197 search results for ""election integrity""

Swalwell: It's too rich that Donald Trump and Mike Johnson are talking to us about election integrity. That's like having to listen to a lecture by Bonnie and Clyde on bank security. I mean, it's absurd considering what they did in the 2020 election to try and overturn it. pic.twitter.com/V1NrMxjlvP

— Acyn (@Acyn) April 13, 2024

Donald Trump likes to proclaim himself the greatest businessman, greatest president, greatest everything and none of it is even remotely true. Well, there is one category in which he is the undisputed greatest of all time: he is the greatest sore loser in world history. And he’s such a sore loser that even when he wins he whines that he was cheated out of winning even bigger.

The best example of this was his lament after 2016 when he won the electoral college but lost the popular vote by 2 million votes that those votes were all illegal. He couldn’t live with the fact that even though he technically won the election it was not by popular acclamation. He used to say, “when people get in line that have absolutely no right to vote and they go around in circles. Sometimes they go to their car, put on a different hat, put on a different shirt, come in and vote again.” (This does not happen, needless to say.) And he loved to say that most of those illegal votes came from undocumented immigrants.

Almost immediately upon taking office he convened a “Commission on Voter Integrity” and tapped his Vice President Mike Pence and a right wing “vote fraud” activist and then Kansas Secretary of State named Kris Kobach to head it up, larding the rest of the board with Republican hacks. Kobach and his various henchmen quickly lost whatever slight chance they had a credibility when they tried to strong arm the states into turning over massive amounts of private voter data which resulted in a succession of lawsuits that blocked most of the commission’s activities and caused chaos for elections officials all over the country.

One of the Democratic members of the commission was forced to file a lawsuit in federal court to get Kobach and company to share working papers with the few Democrats on the commission and a federal judge sided with him, ordering the Republicans majority to turn them over. At that point the commission was abruptly disbanded without ever issuing a report, they turned the matter over to the Department of Homeland Security and that was that.

But as we all know too well, that did not stop Donald Trump from continuing to insist that the election system is rigged despite no evidence of any kind of systemic fraud. It was even adjudicated more than 60 times in the post election period in 2020. But the Big Lie persists because he has relentlessly flogged it virtually every day since then and polls show that two-thirds of Republicans still believe that election was stolen. In fact, going back to his first election in 2016, prior to each one Trump has planted the seeds that the system is rigged against him. As we found out on January 6th, he has many followers who believe that he must win, or else.

After he incited that insurrection in 2021 it briefly appeared that the Republican establishment was going to finally break with Trump and put an end to this insanity. The leadership of the party stood up on the floor of the congress and denounced Trump’s behavior. A few of them even brought themselves to vote for conviction in his impeachment trial which would have prevented him from running again. But not enough were able to summon the courage and it wasn’t long before then House Speaker Kevin McCarthy scurried down to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago beach club to kiss the ring and establish that Trump remained the leader of the GOP despite his coup attempt and numerous crimes, setting the stage for his inevitable comeback.

These pilgrimages have become a ritual for all Republicans with any ambition. (In fact, it’s become a required stop for foreign politicians covering all their bases as well.) Just last week House Speaker Mike Johnson made the trek, obviously to beg for protection from his arch-nemesis Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene who is making a major power play to strip him his power as Speaker and possibly the chair itself. (She is threatening to call to vacate the chair unless Johnson does exactly what she wants.)

Trump was non-committal, trying to keep Greene appeased (she’s very popular with the MAGA crowd and he agrees with her position on Ukraine aid) while also showing support for Johnson whom he clearly sees as a puppet — which he is. It was a rather sad display, with Johnson looking like an eager schoolboy as Trump stood behind him grimacing like a stern head master.

Although we know why Johnson went running to Big Daddy, the ostensible reason was to announce a new proposal for, you guessed it, “election integrity.” Johnson pledged to introduce legislation to make it illegal for non-citizens to vote, specifically undocumented immigrants, claiming there is a danger that “potentially hundreds of thousands of votes” will be cast by migrants in the November election.

They seem to want people to believe that a big priority for all the people Trump claims are escaped mental patients currently flooding the border is registering to vote. Are they suggesting that these wily, sophisticated migrants are thinking ahead to the future when voting for Democrats may one day entitle them to a path to citizenship? It’s absurd to think that undocumented migrants would take a risk for something so abstract with no immediate reward and it’s not backed up with any data to support it. As CNN reported:

The right-leaning Heritage Foundation’s database of confirmed fraud cases lists less than 100 examples of non-citizens voting between 2002 and 2022, amid more than one billion lawfully cast ballots. And the left-leaning Brennan Center for Justice analyzed more than 23 million votes from the 2016 election and found an estimated 30 examples.

This is just another way for Trump to play to his base’s prejudice and pump the paranoid “Great Replacement Theory”, the formerly fringe belief now mainstream on the right, that immigration from non-European countries is a plot to displace white people and create a permanent Democratic majority. He’s folding it into his Big Lie Redux preview in a two for one package of xenophobic outrage.

Perhaps the Democrats should just go ahead and let them pass this unnecessary, redundant bill so that when Trump loses again, they can say that the election must be legitimate because Trump and Johnson ensured that the integrity of the vote was fully protected. I’m sure that won’t stop Trump from his inevitable primal scream but it would be pleasurable to be able to say it anyway.

