This strikes me as the perfect illustration of the Trump cult:
"what digby sez..."
Month: November 2020
This vote count shitshow is ridiculous. Joe Biden is ahead by nearly 4 million votes and counting. In any normal democracy we would still be sleeping off all the champagne we drank last night to celebrate the overwhelming vote to depose Donald Trump on election day.
But no, we are still waiting for the results in a few discrete states where it’s close and worrying that the national vote leader will lose because of this ridiculous archaic election system.
I thought you might be interested to read this piece by law professor Akhil Reed Amar about how this inane system came to be. And yes, it was slavery:
As Americans await the quadrennial running of the presidential obstacle course now known as the Electoral College, it’s worth remembering why we have this odd political contraption in the first place. After all, state governors in all 50 states are elected by popular vote; why not do the same for the governor of all states, a.k.a. the president? The quirks of the Electoral College system were exposed in 2016 when Donald Trump secured the presidency with an Electoral College majority, even as Hillary Clinton took a narrow lead in the popular vote.
Some claim that the founding fathers chose the Electoral College over direct election in order to balance the interests of high-population and low-population states. But the deepest political divisions in America have always run not between big and small states, but between the north and the south, and between the coasts and the interior.
One Founding-era argument for the Electoral College stemmed from the fact that ordinary Americans across a vast continent would lack sufficient information to choose directly and intelligently among leading presidential candidates.
This objection rang true in the 1780s, when life was far more local. But the early emergence of national presidential parties rendered the objection obsolete by linking presidential candidates to slates of local candidates and national platforms, which explained to voters who stood for what.
Although the Philadelphia framers did not anticipate the rise of a system of national presidential parties, the 12th Amendment—proposed in 1803 and ratified a year later— was framed with such a party system in mind, in the aftermath of the election of 1800-01. In that election, two rudimentary presidential parties—Federalists led by John Adams and Republicans led by Thomas Jefferson—took shape and squared off. Jefferson ultimately prevailed, but only after an extended crisis triggered by several glitches in the Framers’ electoral machinery. In particular, Republican electors had no formal way to designate that they wanted Jefferson for president and Aaron Burr for vice president rather than vice versa. Some politicians then tried to exploit the resulting confusion.
Enter the 12th Amendment, which allowed each party to designate one candidate for president and a separate candidate for vice president. The amendment’s modifications of the electoral process transformed the Framers’ framework, enabling future presidential elections to be openly populist and partisan affairs featuring two competing tickets. It is the 12th Amendment’s Electoral College system, not the Philadelphia Framers’, that remains in place today. If the general citizenry’s lack of knowledge had been the real reason for the Electoral College, this problem was largely solved by 1800. So why wasn’t the entire Electoral College contraption scrapped at that point?
Standard civics-class accounts of the Electoral College rarely mention the real demon dooming direct national election in 1787 and 1803: slavery.
At the Philadelphia convention, the visionary Pennsylvanian James Wilson proposed direct national election of the president. But the savvy Virginian James Madison responded that such a system would prove unacceptable to the South: “The right of suffrage was much more diffusive [i.e., extensive] in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of Negroes.” In other words, in a direct election system, the North would outnumber the South, whose many slaves (more than half a million in all) of course could not vote. But the Electoral College—a prototype of which Madison proposed in this same speech—instead let each southern state count its slaves, albeit with a two-fifths discount, in computing its share of the overall count.
Virginia emerged as the big winner—the California of the Founding era—with 12 out of a total of 91 electoral votes allocated by the Philadelphia Constitution, more than a quarter of the 46 needed to win an election in the first round. After the 1800 census, Wilson’s free state of Pennsylvania had 10% more free persons than Virginia, but got 20% fewer electoral votes. Perversely, the more slaves Virginia (or any other slave state) bought or bred, the more electoral votes it would receive. Were a slave state to free any blacks who then moved North, the state could actually lose electoral votes.
If the system’s pro-slavery tilt was not overwhelmingly obvious when the Constitution was ratified, it quickly became so. For 32 of the Constitution’s first 36 years, a white slaveholding Virginian occupied the presidency.
