe Biden is not a charismatic leader, and while people are enthusiastic about ousting the worst president in American history, they are also primed for change in a substantive way. Trump and the Republicans have exposed the rot in our system in a way nothing else could have done.
Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir wrote a thoughtful piece this week about political engagement in which he makes the case that merely voting is a tepid form of activism anyway, particularly in America, where it often becomes “a bizarre form of symbolic theater or public therapy.” He suggests that direct action is necessary to move the country forward and cites the civil rights movement, the in-your-face ACT UP AIDS activism of the 1980s and the anti-globalization protests of the late ’90s as movements that were considered far outside the mainstream at the time but pushed their agendas much more quickly than they could have through traditional lobbying or partisan politics. He points out that the post-Parkland student movement, Greta Thunberg’s climate strikers and the Black Lives Matter protesters, among others, are the rumblings of a new generation getting ready to push the envelope beyond anything we’ve seen.
I completely agree with this, but I will add that I think electoral grassroots organizing (carried on more by the older generation, and mostly by women) is still vital. I’m reminded of this interview with leftist organizer Norman Solomon from a few years back discussing what makes a healthy, progressive political ecosystem:
We need to occupy — literally and figuratively — congressional seats for the 99 percent. Social movements need a healthy ecology, which means a wide array of activities and manifestations of grassroots power. That includes progressives in Congress. I say on the campaign trail that we need our feet on the ground and our eyes on the stars of our ideals.
It’s not good enough to have one or the other. State power matters — we’ve seen that from county and state offices to Washington, D.C. And as somebody who has written literally thousands of articles, 12 books, gone to hundreds of demonstrations and probably organized hundreds of demonstrations, I believe we always have to be protesting; we always have to be in the streets. It’s not either-or. I want our feet on the ground to include change for government policies. Laws matter. Whether or how they are enforced matters.
If nothing else, Donald Trump has revealed just how much state power matters in this country. With no more ambition than to be worshipped by his followers and treated like a king, Trump — with the help of his conniving Republican henchmen — has managed in four short years to turn the federal government into his personal fiefdom, enrich himself and his friends, twist the rule of law for his own purposes and upend American alliances and institutions, simply because he didn’t know what else to do.
Trump also finally laid bare the true nature of the Republican Party. It sees politics as war, and many or most Republicans are willing to win by any means necessary. If Trump ultimately loses the election and leaves office in January, that will only be a momentary pause in the conflict. The last four years of establishment GOP collaboration with his lawless administration, along with Mitch McConnell’s manipulation of Senate rules to stack the federal judiciary with youthful, far-right extremists, shows what an exercise of raw political power can accomplish. With or without control of Congress or the White House, Republicans will hold tremendous power to impact the lives of everyday Americans for a generation.
We don’t know if this upcoming election will provide a close enough result for the courts to decide the outcome, but we can already see considerable willingness to use the judicial system for crude partisan gain. Kavanaugh echoed his benefactor Donald Trump in his concurrence in the Wisconsin voting case this week, suggesting that election results should be decided on election night.
Trump is ignorant enough to think that when the networks call an election result, it’s official. TV is God to him. But in reality, elections are never certified on election night. Kavanaugh knows this. He was one of the Bush v. Gore lawyers who argued that absentee ballots should be accepted as late as Thanksgiving. He was acting as a partisan hack then, just as he is now. (And doing a sloppy job of it.) This is a preview of what we can expect Republicans to do whenever they get the chance.
When Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., endorsed Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary campaign, she said it was because she wanted to be part of a movement. And so she is. She is one of the new generation of progressive leaders who is also, as Norman Solomon said in that interview I quoted above, “occupying” a seat in Congress. She has learned very quickly that if the movement is to accomplish anything, state power is essential:
Republicans do this because they don’t believe Dems have the stones to play hardball like they do. And for a long time they’ve been correct. But do not let them bully the public into thinking their bulldozing is normal but a response isn’t. There is a legal process for expansion.
AOC is both inside and outside, as are many of the new progressives in Congress, most of them women and several of the most prominent women of color. They will need the passion and numbers of outside movements to help them leverage their power on the inside. If they can do that effectively they may end up showing the Republicans, and the world, what a government that’s actually responsive to the people looks like.
