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Stacey Abrams, speaking generally on The Colbert Report on Tuesday, offered her take on the Democrats financial strategy: “To raise all the money that we can as fast as we can from anywhere we can.”

Abrams also took the interview as a change to call President Trump “an orange menace of putrescence.”

They are eating their ownin Georgia for the moment, but who knows how long before they all fall in line:

“Republicans in disarray.” That was the three-word response from Senate Democratic candidate Jon Ossoff late Monday to the extraordinary infighting that’s divided the Georgia GOP over President Donald Trump’s effort to taint Joe Biden’s victory.

This was supposed to be the week that Republicans united behind U.S. Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue for a pair of Jan. 5 runoffs that could decide control of the Senate.

Instead, the two senators leveled unfounded claims of a disastrous “embarrassment” of an election at fellow Republicans who oversaw last week’s vote – and called for the resignation of Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.

It was a brazen effort to appease Trump, who has falsely claimed electoral fraud despite no evidence of any wrongdoing as he and his supporters try to discredit Biden.

We’re told the president and his top allies pressured the two Republican senators to take this step, lest he tweet a negative word about them and risk divorcing them from his base ahead of the consequential runoff.

And shortly after, Trump and some of his inner circle started tweeting attacks at Raffensperger, who was already unpopular with many in the Georgia GOP base long before Tuesday’s vote.

WSB radio analyst Jamie Dupree called it “an orchestrated election move the likes of which I’ve never seen before.” Perdue’s camp pushed back on Tuesday:

“Neither senator nor anyone on their campaigns discussed with the president, White House or the president’s campaign before issuing their statement,” said Perdue spokesman John Burke.

On Tuesday, U.S. Rep. Doug Collins jumped in. He’s leading Trump’s effort to recount Georgia’s race and he called for several steps, including a hand-count of every ballot cast in each county due to “widespread allegations of voter irregularities” but offered no evidence to back that up.

“We can – and we will – petition for this in court after statewide certification is completed if the Secretary of State fails to act, but we are hopeful he will preemptively take this action today to ensure every Georgian has confidence in our electoral process.”

The intraparty war included Gov. Brian Kemp, who echoed the two senators’ criticism of Raffensperger but didn’t go as far as supporting his ouster. Georgia GOP chair David Shafer, who has recently staged “Stop the Steal” rallies as Biden’s lead in Georgia has grown, joined in.

Along with election officials, Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan was on the other side of the dividing line. He took to CNN in the morning – before the senators’ statement – saying there was no evidence of any systemic wrongdoing. He has been lit up by Trump supporters for speaking the truth.

The AJC’s Jim Galloway has an exclusive interview with Raffensberger posting today, with plenty to sift through. Here’s an insight to the lack of communication he’s had with Perdue and Loeffler:

“In the business world that I live in, if we have an issue with people, we call them directly and we have our conversation. We don’t just send it out to the world.”

“If that’s how they want to do business, that’s how they do business. I just don’t do business that way.”- AJC

Among other remedies Collins and Team Trump are calling for from Rafensberger, Collins said he wants “a check for felons and other ineligible persons who may have cast a ballot.” That detail caught our eye because Collins has been a vocal champion for criminal justice reform in Congress and, in the final days of his own campaign against Loeffler, brought in Roger Stone, a convicted felon whose sentence was commuted by Donald Trump, to join him on the stump.

What they are asking these Republican officials to do is prostrate themselves before Donald Trump and lie, saying they ran a sloppy or rigged election that benefitted Joe Biden.

The sad thing is that I don’t know for sure that they won’t do it. Trump and the Republicans are a symbiotic organism at this point and if these GOP politicians are ambitious, the pressure on them to put their thumbs on the scale in whatever way they can is going to be immense. After all, nothing, nothing, is more important to the organism at this point than Mitch McConnell being allowed to retain power in the US Senate. Even two minutes, much less two years, in the political wilderness is more than they can even contemplate so they’ll do whatever is necessary to ensure that those Senate seats go their way.

Update — Speaking of eating their own …

While some of us are fighting for President Trump…

Nikki Haley is eulogizing him.