Salon

One of Donald Trump’s most famous quotes is from the 2016 campaign when he said,” I could shoot someone on 5th avenue and not lose any voters.” He seems to have convinced himself that it’s true. Despite the fact that he has been losing between 20 and 40 percent in most of the Republican primaries this year, he insists that they will all vote for him in the fall and anyway, he says, “I’m not sure we need too many.”

https://twitter.com/highbrow_nobrow/status/1753612048720666935?s=20

As recently as Super Tuesday he told Right Side Broadcasting, “I don’t need votes, we have all the votes we need.”

Trump: “I don’t need votes.” pic.twitter.com/aV8oeRjqwr

— American Bridge 21st Century (@American_Bridge) March 5, 2024

And why wouldn’t he say that? After all, as he told Newsmax again on Thursday night, “We won in 2016, we won even bigger in 2020 , we won by a lot more” so he’s certain to get as many votes this time. Or, at least, that seems to be his logic.

But if he was really so sure of himself you’d think he wouldn’t need to ensure that the election is going to be a nightmare that makes 2020 look placid and serene by comparison, wouldn’t you? But that looks like what he has in mind. Now that he has managed to install his daughter-in-law Laura Trump, MAGA henchman Michael Whatley in the RNC, along with his defacto campaign manager (and underhanded operative) Chris LaCivita, and immediately purged the RNC staff to make room for loyalists, the takeover of the party is complete. And from what we hear from Lara Trump, who has been all over TV discussing their agenda, they plan a full fledged assault on the election process in November.

Although she has said repeatedly that they planned to encourage early voting in this election, according to the Washington Post, they’ve actually ended their “Bank Your Vote” program and replaced it with a “Grow The Vote” outreach to less likely Trump voters (which must mean white voters since they are also reportedly shutting down their minority outreach centers.) Trump has made it clear that if her father-in-law is elected they will immediately put in place laws to return to one day voting, with paper ballots, voter ID and requirements that the count to be finished by the end of election day, so that’s something to look forward to.

In the meantime, they plan to train actual MAGA poll workers apparently, something the RNC was not allowed to do for decades because of a consent decree from 1981 when they got caught intimidating minority voters as they are wont to do. (In reality, this plan was already announced last fall under the auspices of former RNC chair Ronna McDaniel, but like all Trumps she’s taking credit for others’ work.)

Lara Trump told Sean Hannity, “we have to fight fire with dynamite” and announced that they are putting “massive resources” toward a newly created “election integrity division” claiming “we currently have 78 lawsuits out right now in 23 states across this country to make it easier to vote and harder to cheat. And here’s what I want to say. To anyone out there who is thinking about cheating in an election, we will go after you. You will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.” (Actually that’s already happening — to her father-in-law and his cronies.)

But you won’t believe who they’ve hired as the “senior counsel” for the new election integrity division. It’s almost as if they are trolling the media and the Democrats by putting one of the most dishonest, hyperbolic purveyors of The Big Lie in all of MAGA world, Christina Bobb, the author of the book “Stealing Your Vote: The Inside Story of the 2020 Election and What It Means for 2024.” She’s the former Trump DHS official and OAN commentator who promoted the daft idea that Trump would be reinstated after Joe Biden was inaugurated on the basis of the absurd “audits” that took place in various close states and came up with nothing.

Bobb is probably best known to mainstream America as the attorney who signed the affidavit attesting to the fact that Trump had turned over all the classified material at Mar-a-lago which was later found to be untrue. But she’s been part of the Trump inner circle since November of 2020 as an energetic election denier, as this NY Times profile from 2022 illustrates:

Ms. Bobb was present in the pro-Trump “command center” at the Willard Hotel in Washington before the Capitol attack, along with Rudolph W. Giuliani and other Trump stalwarts. She acted as Mr. Giuliani’s go-between with state officials in Arizona and helped fund-raise for a recount in Maricopa County that Republican leaders called a “sham.” She drafted a memo and participated in meetings to discuss a plan to appoint alternate slates of electors to reverse legitimate state election results. And Ms. Bobb created the computer file used to draft a proposal, never carried out, for Mr. Trump to issue an executive order for the federal government to seize voting machines.

Bobb was also sued for defamation by Dominion and Smartmatic voting machines and played a key role in the fake electors scheme.

She’s had quite a trajectory. She went to law school and then joined the marines for two years after which she ran for office and came in last in field of 8. Then she went to DC and joined the Trump administration, then decamped to OAN where she became a “Stop The Steal” cheerleader and became “a fixture at meetings” with the likes of John Eastman and Sidney Powell. She finally quit OAN and moved to Florida where she took a staff job at Trump’s Save America PAC and somehow was tapped to be the lawyer who had to sign that affidavit when the FBI came calling.

Her devotion to Trump is limitless. I saw her on Right Side Broadcasting at a Trump rally where she extolled Trump’s impeccable musical taste and fantastic dancing abilities. I’m not kidding. According to the Times, even Trump himself has recoiled at her cloying sycophancy (which, frankly, is hard to believe.) But in MAGA world she is an expert on the Big Lie and the truest of true believers. Of course they’re making her “senior counsel for election integrity.” Who else could it possibly be?

Josh Marshall comments on this weird story:

A rather bizarre development in Virginia. On election day Glenn Youngkin’s 17 year old son twice tried to vote illegally. Indeed, he attempted to do so – twice – in a precinct where his family doesn’t even live.

The younger Youngkin went to vote in a precinct at the Great Falls Library in Fairfax County. He presented his ID which identified him as a 17 year old. The voting official realized who Youngkin was and told him that people under the age of 18 are not allowed to vote in Virginia. She offered to register him for the next election but he left. He then returned about 20 minutes later and insisted he be allowed to vote because an unidentified friend of his, also 17, had been allowed to vote. The precinct captain, Jennifer Chanty, again told him that he was not eligible to vote.