Backers of President Donald Trump were left stranded overnight, with several taken to hospital for hypothermia after an Omaha campaign rally ended in chaos.
Hundreds were bussed in to the Eppley Airfield site, leaving their cars in parking lots, but were left wandering up to four miles in the cold after coaches failed to pick them up.
“President Trump took off in Air Force One 1 hr 20 minutes ago, but thousands of his supporters remain stranded on a dark road outside the rally,” CNN reporter Jeff Zeleny tweeted at 10:21 p.m. CDT.
Zeleny described the scene as a “chaotic cluster.”
Wait until they see what Trump does when he loses the election.
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For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.
Kuwaiti oil fires set by retreating Iraqi forces in 1991. Photo by U.S. Army (Public domain).
Salt of the earth he’s not. Salt the earth he might.
The headline on Thomas B. Edsall’s column is attention-getting enough: How Far Might Trump Go?
Go, as in fighting tooth-and-nail to snatch (or rig) a victory from vote totals next Tuesday night (election night) that how him losing reelection.
“The president might attempt to defy even a landslide in the popular vote in battleground states,” Edward B. Foley, a constitutional law professor at Ohio State, outlined in a 2019 paper. His worst-case scenario involved Trump announcing victory after early results show him ahead in Pennsylvania. As votes trickle in and his lead evaporates, Trump could lean on Republicans in control of the state legislature to reject “some or all mailed-in ballots, and subsequently choosing a slate of pro-Trump electors to cast the state’s 20 Electoral College votes for the incumbent.”
But that paper is from a year ago. Today, with half of 2016 votes already cast, such a scenario could be wiped away like a sandcastle by a tide of popular votes against an unpopular president.
That’s not to say a post-election apocalypse of legal (and perhaps street) battles could not manifest. Edsall cites several election-watchers whose jobs it is to ponder worst-case scenarios. Barton Gellman, Rick Hasen, and others consider how “the red mirage” and “the blue shift” might whipsaw public perceptions of the outcome in the days and weeks following Nov. 3. Should the Department of Justice under Attorney General William Barr become involved, resolving who won the election could become a horror show that simply arrives late for Halloween.
But too few are considering what Trump might do with his remaining term after an irrefutable crushing defeat. Offices where I’ve worked, once the boss calls you into his office to give you notice you might (might) be allowed to work out the day. As likely as not, they lock you out of the computer, have you collect things from your desk, and escort you out the door lest you work some mischief before leaving.
Trump will get 79 days to do whatever Mr. “I love getting even with people” feels disloyalty to his Person demands. “If they screw you, screw them back 10 times as hard,” is his motto. He might be too busy getting even to plan for how he stays out of jail in New York state. What havoc might he and his minions wreak on agencies they have not already wrecked?
I have no contacts in Washington, D.C. to walk me through what procedures are in place to prevent malicious mischief during a normal transition. And Donald J. Trump is Abby something.
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For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.
President Donald Trump repeatedly attacked Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, during his rally in Lansing, Michigan, on Tuesday, at one point taking credit for the FBI thwarting a plot to kidnap her and then immediately downplaying the actual threat that had been posed to Whitmer.
“Your governor, I don’t thinks she likes me too much,” Trump joked, prompting a loud reaction from the crowd.”Hey, hey, hey hey,” he told the audience, “I’m the one, it was our people that helped her out with her problem.”
“I mean, we’ll have to see if it’s a problem. Right? People are entitled to say maybe it was a problem, maybe it wasn’t,” he added. “It was our people — my people, our people that helped her out. And then she blamed me for it. She blamed me and it was our people that helped her. I don’t get it. How did you put her there?”
That’s right. Very fine people can disagree whether it’s a problem to kidnap and execute a sitting Governor because she closed gyms for a couple of weeks and asked people to wear masks. I mean, she probably deserves it, amirite?
Ted Nugent opened for Trump at that rally today. Recall his sentiment about Obama and Clinton back in 2007:
https://youtu.be/vy8RIiTyhMI
Aand this:
Nugent’s been running his game for a while. He’s a clown. But there are lot of them in thiscountry, all of them armed and dangerous.
Those terrorists wanted to kidnap Whitmer, “try her” and then execute her. That’s what the president of the United States is excusing.