Sad! https://t.co/vuaHk4pha2

— Matt Gaetz (@mattgaetz) November 5, 2020

Later today, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts takes up an emergency appeal by Republican leaders of North Carolina’s House and Senate and the Trump campaign.

Amy Howe at SCOTUSblog explains the latest election intrigue from North Carolina. In settlement of COVID-19-related litigation brought by the North Carolina Alliance for Retired Americans (and specific litigants I know personally), the State Board of Elections extended the deadline for accepting absentee ballots from three to nine days after Nov. 3. The 4th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the appeal 12-3, explaining, “The extension simply makes it easier for more people to vote absentee in the middle of a global pandemic that has killed over 200,000 Americans.”

North Carolina Republicans and the Trump campaign, Howe explains, took dissenting judges advice and appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court:

Two days after three judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit urged them to “take this case up to the Supreme Court immediately,” the Trump campaign and North Carolina Republicans did exactly that, asking the justices to block an extension of the deadline for absentee ballots in that state to nine days after the election. Timothy Moore, the Republican speaker of the state’s House of Representatives, and Philip Berger, the highest-ranking Republican in the state’s senate, told the justices that they should step in immediately to stop an “unconstitutional usurpation of power,” and “to avoid the specter of a post-election dispute over the validity of ballots received during the disputed period in North Carolina.” A second filing, by the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee, characterized the extension of the deadline as an “extraordinary attempt by an unelected state board of elections to rewrite the unambiguous terms of a statute enacted in June” by the North Carolina legislature.

Roberts handles emergency appeals from the 4th Circuit, Howe continues. He can act alone or refer it to the full court. Meaning, a newly confirmed Amy Coney Barrett could participate in the decision and break the 4-4 tie rendered in a similar Pennsylvania case on Monday. Roberts requested a response from parties by Saturday, Oct. 24, at 3 p.m. EDT.

The appeal filed by Moore and Berger argues for quashing the Memorandum issued by the State Board of Elections to implement the extension, arguing “administering the election in an arbitrary and nonuniform manner that will result in disparate treatment by inhibiting the rights of voters who cast their absentee ballots before the Memorandum was issued.”

One imagines an amicus curiae filing in support of Republicans:

BRIEF FOR AMICUS CURIAE HEADS, WE WIN, TAILS, YOU LOSE COALITION IN SUPPORT OF TIMOTHY K. MOORE, in his official capacity as Speaker of the North Carolina House of Representatives; PHILIP E. BERGER, in his official capacity as President Pro Tempore of the North Carolina Senate; and Trump 2020 campaign.

In their ongoing efforts to secure the vote and improve election security, North Carolina Republicans have spent the better part of the last decade in court. They have been joined by the RNC, the several Republican-controlled states, and the Trump administration in:

• Limiting who counts as a person for census purposes
• Gerrymandering targeting “African Americans with almost surgical precision“
• Photo/voter ID laws
• Restrictions on acceptable IDs
• Onerous document requirements for voter registration
• Street address requirements for registering in communities lacking street addresses
• Limiting days/times/locations for voter registration services
• Restrictions on ex-felon registration
• Restrictions on voter registration drives
• Violating the “Motor Voter” law by state DMVs
• Restrictions on early voting times
• Siting early voting locations remote to minority neighborhoods
• Restrictions on absentee voting
• Restrictions on absentee ballot drop boxes
• Voter roll purges
• Closing polling places
• Limiting voting machines in minority precincts
• Voter intimidation tactics at the polls
• “Disenfranchisement by typo“
• Decades-long effort to undermine confidence in the election process itself

This year, Republicans under the leadership of newly appointed Postmaster General Louis DeJoy (a Republican mega-donor with no prior postal experience) have gone to great lengths to make mail service more efficient. Allegations that his actions sabotaged U.S. mail service in an election year we reject as categorically false. Fake news. DeJoy removed sorting equipment and mailboxes because they were not needed during a pandemic in which record numbers of Americans would vote by mail. He issued instructions resulting in mail piling up in warehouses to reduce costs, not to drag out delivery times.

Key battleground states are experiencing “some of the nation’s most erratic mail service” as a result of heroic efforts to set the venerable U.S. Postal Service on the path to fiscal health.