Southerner Thomas Jefferson, for example, won the election of 1800-01 against Northerner John Adams in a race where the slavery-skew of the electoral college was the decisive margin of victory: without the extra electoral college votes generated by slavery, the mostly southern states that supported Jefferson would not have sufficed to give him a majority. As pointed observers remarked at the time, Thomas Jefferson metaphorically rode into the executive mansion on the backs of slaves.
The 1796 contest between Adams and Jefferson had featured an even sharper division between northern states and southern states. Thus, at the time the Twelfth Amendment tinkered with the Electoral College system rather than tossing it, the system’s pro-slavery bias was hardly a secret. Indeed, in the floor debate over the amendment in late 1803, Massachusetts Congressman Samuel Thatcher complained that “The representation of slaves adds thirteen members to this House in the present Congress, and eighteen Electors of President and Vice President at the next election.” But Thatcher’s complaint went unredressed. Once again, the North caved to the South by refusing to insist on direct national election.
In light of this more complete (if less flattering) account of the electoral college in the late 18th and early 19th century, Americans should ask themselves whether we want to maintain this odd—dare I say peculiar?—institution in the 21st century.
This is ridiculous. We have known since shortly after all the polls closed that the majority of this country chose Joe Biden to be their next president. This outdated racist system is denying the will of the people (or coming close to it) regularly these days. It’s time to get rid of it.
Don’t know about you, but after watching Schnooks Bros. riots break out in Detroit and Maricopa County, AZ, I needed this celebration of democracy from Philadelphia.
Compare and contrast.
Our drawn-out, Covid-driven, vote-count drama has begun to resemble an old Monty Python sketch. Biden likely will win the presidency in the end, but Trumpism is not dead yet.
Joe Biden will put up a greater popular vote margin than Hillary Clinton’s 2.9 million votes in 2016. With votes still being counted in a handful of states Biden’s margin is already 3.7 million and likely to grow. California, which famously takes weeks to complete its final vote tally, will add to it in bulk.
The only reason Biden is not the president-elect at this minute is the Electoral College, an absurdist leftover of America’s slave past. It also means Biden’s victory will not be the definitive repudiation of Trumpism for which Democrats (and much of the world) had hoped.
Daily Beast Editor-At-Large Molly Jong-Fast shakes her head over the polling failures. She was promised another “blue wave,” that suburban women would turn against Trump in numbers sufficient to “once and for all reject the racism, the stupidity, the sexism, the hate, the anti-science rhetoric.” Yet here we are. Trump may be defeated. Trumpism will linger.
I’ve argued for years that Republicans’ flag fetish, pocket constitution-clutching, and teary singing of “God Bless the USA” are emotional affectations, no more true to the Founders’ vision for this republic than the prosperity gospel is to Jesus. They are the hypocrites Jesus condemned who “love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men.”
Moreover, people raised from the cradle to pine for the return of their god-king were primed to accept an earthly one. They are at heart more royalists than patriots, heirs not to colonial revolutionaries, but to the loyalists who remained committed to a system of government by hereditary royalty and landed gentry. In this moment, one wonders whether Trump’s followers are still Americans except on paper. They wear America like a corporate logo.
Conservative commentator David Frum warned three years ago that, like the poor, conservatives will always be with us. Frum argued for the country to endure, conservatives must escape the dead end of Trumpism and find its way toward “conservatism that cannot only win elections but also govern responsibly, a conservatism that is culturally modern, economically inclusive, and environmentally responsible, that upholds markets at home and U.S. leadership internationally.” Because if “conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.” Indeed, many have.
George Packer concurs at The Atlantic:
Tens of millions of Americans love MAGA more than they love democracy. After four years of lawbreaking and norm-busting, there can be no illusions about President Donald Trump. His first term culminated in an open effort to sabotage the legitimacy of the election and prevent Americans from voting. His rallies in the final week of the campaign were red-drenched festivals of mass hate, autocratic self-absorption, and boredom, without a glimmer of a better future on offer—and they might have put Trump over the top in Florida and elsewhere. Even as “freedom-loving people” came out in unprecedented millions to vote, their readiness to throw away their republican institutions along with their dignity and grasp of facts suggests that many Americans have lost the basic qualities that the Founders believed essential to self-government. There is no obvious way to reverse this decline, which shows signs of infecting elements of the other side as well.