State officials say – I think rightly – that there is no crime because the younger Youngkin didn’t try to falsify his identity or age. So he didn’t break the law since he wasn’t allowed to vote.

Check out the guy who built his campaign around the issue of “election integrity” and parental rights defending his snotty little brat:

Asked about the incident a spokesman for Gov-Elect Youngkin attacked people “pitching opposition research on a 17-year old kid who honestly misunderstood Virginia election law” while Youngkin was trying to unite the state.

He’s 17, not 7. And he is either a moron or he was playing games. I vote for the latter.

Republicans are afraid of Americans voting but are just fine with Russia interfering on Donald Trump’s behalf. Again:

I’m sure you recall Mike Pompeo, John Ratcliff and other lying Trump toadies all saying that Russia wasn’t really interfering and it was actually China that was pushing for Biden. Surprise! That wasn’t true:

Top lines from a new ODNI assessment of election interference: China didn’t interfere and Putin was directly controlling André Derkach, who was promoting anti-Biden disinformation

— Ken Dilanian (@KenDilanianNBC) March 16, 2021

You remember Rudy and Derkach, right?

President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer and a key Ukrainian ally in their plot to smear Former Vice President Joe Biden have both tried to distance themselves from collaborator Andriy Derkach after he was sanctioned and outed as an “active Russian agent” by the U.S. Treasury Department.

Rudy Giuliani, who worked with Derkach and whose work as Trump’s lawyer and top Biden-dirt-digger culminated in his own client’s impeachment, told The Daily Beast on Friday that he was no longer in touch with the Russian intelligence asset.

I guess Rudy’s going to get away with what he did to try to sabotage the 2020 campaign for his client Trump. But it is stunningly traitorous behavior that went all the way to the oval office. The fact that the Republicans didn’t give a shit about any of this and it will be swept under the rug, probably forgotten, still boggles my mind. Rudy Giuliani was working with a Russian agent, who we now know was on orders from Vladimir Putin, to help the president set up a foreign operation to destroy his political rival. The president was impeached for it and the Republicans voted in lockstep to protect him, in effect endorsing his plot.

And it’s just … whatever.

Election integrity but not elected integrity
by Tom Sullivan

It’s a cliche anymore to say that people who get distraught when women they don’t know want an abortion show much less concern for other people’s children once they’re born. But a headline from the inbox yesterday reminds me this is not the only area of public policy where such behavior holds.

One of the state’s GOP websites regularly reproduces in whole press releases from the Voter Integrity Project, North Carolina’s spinoff of True the Vote. This week’s 10-alarm headline? Curbside voting. Did you know that “there is no actual ‘proof’ of disability required” for the disabled or aged to use curbside voting? That you don’t have to show a photo ID at curbside voting? And that George Soros-backed groups will use this “curbside loophole” to help “drive-by voters” circumvent the state’s new voter ID law?

No code-speak there, huh?

But it strikes me that all the alarmism over the integrity of elections by people who devote themselves to undermining public confidence in them dissipates like morning fog once candidates take office. Ensuring only their preferred candidates come to term is what’s important. The integrity of those electeds and the actual legislative process afterwards? Not so much.

People whose only power is at the polls are a threat to democracy. Money wielding unprecedented influence in the halls of government at both the state and national level is much less of a concern.

I’ve been pointing this out for a while, but now the media is noticing: Trump is relying on his “election integrity” goons to intimidate voters.. And if that doesn’t work, they’ll use the chaos they create to contest the election. They aren’t even trying to legitimately win.

Some Republicans worry that Trump’s focus on preventing a “rigged” election has hurt the party’s ground game, the get-out-the-vote operations that can be crucial in an election as close as this one.

Trump’s “election integrity” team also has raised concerns among Democrats about potential voter intimidation at the polls.

If Trump loses on Nov. 5, the election teams would be his evidence collectors for what almost certainly would be a barrage of legal challenges — and calls for state officials not to certify the election results.

 Early on, Trump told his team to pour its resources into “election integrity” efforts, saying that he’d take care of generating excitement and turning out voters for his campaign against President Biden.

But now that Biden has stepped aside, Trump faces an invigorated Democratic ticket led by Vice President Kamala Harris, who’s benefitting from the robust ground operation the Biden-Harris campaign built in swing states.

The difference between the Harris and Trump door-to-door campaigns is evident in several states, especially the seven swing states likely to decide the election — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Harris’ team says 330,000 people have worked as volunteers since she announced her campaign last month. The campaign has about 1,500 staffers.

After months of declining to specify the scope of Trump’s ground operations, Trump campaign political director James Blair posted on X that the campaign has hundreds of paid staffers.

Blair told Axios the campaign has 14,000 trained volunteers or “Trump Force 47 Captains” in battleground states. He added that the operation has more volunteers but would not elaborate. Blair also disputed the size of Harris’ volunteer force, calling it “fake numbers on a spreadsheet.”

Trump is relying on Turning Point USA, the Sentinel Action Fund, conservative activist Scott Presler’s group Early Vote Action, and the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s network of churches and Elon Musk’s America PAC to get out the vote. Reports are theat none of them have a clue what they’re doing.

Meanwhile Trump’s campaign has allegedly trained about 160,000 “poll watchers”

At Trump rallies in swing states, large signs with QR codes asking attendees to sign up to “Protect the Vote” are everywhere.