We join this appeal not out of rank partisanship, no. We recognize success in this case will disenfranchise both Republican and Democratic voters. (Of course, we predict that more Democrats are likely to lose their votes than Republicans. That outcome is simply incidental.)

How dare the North Carolina Alliance for Retired Americans, the North Carolina State Board of Elections, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and lower courts foil well-laid Republican plans by extending the ballot acceptance deadline.

The Heads, We Win, Tails, You Lose Coalition defends the deeply principled belief that counting the votes of voters who cast absentee ballots later inhibits the rights of voters who cast their absentee ballots earlier.

For all of the reasons discussed above, this Court should once again limit the franchise of non-Republican voters and uphold the core value we proudly declare in our organization’s name. Failure to do so will raise “the specter of a post-election dispute over the validity of ballots” and threaten to delay certification of a slate of presidential electors long enough to allow the Republican legislature under state law to appoint electors of its choosing. We promise.

Respectfully submitted on this 24th day in October, 2020.

Update: Added “Closing polling places.”

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Overstimulated Trump-cult civilians are not the only sources of possible election mischief. The acting president is openly telegraphing his intent to try to hijack electors in state legislatures or have the Supreme Court hand him what he fails to win at the polls.

This prospect of rigging the election in state legislatures has been the source of murmurs for months. The acting president is hot to fill the vacant seat on the Supreme Court to ensure enough conservative justices who owe him (in his mind) will settle any post-election litigation in his favor. “I’m counting on them to look at the ballots, definitely, ” Trump said during Tuesday’s debate, seeming to think that falls under the court’s purview.

Greg Sargent points to legal analysis of whether selecting electors falls under the purview of Trump-friendly Republican legislatures. Could this work? Sargent asks:

To be clear, it shouldn’t.

The Constitution does assign to each state the authority to “appoint” its electors, in a “manner” that the legislature “may direct.”

But in a terrific piece, three legal scholars — Grace Brosofsky, Michael Dorf and Laurence Tribe — explain that precedent shows this means the legislature must “direct” how the state appoints its electors by making laws that create and define the process for doing so.

Virtually all states have made laws that provide for electors to be appointed in accordance with the popular vote outcome in them. (Maine and Nebraska do this by congressional district.) Thus, those scholars argue, legislatures can’t appoint pro-Trump electors without making a new law providing for appointment of electors based on legislators’ own will, not that of the voters.

Such a new law would require the governor’s signature. And in three states where this appears most likely to be tried — Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin — Democratic governors would veto any such effort by GOP-controlled legislatures.

The Supreme Court has upheld the principle that a governor can veto such an effort, those scholars note. In the 1932 case Smiley v. Holm, the court ruled that the Minnesota state legislature could not change election rules unilaterally in the face of such a veto.

This ruling confirmed that for the court, “state legislatures cannot alter” laws governing the selection of electors “except through their ordinary state lawmaking procedures,” which would require a gubernatorial signature and be subject to veto, the scholars argue.

So friendly legislatures can’t do this on Trump’s whim without a new law, no matter how loudly they scream that ongoing counting of mail ballots is fraudulent.

One hitch the legal scholars do not discuss in their focus on what Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin can and cannot do. North Carolina law provides for its state legislature to select electors in the event no winner has been declared by the “safe harbor” deadline in December.* If for some reason the legislature (currently GOP-controlled) cannot meet by noon the day before the Electoral College convenes, the governor picks. Gov. Roy Cooper is a Democrat.

Furthermore:

In exercising their authority under subsections (a) and (b) of this section, the General Assembly and the Governor shall designate Electors in accord with their best judgment of the will of the electorate. The decisions of the General Assembly or Governor under subsections (a) and (b) of this section are not subject to judicial review, except to ensure that applicable statutory and constitutional procedures were followed. The judgment itself of what was the will of the electorate is not subject to judicial review.

Isn’t that special?

* UPDATE: Just to be clear, in a North Carolina presidential race tight enough to trigger recounts (with or without absentee ballots being contested), Democrats should expect teams of Republican attorneys are prepared to challenge in court certification of the election just long enough to trigger the Code Section 163-213 provisions above. Then guess who gets to decide the will of the electorate?