Donald Trump wore the Republican Party “like a rented tuxedo” to get elected, a CNN commentator quipped this morning. Now Republicans are stuck with the dry cleaning bill. So are the rest of us. The party now represents whatever whim Trump tweets on whatever day at whatever hour. Where counting votes favors him, he is for it. Where counting them does not, he is opposed.
The acting president’s followers roll with Dear Leader’s whims. “Stop the vote count,” they shouted last night in Detroit. “Count the votes!” they chanted in Maricopa County, Arizona. In both places, Biden was ahead:
Without citing evidence, some Republicans have accused election officials of manipulating the results to indicate that Mr. Trump is losing in Maricopa County, which is home to about 60 percent of Arizona’s population.
“The only way Biden can win Arizona is through fraud,” said Jim Williams, 67, a welder who attended the protest. “I won’t accept a Biden victory. I don’t want to live under Communist rule.”
Many in the crowd were holding Trump flags, and numerous people were wielding AR-15 rifles and other firearms.
COVID-19 has claimed the lives of 234,000 American lives so far. That is 20 percent of the world’s deaths in a country with just over four percent of the world’s population. To borrow a phrase, this was no boat accident. It was Trumpism. Should their king win a second term, the pandemic here will continue to claim American lives by the tens of thousands. (Republicans know where they can stick their talking points about four Americans lost in Benghazi.) Should Trump lose, his amped-up followers will take lives without needing more prompting.
Quietly or not, they are not going away.
It’s bad enough that they love Donald Trump. They are also killing us. Literally:
Who Americans voted for in 2016 is a strong predictor of how they reacted to the deadliest pandemic in a century, according to a new study published in Nature.
“Partisan differences in physical distancing were linked to higher growth rates of infections and fatalities in pro-Trump counties than necessary,” the authors write.
Using the geotracking data of about 15 million people per day, the study found that counties that voted for President Trump in 2016 saw a 24% decrease in movement and visits to non-essential services between March 9 and May 29 of this year. Counties that voted for Hillary Clinton saw a 38% drop.
This partisan gap remained after factoring in variables like counties’ coronavirus case counts, population density, income, racial makeup and age makeup.
The study also found that less physical distancing was linked to higher coronavirus infection rates 17–23 days later, and an increase in fatality rates 25–31 days later.
“These results imply that Trump-leaning counties could have curbed their infection and fatality growth rates if they had distanced to the same degree as Clinton-leaning counties did,” the authors conclude.
Although the authors thought they’d see the partisan gap decrease as the pandemic got worse over the spring, it actually increased with time.And stay-at-home orders only exacerbated the gap, as they were more effective in Democratic counties.
The partisan response is likely at least partially attributable to Americans’ polarized media consumption. The study found that counties that consumed more Fox News than Democratic-leaning outlets like MSNBC and CNN had less physical distancing.
“Republican-leaning media downplaying the virus at the start of the pandemic may have signaled to Republicans that they should not take the virus very seriously, in turn potentially in part causing the observed partisan differences,” the authors write.
It seems very unlikely that this dynamic has changed since the end of May.
It has not and it will not.
And this is the milestone we hit today:
As Election Day turned into election week early Wednesday morning, Donald Trump had a simple message for his closest political and legal advisers as they began charting a plan to challenge and temporarily halt ballot counts in several key states: give them a court fight that “they’ll never forget.”
The president’s remarks, relayed by two people familiar with them, came on the morning after an inconclusive election night, but one that seemed trending Joe Biden’s way. And for Team Trump, it was meant as a clarion call to use every possible legal resource and bit of political organizing to help re-tip the balance of the scale.