RNC chair Michael Whatley told Axios the goal is to have 5,000 “election integrity volunteers” in each battleground state.

Whatley also told Axios their GOTV operation is aimed at people who haven’t voted before. Maybe they should just start handing out cash?

It’s possible this is all bluster. If their amateur hour of a convention is any example, this campaign is not exactly first rate. But Trump has said repeatedly that there’s no need for a GOTV operation because he is all that’s needed to get his people out to the polls. He certainly believes that. But his rallies aren’t really pulling like they used to and it’s possible that the show has gone on just a little too long, even for the faithful.

Who did this???? 😆😆😆 pic.twitter.com/2SBFTkBYO1

— Morgan J. Freeman (@mjfree) August 8, 2024

Donald Trump is in a bad way. His campaign has completely lost its bearings with the withdrawal of Joe Biden and the ecstatic reception of the Kamala Harris-Tim Walz ticket among the Democratic faithful. He is so upset about losing Biden as his opponent that he’s even taken to posting freaky fan-fic on his Truth Social Platform, hopefully suggesting that Biden is going to storm the convention and take back the nomination:

Some of that is a classic “I know you are but what am I” Trump set-up to rationalize a loss in November. He’s going to say the Democrats staged a coup and usurped the Constitution by replacing Joe Biden on the ballot. It’s laughably absurd but it will soothe him to say it and give his followers something to hang on to.

But it’s also obvious that he just can’t wrap his mind around the fact that he has to run against Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. It’s so confusing to him that he can’t even leave Mar-a-lago anymore. While the Democratic nominees are barnstorming the country with Trump’s VP choice JD Vance trailing behind them with pathetic stunts, Trump himself is doing just one rally this week — in an irrelevant deep red state that he will certainly win.

Philip Bump of the Washington Post has the numbers showing how much he has slowed down:

Trump is holding far fewer rallies than he did in 2016 and has held far fewer public appearances than he did in 2020, the two previous times he sought the presidency.

A review of Trump’s activities in July and August of those previous years shows the difference. From July 1 to Aug. 10, 2016, Trump held 22 rallies, including six days on which he held multiple rallies. Over the rest of August, he added 15 more rallies. This year, he’s held seven rallies with another scheduled for Friday in Montana.

One might guess that he is still spooked from the assassination attempt and fears being back out there but he wasn’t campaigning much even before that. He just doesn’t seem to think he needs to do it because, as he tells his people, he believes that the votes are already there and the main job of the campaign is “election integrity” which translates to suppressing the Democratic vote and contesting the results if he loses.

Nonetheless, he’s obviously agitated over the Harris’s massive small donor fundraising haul over the past couple of weeks which he knows very well is indicative of tremendous enthusiasm for their ticket. (He’s drained his own small donors dry over the past eight years.) And polls showing her taking the lead are driving him to distraction.

According to his former communications director, Stephanie Grisham he’s decided to take matters into his own hands:

Re: Trump’s self-announced press conference today at 2 pm: He’s panicking. I’ve seen this play many times. He thinks his team is failing him & no one can speak better/“save” his campaign/defend him but him. He hates the coverage Harris is getting & thinks only he can fix it.

The questions at the presser couldn’t be heard because of the poor production at Mar-a-lago, but from what we could tell the reporters were extremely polite and demanded no follow-ups which was nice for him. Some of the questions sounded like they might have even been asked by members of his own staff.

For instance, when someone threw him a red meat question about whether former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown dating Harris back in the 1990s had helped her career, Trump told a wild tale about almost dying in a helicopter with him and that Brown had told him “terrible things” about Harris and was “not a fan.” (This is not the first time Trump has made these crude suggestions about her.)

Willie Brown told the New York Times he’s never been in a helicopter with Trump and that he never disparaged Harris to him. It seems that Trump had mistaken Willie Brown with former California Gov. Jerry Brown who did take a helicopter flight with him and Gov. Gavin Newsom to inspect fire damage a few years back. They didn’t speak of Kamala Harris and the helicopter was never in any danger but Newsom recalls Trump incessantly wondering if it might crash.

Oddly, no members of the media are angrily demanding to see Trump’s medical records despite the fact that he appears to be having major memory problems and possibly even delusions.

After declaring that reproductive rights are no longer an issue because he’d “sent it back to the states” which he insists was the desire of liberals and conservatives for 50 years (total nonsense) there was this straightforward question about whether Trump planned to have the FDA ban mifepristone. He answered with a bizarre mish-mash of words about “supplementing” with something “open and humane” and people voting on it that made no sense whatsoever.

Recall that he told Time Magazine he has “pretty strong views” about mifepristone and would be making an announcement “probably over the next week.” That was on April 30th. There’s been no announcement. This latest gibberish is all we have to go on.

And then there were the crowds. He simply could not stop talking about the size of his crowds, complaining that the press was undercounting them even declaring that his January 6th crowd was bigger than Martin Luther King’s March on Washington. Over and over again he kept bringing it up apropos of nothing as if on a loop. It is a long-standing obsession of his that seems to be getting worse.

He did make some news by saying that he had agreed to debate Harris on ABC from which he had earlier backed out. He also announced a debate on NBC and on Fox but he got the dates all mixed up and according to the Harris campaign they’ve only agreed to the original debate on ABC on September 10th anyway. Perhaps others will happen as well but despite Trump’s apparent desperation to have them, nothing has been set.