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Since Barton Gellman’s “The Election That Could Break America” last week, months of whispers went public about Democrats needing a 12th Amendment backup plan for securing the presidency for Joe Biden. Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says her team has been gaming this out for some time behind the scenes. Now she is publicly recommending a belt-and-suspenders approach.

USA Today:

WASHINGTON – House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has urged Democrats to win more House seats if a scenario unfolds in which the House of Representatives would vote to determine the outcome of the presidential election in November.

In a letter to Democrats on Sunday, Pelosi outlined an option in which neither President Donald Trump nor former Vice President Joe Biden win a majority of votes in the Electoral College, meaning the House of Representatives would have to decide the election by a vote. Pelosi referenced remarks from Trump, who said in mid-September that “at a certain point, it (the election) goes to Congress.” 

Politico:

Under that scenario, which hasn’t happened since 1876, every state’s delegation gets a single vote. Who receives that vote is determined by an internal tally of each lawmaker in the delegation. This means the presidency may not be decided by the party that controls the House itself but by the one that controls more state delegations in the chamber. And right now, Republicans control 26 delegations to Democrats’ 22, with Pennsylvania tied and Michigan a 7-6 plurality for Democrats, with a 14th seat held by independent Justin Amash.

Democrats need to flip control of House delegations to ensure they control that process. Two of the lightest lifts are in Montana and Alaska, states with only one representative. Both are now in GOP hands but with polls turning against Republicans, they could be one-seat delegation pickups for Democrats. Cook’s rates both seats “lean Republican,” but the races themselves may be closer.

New: seven more House rating changes at @CookPolitical, including five in Democrats' direction. Full analysis ($): https://t.co/ZPxcWHnNOU pic.twitter.com/MFMRuAeTT2

— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) September 29, 2020

Democrat Kathleen Williams is running for the open Montana seat vacated by U.S. Rep. Greg Gianforte, now running in a toss-up race for governor against incumbent Steve Bullock. An August poll from the House Majority PAC showed state Rep. Williams leading state Auditor Matt Rosendale (R) 49%-47%. An earlier poll from July showed the two tied, with Williams more popular than Rosendale. Her ActBlue page is here.

Alyse Galvin is running as a Democratic-nominated registered independent against 24-term Republican Don Young for Alaska’s at-large House seat. The Emily’s-list endorsed candidate recently sued the election commission for stripping candidates’ political registrations from the ballot because Galvin “has heavily advertised herself as an independent candidate.” The new ballots identify her as the Democratic party’s nominee. The state Supreme Court declined to order reprinting of the ballots. “The fact that neither campaign has released or leaked polling data suggests, however, this is a real horse race,” the Washington Post’s Henry Olsen believes. Galvin’s ActBlue page is here.

The Senate would decide the selection of Vice President by a majority vote under the 12th Amendment. Alaska’s U.S. Senate seat is also in play (Dr. Alan Gross). So is Mississippi’s (Mike Espy). Plan your donations accordingly.

This is why Trump's game plan is to stop the vote counting after election night. This right here. https://t.co/lT9pHIZg9o

— 🕷Dante Atkins🕷 (@DanteAtkins) September 29, 2020

A couple of polls now show Biden up 9 points over Trump in Pennsylvania. Winning a landslide electoral victory on Nov. 3 could make all this electoral college intrigue moot. But do not trust to that.

Remember, Trump is no longer trying to win the election outright at the polls. He is hoping to stop the vote count on Election Day. And, if that doesn’t work, to challenge the count in enough states to tie up in court certification of a majority of electors until Dec. 8. That throws the election into the House of Representatives. It is his last line of reelection defense. After that, there is resignation and hope for a Pence pardon that won’t cover all his legal exposure.

Better to kick his ass with Democratic turnout. But cover yours just in case.

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Joe Biden’s “low-key campaign style worries some Democrats,” reads the headline on an Associated Press story … before quoting criticism from the Texas Democratic Party chair and the acting president. Some is the chairwoman of the local African American Caucus in Charlotte who complains she received only one day’s notice of Biden’s Black economic summit there. She only heard about it on TV.

That’s not at all unusual.