Olivia Nuzzi at NY Magazine profiles one of the high-powered GOP anonymous sources who chose their careers and the radical Republican agenda over patriotism:
He was of the Establishment but never deluded about the righteousness of his chosen side. George W. Bush, for instance, couldn’t earn his support because of “how badly he had fucked up” the Iraq War. “I still don’t think Republicans have been held to account completely for that,” he said. The election of the country’s first Black president gave life to right-wing extremism, and over eight years, polarization and negative partisanship — or hatred of the other side — accelerated as it hadn’t since the Gingrich revolution. By the end of the Obama administration, the party sounded more like Glenn Beck than Barry Goldwater, and although mainstream conservatives liked to pretend that the “crazies” said little about them, there was no denying that a fear of such people motivated much decision-making in Washington. This transformation all but invited what happened next.
Yet, eyes open, the Republican hadn’t anticipated a moral inconvenience like Donald Trump. “We were still fundamentally sane until Trump became the nominee,” he said of his party. Like just about everybody else, he didn’t believe Trump’s campaign was serious at first and didn’t believe he would win the Republican nomination. “I was one of those idiots. I remember telling family members there was zero percent chance,” he said. “When he became the nominee, I almost quit.” But he didn’t. Instead, when the test came, he found it was possible — easy, even — to put up with what he didn’t agree with and didn’t want to be associated with in order to climb and survive in Washington.
He figured the era of Trump’s dominance of his party would be over in November 2016 when Hillary Clinton won the election, as most polling and most so-called experts suggested she would. That wasn’t so far away, and he was “too pragmatic” to leave a big job that he had worked hard to get, and that he liked having, over something that was only temporary. “You could just tough it out for a few months,” he said, recalling his thinking then. “I thought he would lose! I mean, everyone thought he would lose. The idea that he won is still shocking. This is a man who is so completely alien to what this country — the best principles of what this country is about. When I think about the fact that a hundred years from now, people will look back and say, ‘How the fuck did they think this was normal?,’ it makes me sad for the country. He’s a permanent scar on the face of our country.”
When people look back and say that, the “they” to whom they’ll be referring will include this Republican and others like him. Even as he likes to see himself as a passive player, unable to do much beyond enable the president, he knows that much is true. He understands that being carried along in the stream of narrow self-interest is what brought Trump to the presidency in the first place and has kept him there for almost four years. Officially, there’s little daylight between the party and the president, and this Republican works for one of the most powerful people in the country, which means, looked at in one way, that he’s working for Trump, too. “If you ask the average well-informed observer,” he said, “I think they would say most every Republican is working for him.”
Oh, I don’t think that’s true. Donald Trump is working for them. He may not know it, but Mitch McConnell knows it. Brett Kavanaugh knows it. None of the establishment takes him seriously as a leader. They were willing to destroy the country for political power to pack the federal judiciary, cut taxes for their wealthy pals and destroy the administrative state.
This bit of insight by Nuzzi is worth pondering too:
Republicans whose identities remain secret tell reporters that, in private, everyone is mad at the president, they think he’s an idiot, he’s screwing up, whatever. Liberals and moderate media critics get together to roll their eyes at this grand display of cowardice, enabled by reporters like me who live for drama and are thus part of the problem, while the president’s supporters cry fabulism or conspiracy or both. My own self-serving justification for granting anonymity to Republicans connected to or able to provide insight into this White House is simple: If the choice is between being lied to on the record or told the truth “on background” (the technical term for anonymity), I will choose the truth every time — even though every time I choose the anonymous truth, I make it easier for this system of secrecy to continue. Actually, that’s too generous. It’s more truthful to say I’m part of a system that enables political leaders to have it both ways, to indulge in ugliness and irresponsibility and to distance themselves from their own actions. The press provides the alibi as it prosecutes the case.
It does. But as she says, I’ll take the truth every time. I have zero respect for these anonymous Trumpers who want to have it both ways, but if we didn’t have the inside story I’m afraid Trump would be much more popular than he is and much more likely to win re-election. These sources are cowardly, self-serving people but they didn’t keep his secrets and that’s worth a lot.