All in all, it was another Trump trainwreck, perhaps one of his worst but certainly not unprecedented. However, this time, the opposition is taking no prisoners. The Harris campaign put out a very sharp (and hilarious) response:

He was dour and angry and frankly is starting to look a whole lot older, just in the past few months. He’s not enjoying himself and it shows and compared to the excited crowds greeting Harris and Walz this week this sad, pathetic appearance seemed almost funereal. Donald Trump isn’t fun anymore.

I think he’s considering for the first time that he might lose again and he is not psychologically equipped to deal with that reality. Sure, he’ll fight it and tell his supporters that it was stolen and perhaps even incite more violence. But deep down he knows he might actually lose just as he knows deep down that he lost in 2020. There’s a look of panic in his eyes right now. If he fails this time he might just break apart at the seams.

Chris Hayes had a good take on it last night:

“We are in a different world, one where Donald Trump is no longer the clear favorite,” says Chris Hayes. “That is why we have seen him swing wildly from overconfident to spiraling, whining, and very obviously miserable.” pic.twitter.com/Q6kI7Xdxdi

— All In with Chris Hayes (@allinwithchris) August 9, 2024

Salon

Trump’s nightmare becomes a night terror

Ebullient. Is that the right word? Since President Biden passed his party’s baton to Vice President Kamala Harris, the mood among Democratic Party faithful has turned a sharp corner. The energy at rallies for the Harris campaign, now complete with Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate, is the stuff of former president Donald Trump’s reality-challenged boasts. And a nightmare for an old con man desperate for the presidential shield to shield him from jail time.

(Trump made bank off his glowering mugshot. Wonder what his glower will look like after a prison haircut?)

Ed Kilgore reviews a few post Biden polls for the New York Magazine Intelligencer. Trump’s nightmare is headed into night terror territory. The Harris polling bounce is now a trend:

According to the FiveThirtyEight national polling averages, Harris is leading Trump by 1.9 percent (45.3 to 43.4 percent), with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at 5.3 percent. When Biden dropped out, he was trailing in the same averages by 3.2 percent. In a contest as static as the 2024 presidential race had been, that’s a big swing.,

The trend lines in national polls are equally telling. YouGov-Economist tested Harris against Trump back on July 16, showing Trump leading by 5 percent (44 to 39 percent). Then, on July 23, after Biden’s withdrawal, the same pollster had Trump leading Harris by 3 percent (44 to 41 percent). On July 30 and again on August 6 YouGov-Economist showed Harris leading Trump by 2 percent (46 to 44 percent on the earlier date and 45 to 43 percent later). Similarly, RMG Research had Trump leading Harris by two points (48 to 46 percent) on July 23, with Harris leading Trump by five points (47 to 42 percent) on July 31. Morning Consult’s tracking poll showed Trump leading Harris by two points ( 47 – 45 percent) on July 22 but then Harris leading Trump by four points (48 – 44 percent) on August 4. A CBS poll of likely voters conducted by YouGov shows a three-point Trump lead (51 to 48 percent) on July 18 turning into a one-point Harris lead (50 to 49 percent) on August 2.,

Polls comparing the Harris-Trump matchup to the earlier Biden-Trump matchup mostly show the same pro-Democratic trend. On July 16, Reuters-Ipsos showed Trump ahead of Biden by two points (43 percent to 41 percent). On July 23, the same poll gave Harris a two-point lead (44 percent to 42 percent). On July 2, the New York Times–Siena showed Trump leading Biden by six points (49 percent to 43 percent). On July 24, that pollster showed Trump leading Harris by one point (48 percent to 47 percent). Similarly, on July 2, The Wall Street Journal had Trump leading Biden by six points (48 to 42 percent) and Harris by just two points (49 to 47 percent) on July 25. Both Times-Siena and WSJ showed Harris ahead by a point when non-major-party candidates were included. Most recently, Survey USA showed Harris leading Trump by three points (48 – 45 percent) among likely voters as of August 5; the same pollster showed Trump leading Biden by two points (45 – 43 percent) back on June 28.

Shrinkage

Walz kicked off the use of “weird” to deflate Republicans’ image. “Shrink him, shrink the message,” Walz elaborated last week on the Pod Save America podcast. And hoo-boy, is Trump feeling his shrinkage in the polls.

Republicans were sure of victory at their convention last month. That confidence has evaporated. Predictably, Trump complains the world is unfair (Washington Post):

“It’s unfair that I beat him and now I have to beat her, too,” Trump told an ally in a phone call last weekend.

Trump’s campaign has struggled to recover both from the vigor of his opponent’s campaign and the fallout from his choice of a running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio, who was not and is not ready for prime time.

While Trump has repeatedly said Republican Party officials only needed to focus on election integrity, he has begun hearing from outside allies that he does not have a significant ground game in key battleground states. He has grown annoyed with some of the media focus on his campaign staff, suggesting to others that his advisers get too much credit. Some advisers have urged him to spend more on digital advertising, saying he is being pummeled online.

His “bonkers” decision to ditch the Republican National Committee’s field plan and to outsource his ground operations to Turning Point Action and other PACs could turn his national campaign into another Trump Taj Mahal.