Biden fares better in another AP story focused on Biden leveraging his working-class roots in taking on an incumbent born with a golden spoon up his aspirations. This one begins:

“I’ve dealt with guys like Donald Trump my whole life, who would look down on us because we didn’t have a lot of money or your parents didn’t go to college,” Biden said, recalling his boyhood roots. “Guys who think they’re better than you. Guys who inherit everything they’ve ever gotten in their life and squander it.”

[…]

“The truth is,” Biden said, “he never really respected us.”

It’s at once a demonstration of Biden’s personal contempt for Trump and the Democratic challenger’s pride in his own family history as mostly working-class Irish Catholics. But, most importantly as voters begin casting early ballots, it’s a carefully tailored message aimed at voters who’ve abandoned Democrats in recent elections and helped Trump flip a band of Rust Belt states to fashion his own presidential victory map.

It seems to be working.

Even Ohio is a swing state again. Biden and Trump are in a dead heat in Iowa and Georgia and Biden is competitive even in Texas.

It cannot hurt that 489 members from National Security Leaders for Biden — former national security officials from both parties — signed a letter endorsing Biden on Thursday. Among them, “former Obama administration Defense Secretaries Ash Carter, Chuck Hagel and Leon Panetta, along with former Navy Secretary and NASA administrator Sean O’Keefe, who served under both former Presidents George H.W. and George W. Bush. Among the retired senior officers is Air Force Gen. Paul Selva, who until last year was the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Trump.”

Michael O’Hanlon, a Brookings Institution military analyst, said, “There is real concern among some of these folks that we’re living on borrowed time with this guy having his finger on the nuclear trigger.”

About nuclear arms. Inside the Kremlin, analysts are scrambling to game out how Russia’s fortunes might fare under a Biden presidency (Bloomberg):

Increasingly alarmed at the prospect of a White House without Donald Trump, Russia is trying to determine what that’ll mean for sensitive issues from nuclear arms to relations with China, energy exports, sanctions and far-flung global conflicts, according to people familiar with the efforts. Though few see much prospect for improved ties if Trump is re-elected, Biden would likely be bad news for Russia, people close to the leadership said.

This could mean Russian social media disinformation campaigns to undermine Biden may get more frenetic. But now, Russia has to hedge its bets.

“It’s not clear what kind of help they could offer Trump,” former Kremlin adviser Gleb Pavlovsky tells Bloomberg, “but they’d give it to him as long as it didn’t provoke a big scandal … They don’t want to trigger a boomerang effect.” Read: economic sanctions.

The prospect of new Western sanctions on Russia has helped drive the ruble to the lowest levels since April.

What a pity.

Speaking of economic sanctions, South Carolina Republican senator and top Trump bootlick, Lindsey Graham is sweating bullets. Two recent polls show him in a dead heat with Democratic challenger Jaime Harrison. Graham appeared like a deer in the headlight of Harrison’s fundraising freight train Thursday night when he ran to Fox News to plead for help.

Lindsey Graham: I’m getting overwhelmed… help me, they’re killing me moneywise. Help me pic.twitter.com/xaY9S6uaYM

— Acyn (@Acyn) September 25, 2020

Incompetent as Trump is, he has people around him smart enough and unscrupulous enough to try delaying election certification long enough in a few key states to throw the election to the House of Representatives. But that requires an election outcome close enough to do so.

Right now, things are trending in Biden’s favor. And bad news for Graham, The Economist projects a 68% chance of Democrats gaining control of the U.S. Senate. Even if the publication and Cook’s Political Report show the race as “lean Republican,” the look in Graham’s eyes last night showed something else.

“Great, kid! Don’t get cocky,” said a starship pilot in a galaxy far, far away. And all y’all? Get to work this weekend, please. We’re not out of this yet.

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Are leading Democrats the last frogs in the pot to realize they are slowly boiling?

Their need to uphold norms and reluctance to play political hardball means underdeveloped muscles will not be there when needed both in state capitols and on Capitol Hill. And when is right now. Too many seem not to realize Republicans threw out the rulebook. How many have the chops to play as rough as you can bet Republicans will?

Beltway Democrats fought pretty hard against the Brett Kavanaugh nomination and during the Trump impeachment. But pretty much by traditional rules. Meanwhile, Trump abused the legal system not to win court cases, but to stall long enough to “win” by attrition. Republican senators’ “180” on approving Supreme Court justices during a presidential election year proves again that bad faith is the only kind they practice.