Trump told his advisers that, even if Biden were to claw the presidency away from him,he wanted them to “go down fighting” harder than they ever had before, one of the sources with direct knowledge said. By Wednesday afternoon, some semblance of that approach began to materialize.
In Detroit, pro-Trump protestes showed up at a ballot counting site demanding access to the officials and insisting that the counting be ended. In Arizona, one of Trump’s closest congressional allies, Rep. Paul Gosar, put out a “call to action” for “red blooded American patriots” to attend a rally to “protect our president” at the Maricopa County election center. In Nevada, a Trump supporter interrupted a registrar of voters press conference by declaring “the Biden crime family steals this election.” And throughout the day, the Trump campaign peppered donors and supporters with text messages and emails asking for money to help fund—what it erroneously called—an attempt by Democrats to “steal” the election.
Trump’s legal team—including George W. Bush campaign veteran Mark “Thor” Hearne—asked a court in Michigan to halt absentee ballot counts because it alleged its observers had not been granted full access to the tally, and were not permitted to watch video footage of “remote and unattended dropboxes.” It brought a similar suit in Pennsylvania, fighting to stop the tabulation on the grounds that its overseers had not been allowed within 25 feet of the counting effort.
Further, it filed to enter an ongoing Supreme Court case, hoping to convince jurists on the highest bench to overturn a state policy that would allow counties to count votes postmarked on Election Day and received as late as Friday.
Jay Sekulow, a personal attorney and confidant of Trump’s, is overseeing the Supreme Court effort.
And in the afternoon, members of Trump’s family and another one of his personal lawyers, Rudy Giuliani, were heading to Philadelphia for a “press conference,” but they made a late diversion and chose to host it at a nearby airport.
During the presser, Giuliani declared the city’s count “totally illegitimate,” citing fabricated data, contextual-less anecdotes, and manufactured rumors of illegal voters.
The effort to swarm the sites and demand access to the vote counting operations had clear echoes to what Republicans did in Florida in 2000, when a group of young operatives famously caused a scene in Florida that became known as the Brooks Brothers Riots. Those operatives insisted that they were merely pushing for transparency to ensure a valid recourt. Officials on the ground in Miami-Dade said they felt it was an intimidation tactic.
At least one of the infamous Brooks Brothers rioters is a top ally of President Donald Trump. In an interview, Matt Schlapp declined to say if he was involved in any current effort. But he defended what was transpiring in Detroit, where pro-Trump rallies demannded that workers “stop the count” on grounds that it was a matter of election integrity.
“I can just reiterate that it is perfectly appropriate for voters to highlight any voting irregularity to the officials whose job it is to make sure there is no irregularity,” said Schlapp. “And if citizens want to get involved in that process, i think that’s a positive thing, not a negative.”
But others involved in that episode said the parallels don’t actually hold up well. For starters, Biden is currently leading in Michigan, making it unclear why the Trump side would want counting stopped. Doug Heye, another member of the 2000 crew, noted: “We wanted every vote counted and counted publicly.”
Those inconsistencies didn’t seem to bother the Trump team. Even before the clock struck noon on Wednesday, top players on the president’s campaign were already starting to bet everything on an armada of lawyers. Publicly, the campaign put on a determined, cocky face, with Trump’s campaign manager Bill Stepien and other aides assuring reporters that they were all still confident that, as the week progressed, the final ballot counts in the critical battleground states would hand them a clean, decisive victory.
However, before the morning even ended, three senior officials on the reelection effort were already telling The Daily Beast that they were confident the president’s best, if not only, hope in locking Biden out of the White House would be if the attorneys were able to successfully intervene in enough states.
“Lawyer city,” Joe Grogan, formerly a top domestic policy adviser to President Trump, said, describing the situation on Wednesday afternoon. “It’s going to be really ugly.”
Trump just wants to fight because that’s what he does. Most of this is just instinctual. He’ll rile up the cult and get them out in the streets if he can and who knows what else he might do. But he’s also preparing to refuse to concede and if he leaves office in January without disruption, he will make himself into the president in exile. I think he sees this as a key to replenishing his coffers.