By the way, Kilgore wasn’t done:

Most recently, and perhaps impressively, Bloomberg–Morning Consult has released a new batch of seven battleground-state polls taken from July 24–28. Overall, they showed Harris leading Trump by one percent (48 to 47 percent), as compared to a two-point Trump lead over Biden in early July. The individual state gains by Harris were also striking: She led by 2 percent (49 to 47 percent) in Arizona, a real problem state for Biden; by 2 percent (47 to 45 percent) in Nevada; by 2 percent (49 to 47 percent) in Wisconsin; and by an astonishing 11 percent (53 to 42 percent) in Michigan. Harris was tied with Trump in Georgia at 47 percent, and she trailed him by 2 percent (46 to 48 percent) in North Carolina and by 4 percent (46 to 50 percent) in Pennsylvania.,

A July 29-August 2 survey from Split Ticket-Data for Progress of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin showed Harris leading Trump by a point (48 to 47 percent) among likely voters across the three states, after trailing him by five points (45 to 50 percent) in a July 18-23 poll.,

Three battleground states have enough post-Biden-Harris-switch polling now for FiveThirtyEight to compile averages, and all of them show very close races. In Georgia, Trump leads by 0.7 percent (45.8 to 45.1 percent), but Harris leads in Michigan by 1.7 percent (44.7 to 43.1 percent) and most surprisingly, in Pennsylvania by 0.8 percent (45.4 to 44.6 percent).

Kilgore likely penned his post before Marquette Law School released its survey showing Harris opening up an eight-point lead over Trump:

The survey, conducted by Marquette Law School between July 24 and August 1, shows that when third party candidates are included, Harris leads among likely voters on 50 percent to Trump’s 42 percent. Harris has improved the Democrats‘ position since May, when Trump was leading on 44 percent to Joe Biden‘s 41 percent.

An outlier about an old liar?

Trump can sleep on that.

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.

Alarm bells are warranted

“Here in Georgia, we’re watching as Trump and his allies prepare to sabotage the 2024 election by changing the rules around certification election results,” tweeted Max Flugrath on Sunday.

The thread by the communications director of Fair Fight Action raises the alarm over weirdness out of the ordinary for Donald Trump. At his Georgia rally on Saturday, Trump praised three Georgia State Election Board members by name.

Yesterday at Trump's Georgia rally, his lie-riddled & rambling speech had all the usual hits: false election conspiracies and attacks on VP Harris.

But one part of Trump's remarks stuck out.

And it may be a preview of his strategy in November.⬇️

— Max Flugrath 😤 (@MaxFlugrath) August 4, 2024

---

Yesterday at Trump’s Georgia rally, his lie-riddled & rambling speech had all the usual hits: false election conspiracies and attacks on VP Harris.

But one part of Trump’s remarks stuck out.

And it may be a preview of his strategy in November.⬇️ 

Trump praised the Georgia State Election Board, a government body overseeing its election rules. 

Trump thanked three of the Georgia State Election Board’s members specifically for their efforts to change Georgia’s certification rules.

This is odd. Trump doesn’t usually concern himself with details this in-the-weeds. 

The Georgia State Election Board members Trump thanked & singled out were recently appointed:

Janice Johnston
Rick Jeffares
Janelle King

Trump called them “pitbulls fighting for honesty, transparency, and victory.”

So, what exactly are they fighting for? 

.@AmericanDoom_ published a great write up this morning about Trump’s certification comments at yesterday’s Georgia rally:

In Atlanta, Trump confirms that Georgia’s state election board is in his pocketThe comments came at Trump’s rally Saturday night and confirm much of what democracy advocates have long suspected of the board’s Republican members.https://www.american-doom.com/p/in-atlanta-trump-confirms-that-georgias?utm_campaign=email-half-post&r=48kvzt&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

From that American Doom post:

It’s jarring enough that Trump name-checked these previously-obscure officials — and that they received such a warm reception from the crowd — but it’s even more concerning that he praised some of their work specifically. Trump is not a man of details. The importance of him even being aware of a rule of such election minutiae as that passed at the SEB’s last meeting is a shocking alarm bell that he and his campaign are highly aware of the mechanisms they need to employ in order to get their way in Georgia in November. 

Put more simply: Trump knows about certification, and his comments Saturday night are surely reflective of a much-deeper understanding of the issue within the highest ranks of the Republican party, signaling a clear plan to weaponize certification to their greatest advantage on election night.

Of the three SEB members Trump praised — and who were apparently in the audience Saturday night — Jeffares and Johnston are confirmed election deniers, as I reported here at American Doom and for the Guardian. The third, King, is probably one as well, or is simply climbing her way up through the ranks of the Georgia Republican Party and doing whatever she’s told by her handlers in her capacity as a member of the SEB. 

Flugrath again:

First, more context on the Election Board: It’s now a Trump-aligned government body. One new member is a former Republican Party operative.

Their meetings are chock full of false election conspiracy theories, many are based on Trump’s 2020 election lies.

Trump-friendly panel shapes Georgia’s election rules at long, often chaotic meetingsThe State Election Board in Georgia once toiled in relative obscurity. Now it hosts raucous meetings where public comment lasts for hours and attendees loudly heckle board members and speakers.https://apnews.com/article/georgia-state-election-board-0141f8011dc9e7c054ed73f63dbf5f58

The Trump-aligned GA election board members are working to change the state’s election rules with less than 100 days until the election.

They recently held a meeting, unlawfully noticed and carried out, where they advanced changes to Georgia’s election certification process. 

More on the Georgia State Election Board’s unlawful meeting and actions here:

Georgia election board walks back rules approved at meeting flagged by state AG • Georgia RecorderThe nonprofit government watchdog group that sued to overturn votes taken at a Georgia State Election Board meeting earlier this month.https://georgiarecorder.com/briefs/georgia-election-board-walks-back-rules-approved-at-meeting-flagged-by-state-ag/

After a lawsuit, the election board is holding another vote on some of the proposed election rule changes, on Tuesday, August 6.