But this … this is just grotesque rationalizing that gives away the game:
[F]r officials whose identities are defined by the principals they serve — like this Republican — the choice can look like abiding almost anything to maintain proximity to power (“Everyone loves power,” as he put it) or defecting to the Never Trump wilderness… But that logic suggests an almost total indifference to policy and ideology, and the Republican insists that he isn’t indifferent, not entirely. He thinks Trump is “lazy,” “an awful person,” and “an idiot,” among other things. But he’s also against tax hikes and the Green New Deal. He believes in small government, in Washington staying out of the way. In fact, before the coronavirus pandemic, he thought the government’s managing to survive a failed executive was “almost a vindication of Republican principles” because most people, in his view, found they could get along just fine without a functioning federal government. Now, of course, “even small-government conservatives would say there’s a pretty big role for the federal government in our society,” he acknowledged.
“You’re not either a MAGA person or a Democrat,” he said. “There are some Republicans who think you should stick around and prevent the worst stuff from happening because he is the president, however odious that is, and it’s not gonna change until he’s voted out of office. If you just completely leave the field, you’re abdicating responsibility.” But he doesn’t actually believe that’s true. Not totally, anyway. “It’s definitely self-serving,” he said. “I mean, once you grow up, life is all about contradictions.” So he chose to become one. He exists now in a zombielike state somewhere between commitment and defection, his outward-facing self spiritually dead but his new identity not yet fully born. Or, put another way, he lives what you could call a lie.
That’s because he is a soulless opportunist who doesn’t deserve even the slightest respect.
As Never Trumper Tim Miller said on MSNBC earlier today, “being an adult doesn’t mean you live a contradiction, it means you make choices.” These people want their cake and they want to eat it too. And because they have been granted anonymity they will probably get away with it.
This is why the entire Republican Party must be shunned. This was one of those definitive crucibles in American history. Giving anonymous details to the press has been informative but it didn’t stop the destruction. Anyone who didn’t speak out publicly when they had the chance, who didn’t openly endorse Joe Biden and exhort others to do it too, are complicit.
During his 30-minute speech to drive-in rallygoers, he said Trump never embraced the job and instead used the presidency to help himself, his friends — and turned the White House into a reality show.
And then he dropped a truth bomb on Trump, telling the crowd that the so-called president was jealous that COVID gets more attention than him. He trolled Trump for once again focusing on inauguration crowd sizes.
Obama: “Who is thinking about that right now? Nobody except him, but the rest of us have had to live with the consequences.”
Obama then detailed the consequences of a Trump administration.
“More than 225,000 people in this country are dead. More than 100,000 small businesses have closed. Half a million jobs are gone in Florida alone. Think about that. And what’s his closing argument? That people are too focused on COVID. He said this at one of his rallies. “COVID, COVID, COVID!” he’s complaining. He’s jealous of COVID’s media coverage!”
Obama explained that the White House is a very controlled environment, but a second wave of infections has broken out even there.
“You can take some preventive measures in the White House to avoid getting sick, except this guy can’t seem to do it. [Trump] has turned the White House into a hot zone,” Obama said.
In 2018, Michael Bloomberg’s political operation did late polling that showed a number of House races that were competitive that were not on the radar and they poured a boatload of money into advertising in the final days. They were right and the Democrats won.
In this cycle Bloomberg has spent tons of money Florida already and it may pay dividends. But they’ve expanded their buys in two other states as well:
Michael R. Bloomberg is funding a last-minute spending blitz to bolster former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. in Texas and Ohio, directing millions toward television advertising in two red states that have shifted away from President Trump in the general election.
A political adviser to Mr. Bloomberg said the billionaire former mayor of New York City would use his super PAC, Independence USA, to air intensive ad campaigns in all television markets in both states. The cost of the two-state campaign is expected to total around $15 million.
The decision by Mr. Bloomberg reflects just how much the electoral landscape appears to have shifted in the final few months of the presidential race, as Mr. Trump’s mismanagement of the coronavirus pandemic has intensified his unpopularity and further alienated crucial voting groups like women and suburbanites.
Mr. Biden’s campaign has treated Ohio as a competitive battleground for some time, even though Mr. Trump carried it by a wide margin in 2016, and more recently, the Democratic ticket has been putting some time and money into Texas. Senator Kamala Harris of California, Mr. Biden’s running mate, is planning to visit the state on Friday.