Nearly 7 percent of ballots in U.S. Postal Service sorting facilities on Tuesday were not processed on time for submission to election officials, according to data the agency filed Wednesday in federal court, potentially leaving hundreds of thousands of ballots caught in the mail system during an especially tight presidential race.
The Postal Service reported the timely processing — which includes most mail-handling steps outside of pickup and delivery — of 93.3 percent of ballots on Election Day, its best processing score in several days, but still well below the 97-percent target that postal and voting experts say the agency should hit.
The Postal Service processed 115,630 ballots on Tuesday, a volume much lower than in recent days after weeks of warnings about chronic mail delays. Of that number, close to 8,000 ballots were not processed on time, a small proportion but one that could factor heavily in states such as Michigan and Wisconsin, which do not accept ballots after Election Day and could be decided by a few thousand votes.
Earlier Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan of the District of Columbia had ordered the Postal Service to sweep 12 postal processing facilities that cover 15 states for ballots. But the agency rebuffed that order and said it would stick to its own inspection schedule, which voting rights advocates worried was too late in the day for found ballots to make it to vote counters.
The directive came after the Postal Service disclosed that more than 300,000 ballots nationwide could not be traced. Those ballots received entry bar code scans at processing facilities, but not exit scans. The agency said the likelihood of that many ballots being misplaced was very low; mail clerks had been ordered to sort ballots by hand in many locations, and items that were pulled out for expedited delivery were not given an exit scan.
Who knows if this would have made a difference anywhere? And that’s the point. We will never know.
NBC News reports:
Twitter is taking quick action on the president’s tweets calling into question the legitimacy of the election.
The social media platform labeled two of Trump’s tweets Wednesday morning with warnings that their claims regarding continuing vote counts were potentially misleading about the election, following a similar action taken in the early morning hours.
In one tweet, which Twitter also restricted from comments, likes and retweets, Trump baselessly claimed his advantage in states led by Democrats “started to magically disappear as surprise ballot dumps were counted.”
Another used a manipulated or misleading screenshot of a map from an elections results reporting outlet to suggest that 100 percent of a new count of votes in Michigan went to Biden. That did not happen.
“As votes are still being counted across the country, our teams continue to take enforcement action on Tweets that prematurely declare victory or contain misleading information about the election broadly,” Twitter spokesperson Nicholas Pacilio said in a statement. “Our teams continue to monitor Tweets that attempt to spread misleading information about voting, accounts engaged in spammy behavior, and Tweets that make premature or inaccurate claims about election results. Our teams remain vigilant and will continue working to protect the integrity of the election conversation on Twitter.”
Twitter’s actions follow several similar steps from election night in which it labeled and limited engagement on a tweet from Trump claiming Democrats were trying to “steal the election.” Facebook took similar steps to label identical posts on its platform.
Remember when Trump lost the popular vote by 2 million votes and won only by 77,000 votes across three states in 2016? And Hillary Clinton conceded the election the next day? And we all took to our beds for a week?
I don’t remember Hillary Clinton tweeting out that Trump had stolen the election or calling for the vote counting to be stopped. Jill Stein collected millions of dollars from gullible Democrats to do a recount in Wisconsin and it didn’t change anything. But that’s not going to happen this time.
Trump is tweeting out disinformation and ginning up his base to do… something. This isn’t going to end well for America, at least not in the short run.
I’m exhausted after staying up late last night to try to write something coherent about what was going on so I’m a little bit foggy today. But I remain confident that Biden will pull off a win that is bigger than Donald Trump’s win in 2016 — and unlike him, it will be backed by a huge popular vote victory. I fervently hope this will happen and it looks good.
Of course Trump is threatening to contest the results (despite his win in 2016 being much, much more narrow and losing the popular vote by 2 million.) But that’s Trump. We knew that was coming too. So fasten your seatbelts.