The new rules they’re trying to pass can be used to sow doubt in the results and delay certification of the the 2024 election.

Experts: Georgia GOP officials lay groundwork to “obstruct” and “subvert” election certification“We’re seeing the national strategy take shape in Georgia,” Atlanta election attorney warns.https://www.salon.com/2024/07/12/experts-georgia-officials-lay-groundwork-to-obstruct-and-subvert-certification/

The Georgia Republican Party & Republican National Committee emailed the GA Election Board members the text of these proposed election rule changes with talking points to use in meetings.

Rules adopted by Georgia Election Board appear to have been suggested by GOP leaderTwo rules approved by the State Election Board in a possibly illegal meeting last week appear to have been suggested by Georgia GOP Party Chairman Josh McKoon.https://www.ajc.com/politics/election/emails-show-republican-leaders-involvement-in-georgia-election-rules/BHUKJ6LZI5ENDLU5BPALXJ24ZY/

One proposed rule change would give authority to local election officials to slow down or refuse to certify the 2024 election results.

With election deniers holding local election positions in Georgia, this should alarm us all.

These Swing State Election Officials Are Pro-Trump Election DeniersNearly 70 pro-Trump conspiracists are election officials in key battleground counties — and they are poised to make a giant mess on Election Day.https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/trump-swing-state-officials-election-deniers-1235069692/

These proposed election rules changes effectively make the certification of election results discretionary.

But, Georgia law states that local election board officials **shall** perform their duties. Their duties are mandatory, not discretionary. 

Another of the proposed election rules changes would increase workload demands on overburdened election workers, which could overwhelm county elections offices and ultimately slow down or stop the certification of the 2024 election results. 

If you’re a Georgia resident & think these election rule changes are dangerous, please consider emailing a public comment of the GA State Election Board.

The deadline for accepting public comments is before 12:00 PM tomorrow, August 5th: SEBPublicComments@sos.ga.gov 

Let’s not forget, in 2020, a Coffee County, GA elections official delayed certification of President Joe Biden’s victory, refusing to validate recount results and using MAGA-backed election conspiracies as the reason.

Exclusive: Georgia prosecutors have messages showing Trump’s team is behind voting system breach | CNN Politicshttps://www.cnn.com/2023/08/13/politics/coffee-county-georgia-voting-system-breach-trump/index.html

In the wake of Fulton County’s 2024 primary, Fulton County Election Board member Julie Adams filed a lawsuit to enable local elections officials to refuse certification.

Republican member of metro Atlanta elections board won’t certify primary resultsA Republican member of the Fulton County elections board is refusing to certify primary election results unless given access to detailed voting data, in a move that Democrats worry could jeopardize ce…https://www.ajc.com/news/atlanta-news/republican-member-of-fulton-elections-board-wont-certify-primary-results/IDYT7CZVMZAJXHDAADS7G6JNT4/

Adams is connected to the Election Integrity Network, founded by Trump ally Cleta Mitchell, who joined Trump’s infamous ‘find me votes’ call to Secretary Raffensperger.

Republican who refused to certify Georgia primary a member of election denialist groupJulie Adams, who abstained from certifying May results, belongs to Election Integrity Network, founded by Trump ally Cleta Mitchellhttps://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jun/04/republican-julie-adams-georgia-election-integrity-network

America First Policy Institute, a Trump-aligned organization, is representing Adams in her lawsuit seeking to overturn Georgia certification law.

‘Wild west of election work’: How certification fights are already cropping up in battleground states | CNN Politicshttps://www.cnn.com/2024/07/30/politics/certification-fights-battle-ground-states/index.html

Here in Georgia, we’re watching as Trump and his allies prepare to sabotage the 2024 election by changing the rules around certification election results.

Trump’s election sabotage plan seems more concentrated in Georgia than any other state. 

If these election rule changes are approved and MAGA-aligned officials obstruct the certification of the 2024 election results, our votes are crucial.

Check your voter registrations status.
Encourage friends, family, and your community to register + vote.
Volunteer if you can. 

Early voting starts soon, make a plan.

Consider serving as a poll worker.

Volunteer with your local/state Democratic Party’s voter protection efforts. 

Our collective participation is crucial to stopping Trump’s election sabotage scheme.

If we turnout and make our voices heard at the ballot box, we can protect American democracy. But we have to show up.

Please RT this to help spread the word.🙏 

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Be on watch for this. Election protection attorney Marc Elias warned in the recent Rolling Stone reporting that “we are going to see mass refusals to certify the elections.” As you can see from Trump’s pleased blathering, Republicans are “counting on the fact that if they don’t certify in several small counties, you cannot certify these statewide results.”

This is not a new GOP approach to “fixing” elections. It’s an upgrade, writes Elias, to their democracy downgrade.

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Trump is too good at wiggling out of trouble

Donald Trump’s selection of Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) for his running mate is the biggest Republican candidate blunder since Sen. John McCain of Arizona chose Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin to join him in defeat. But stupidity is not a crime. Insurrection is. Don’t let the press forget it. Nor his attempts to overthrow the democratic process. He’s planning another coup if he loses in November.

Jason Statler on Mastodon:

TAKE THIS COUP SERIOUSLY

Trump is doing everything he can to delegitimize democracy.

The press needs to put the coming coup attempt and his last attempt in context, explains Marcy Wheeler.

I emphasized over the weekend that the press will move on from Trump’s promise to Christian nationalists to a) end all elections in his second term, or to b) render elections (the consent of the governed) irrelevant. The press will move on to the next news cycle. You must not.