Howard Wolfson, one of Mr. Bloomberg’s closest aides, said the former mayor had recently asked his team to run a round of polls to see whether Mr. Trump had unexpected vulnerabilities that could be exploited in the campaign’s closing weeks. Up to this point, Mr. Bloomberg’s general-election activities have focused on Florida, where he has pledged to spend $100 million supporting Mr. Biden.
The Bloomberg team conducted polling in a number of states over the weekend and came away convinced that Texas and Ohio represented its best targets — narrowly divided electoral prizes where the war for television airtime is not already cluttered with heavy advertising on either side. The team presented Mr. Bloomberg with the numbers on Monday morning and he gave the go-ahead.
“We believe that Florida will go down to the wire, and we were looking for additional opportunities to expand the map,” Mr. Wolfson said. “Texas and Ohio present the best opportunities to do that, in our view.”
Mr. Bloomberg is also planning to increase the size of his television ad buys in Florida over the next week, Mr. Wolfson said.
Should either Texas or Ohio slip into the Democratic column, it would likely indicate not only a Trump defeat, but also one by a thumping margin. The two states have 56 Electoral College votes between them, and Mr. Trump’s campaign has never devised a path to victory that does not involve carrying both. […]
Mr. Wolfson said the Bloomberg advertising campaign in both states would focus chiefly on the coronavirus, highlighting the new spike in cases across the country under Mr. Trump’s watch. The Texas advertising will include a heavy Spanish-language component.
In Ohio, Independence USA also plans to air advertising about the economy and Mr. Biden’s “build back better” message.
I don’t know if the Democrats can swing Texas. But it’s a sunbelt state and they’ve been moving their way for a while. But it sure would be great if they did. Unless Kavanaugh and the gang are willing to illegitimately hand a whole bunch of states to Trump, the bigger the victory the better.
Even if President Donald Trump retains enough rural strength to hold Texas in next week’s election, which many still consider the most likely outcome, the swelling voter turnout in and around the increasingly Democratic-leaning cities of Houston, Dallas, Austin, San Antonio and Fort Worth points toward a return to political competition in the state after more than two decades of almost uninterrupted Republican ascendancy.Just alone in Harris County, which is centered on Houston, 1.15 million people had voted through Monday evening, compared with 1.3 million total in the 2016 election. The state’s other big cities and inner suburban counties are experiencing comparable increases.
“We expected a lot of turnout,” Lina Hidalgo, the Harris County judge (the equivalent of a county executive) told me. “We didn’t expect this level.”
Some local analysts believe that with turnout cresting, and a recoil from Trump swelling Democratic support, Joe Biden could win the counties centered on those five big cities by more than a million votes combined — roughly double Hillary Clinton’s margin in them in 2016 and possibly 10 times Barack Obama’s advantage across the same places in 2012.
Whether or not Biden wins the state, or even precisely meets that prediction, a shift of anything approaching that magnitude would provide Democrats a formidable foundation from which to challenge the Republican hegemony over Texas — a foundation that will only grow stronger through the 2020s as these urban and inner suburban counties across what’s known as the “Texas triangle” drive the vast majority of the state’s population and economic expansion.
“If the explosive growth in the urban centers and suburbs continues [for Democrats] that will be the whole ballgame,” says Richard Murray, a longtime political scientist at the University of Houston who has forecast the 1 million vote metro advantage for Biden.While Trump and other Republicans are consolidating crushing advantages in small-town and rural communities, Murray says, the stagnant or shrinking population in those places means Republicans “just can’t keep pace with this big [metro] vote.”
Republicans still have many advantages in Texas — particularly overwhelming support in its sprawling rural areas — and most observers consider Trump something between a slight and a substantial favorite to hold it.
And the consequences of failure are almost unthinkable for them: Given the Democratic dominance of other large states — including California, New York and Illinois — there is no viable path for Republicans to win the White House without holding Texas and its 38 Electoral College votes.Losing Texas — either next week or in 2024 — would register in Republican circles as a uniquely powerful earthquake that would rattle their confidence in the party’s direction and message, many GOP insiders agree.
I guess the fact that their party has turned into a radical death cult in thrall to an orange imbecile wasn’t enough. But hey, whatever it takes …