Nonetheless, I found this piece by former Obama staffer Dan Pfeiffer to be heartening:
Last night went exactly like we thought it would for most of the last six months. Like many others, I desperately hoped for a quick Biden victory with wins in Florida and North Carolina. Buoyed by a barrage of overly-buoyant polls in recent days, I allowed myself to believe such an outcome was not only possible, but perhaps even probable.
No such luck. It’s 2020. The year we are not supposed to have nice things, so of course this will be a painful slog.
But here’s the thing: I haven’t made a political prediction in the last four years and I not going to start today, but based on what we know now — I feel confident that when the votes are counted Joe Biden will be elected President.
Joe Biden has multiple paths to 270 electoral votes. Donald Trump does not. Late last night, Fox News and the Associated Press called Arizona for Biden. Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Michigan, Georgia, and North Carolina remain too close to call because of delays in counting mail ballots. Biden has the advantage in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Michigan. Trump has the advantage in North Carolina and Georgia seems to be a true toss up.
Perhaps the most important moment of last night was Biden winning the second Congressional district of Nebraska. That single electoral vote unlocks the map for Biden. The former Vice President now no longer needs to win Pennsylvania, Georgia, or North Carolina. With Arizona and NE-2 in the bag, Wisconsin and Michigan gets Biden to exactly 270 electoral votes.
This is not to say Biden won’t win Pennsylvania — he very well may. There are very positive signs for Biden in the votes that have been counted and in the very large number of mail ballots that haven’t yet been counted.
To be clear this isn’t over, but Joe Biden is VERY well positioned. Donald Trump is in a lot of trouble and it’s okay to act like it.
Don’t be afraid to be confident
Joe Biden struck the perfect tone in his brief remarks late last night. He called for patience during the process, but expressed confidence at the outcome:
I’m here to tell you tonight, we believe we’re on track to win this election. We knew because of the unprecedented early vote and the mail-in vote it was going to take a while. We’re going to have to be patient until the hard work of tallying the votes is finished. And it ain’t over until every vote is counted, every ballot is counted.
Trump, on the other hand, threw gas on the fire in a parade of irresponsible misinformation. He is going to spend the next several days lying about the legitimacy of the election and threatening to use his rigged courts to invalidate legally cast ballots. His remarks were dumb, dangerous, and a stain on our democracy. While his words were morally offensive, they were also legally incoherent and politically impotent. There are very legitimate concerns about the role Trump’s words may play in political violence in the coming days, but what he says and tweets will bot affect the outcome.
This process is likely to play itself over days and maybe weeks. The networks burned by their own shitty polling may be very reticent to make definitive calls in states like Wisconsin where Biden leads narrowly. After 2016 and last night, it seems impossible for Democrats to feel confident. We have been emotionally battered by outsized expectations and very incorrect polls, but we should still be confident. We have every mathematical reason to feel internally confident and every political imperative to project confidence externally.
The proper approach to the tumult of the next few days it to adopt the patient confidence of Joe Biden. Trust the process. Be confident in the outcome. It’s the best response to Trump’s irresponsible gaslighting. Talking clearly and calmly about the normalcy of the process, the legitimacy of the votes, and our faith in the math is the posture we need to adopt at this very tense time. We can’t allow the trauma of 2016 to force us into hiding while Trump and his irresponsible minions spread misinformation. This posture matters not just for the vote counting in the coming days, but also for how many in the country will view a Biden presidency in the coming years.
The Republicans are already trying to neuter his ability govern by casting aspersions about how he won. We cannot let them do that. The stakes are too damn high.
We had hoped for a generational victory where Republicans up and down the ballot would be appropriately punished for their misdeeds. That did not happen. We have a lot more work to do. However, it appears that when it is all said and done Joe Biden will be the next President of the United States and Donald Trump will become the third President of the modern era to fail to win reelection.
It’s not everything we wanted, but it’s a giant fucking deal.
As I wrote yesterday, it shouldn’t be this hard. But it is. So, lets just recognize that we are dealing with a toxic, malignant force in our body politic and it isn’t going away. The majority of the country is still normal. But this extremely large minority of brainwashed cultists isn’t going anywhere, with or without Donald Trump. There’s just no getting away from that.