Marcy Wheeler agrees, but castigates “horse race journalists” for finding it initially “more important to repeat and therefore magnify Trump’s latest slur on Vice President Harris” before acknowledging his threat to democracy. Only hours later did that story surface.

Marcy writes:

That story included Trump’s comment about voting, along with Gold’s spin of it as a claim that Trump would address the concerns of Christian voters sufficiently that they would no longer have to vote, buried in ¶14.

At the end of his speech, Mr. Trump urged the religious crowd to vote in November, suggesting that if elected he would address their concerns sufficiently enough that they would no longer need to be politically active. Earlier, he had lamented that conservative Christians do not vote proportionately to their size, a complaint he has made repeatedly in recent weeks.

“Christians, get out and vote. Just this time,” Mr. Trump said on Friday. “You won’t have to do it anymore, you know what? Four more, years, it’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine, you won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians.”

Let it be noted that one of NYT’s allegedly professional horserace journalists believes that the white Evangelical Christians who have been among Trump’s most important supporters vote in disproportionately low numbers or that any Republican would forego that most important part of their coalition. (That said, for demographic reasons Trump can’t change with a speech, white Evangelicals make up an increasingly smaller proportion of the voting public, which poses an entirely different kind of threat than apathy.)

In spite of disinterest by journalists paid to write horserace stories, the clip went viral on social media, setting off a debate about what Trump meant. Right wing trolls pushed the same horseshit claims of low turnout (again, we’re talking about the in-person and TV audience for a Turning Point conference!) that Gold provided. Others attributed it to Trump’s narcissism, a suggestion that he only cares about votes so long as he would be on the ballot.

Three Sunday morning shows dealt with it — all abysmally.

Martha Raddatz for example, let Chris Sununu dismiss the comments as a “classic Trumpism,” without asking what he meant by “this stuff” when he said it “can be fixed.” Then she went back to the horse race.

Let’s get real, Wheeler continues:

There are several things people are ignoring.

First, Trump said something quite similar — and he said it at another Turning Point conference — just a month and a half ago, in Detroit.

Only, at that point, before Joe Biden had dropped out of the race, Trump said,

I said, we don’t need votes. And Charlie Kirk is helping. He’s got his army of young people. These are young patriots. They don’t want to see happen what’s been happening in our country.

Thank you Charlie.

[USA chants]

And I said to Charlie, and I said to Michael [Whatley], listen, we don’t need votes. We’ve got more votes than anybody’s ever had. We need to watch the vote, we need to guard the vote.

We need to stop the steal.

In mid-June, before Biden dropped out, Trump wasn’t concerned about turnout. Now he is.

This comment — to the people Charlie Kirk had assembled to listen to Donald Trump — is best understood as a comment about Trump’s plan to win. As the January 6 Committee discovered, when Trump decided in late December 2020 that he was going to speak and march to the Capitol, Carline Wren turned to Kirk to help turn out bodies. Turning Point was also allegedly used to launder speaking fees to Don Jr and his girlfriend. As it happened, Kirk backed out of attending and deleted his boasts about arranging dozens of busses so others could do so. He pled the Fifth rather than explain to the January 6 Committee anything about all that.

But nevertheless, Charlie Kirk got busloads of people to Trump’s insurrection.

To the extent that Trump needs lots of bodies to be somewhere, Charlie Kirk is a key part of that process. And in June, he wanted them out to surveil polling centers, once again mobilizing Stop the Steal. Friday, he emphasized he actually needs some people to show up to the polls.

If you follow Tim Alberta, he’s reported that Trump axed the GOP’s field operation and turned it over to “allied organizations such as Turning Point Action, America First Works, and the Faith and Freedom Coalition.” But especially to Turning Point. Kirk’s org had become a punch line among the GOP’s strategists after promising to win big in Kirk’s Arizona in 2022 and losing bigger. The RNC wanted to invest in field, in GOTV. Trump would rather invest in “election integrity,” that is, in blocking the vote, Alberta reported:

The marching orders were clear: Trump’s lieutenants were to dismantle much of the RNC’s existing ground game and divert resources to a colossal new election-integrity program—a legion of lawyers on retainer, hundreds of training seminars for poll monitors nationwide, a goal of 100,000 volunteers organized and assigned to stand watch outside voting precincts, tabulation centers, and even individual drop boxes.

Doubling down on the Big Lie is a helluva tell, Wheeler notes. But that was before Biden dropped out. Now he needs GOP turnout too.

I’d noted an important Blue Sky thread by Sarah Posner but could not get to commenting. Wheeler does:

The point is, Trump’s audience of Christian nationalists do view taking over government in apocalyptic terms. They did, on January 6. And it nearly worked the first time.

This was only a Trumpism, as Sununu called it, to the extent that Trump is an epic conman who knows how to mobilize his audience, even Christian nationalists with whom Trump shares little more than a fondness for authoritarianism.

So sure: Perhaps this was just an attempt to juice more turnout out of a group that already turns out in high numbers, almost exclusively for Republicans. Or maybe — as his comments in June were — it’s part of a larger effort to delegitimize democracy.

But even beyond Trump’s last coup attempt, there’s a context here, one you need to at least acknowledge if you’re going to claim to assess his comments.

Trump is too good at wiggling out of trouble. The press is going to move on to the next heat in the horse race. We have to hold him accountable for his words and his plans in the streets, on people’s doorsteps, and on social media. The press will not.

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