Former RNC chair Michael Steele over the weekend asked Democrats a fundamental question going into this election and its aftermath: Are you built for this?

Are you ready to do what you need to do between now and January 20th? Because this isn’t just about November 3rd … Are you built for this? Because if you’re not ready to play this — I’ve been saying it from the very beginning — this is an asymmetrical game we’re in. This is not conventional politics. Stop treating Donald Trump as if he’s an actual president of the United States. He is not. He’s playing one on TV, literally. Speak to that. And so, if you’re not ready to engage against McConnell, against Lindsey Graham — because let me tell you what happens— Graham and McConnell come back to the Senate, Donald Trump goes back to the White House? It’s game, set, match, baby. There’s no stopping anything. So, if you’re not built to do what you need to do between now and January 20th, then stand down and let someone else step in. Because there’s too much on the line.

I’m not sanguine about it. Plus, I have no idea who Steele means by “someone else.”

Slate’s Jeremy Stahl runs down what might be ahead after Nov. 3. Trump might again use the courts to stall certification of presidential electors long enough to toss deciding the presidency to the House of Representatives. Scenarios exist for such a contingent election:

So how might Democrats fight back this time around? To answer that question, it’s important to understand the mechanics of the contingent election—which can be triggered by any scenario in which a majority is not reached, such as unresolved disputes over individual electoral slates. In a contingent election, the House votes on the next president by a majority vote of state delegations. This means Alaska’s one member would get one vote, all of the members from Alabama would combine to get one vote, all of the members from Arizona would combine to get one vote, and so on. A candidate would need to win 26 of 50 state delegations to be declared president. (In the Senate, meanwhile, each senator would vote respectively on the next vice president, with 51 votes necessary for victory.)

Currently, Republicans control 26 state delegations and are favored by Sabato’s site to retain that advantage. Democrats currently control 22, and the remaining two are essentially tied. Democrats need to win four additional House delegations to make Biden president in the case of a 269–269 Electoral College tie, but would need just two delegations to prevent Trump from becoming president if Pennsylvania—with a 9–9 split in the current delegation—remains tied. To get to 26 delegations after this election, Democrats would need to retain competitive seats in Iowa and Minnesota, and sweep a number of potentially competitive seats in four states from a pool of Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Montana, Texas, and maybe Alaska.

Trump could still win, in theory, even if he loses the popular vote “by a 4- to 5-point margin.”

Speaker Nancy Pelosi has cards to play to stop a Trump win in the House:

Suppose the delegation count is 24–24, with Republicans leading slightly in disputed tipping point races in two remaining states. Here is where Pelosi could step in and show herself to be the Democrats’ answer to McConnell. Article 1, Section 5 of the Constitution gives the House majority the authority to “judge” any contested elections. Historically, the House has used that power to refuse to seat new members in contested races pending an investigation or a new vote. In 2018, for example, the House refused to seat the Republican candidate in North Carolina’s 9^th District after a GOP operative was caught committing fraud to swing the race.

If there’s a challenge in any decisive House district—say, over issues with mail-in ballots not being counted, or disparities in votes being disqualified for signature mismatch, or ballots getting lost in the mail—the House could simply vote not to seat the candidate claiming victory pending an inquiry, even if a given state certifies that victory.

Stahl has more at the link above. But before going down the what-if rabbit hole, activists on the Left need to put more focus on boosting turnout than on more theoretical threats like machine hacking the way the Right fixates on voter fraud. Unless there is a Dr. Diabolical out there with an electoral version of The Hitchiker’s Guide’s infinite improbability drive, what could happen in theory is still highly improbable to overwhelm massive voter turnout.

There is no indication from history or current polling to suggest voters under 45 will turn out in the numbers their elders put up. So, perhaps that too is a what-if rabbit hole. Still, younger nonvoters have the numbers to put the final nail in the coffin of the Trump presidency. IF. THEY. VOTE.

A colleague with more computing horsepower is updating my graph from 2018 with final vote counts and creating a version from the 2016 election (more comparable to this year). Year after year, these voting patterns are consistent, sadly. But the growth potential is there. If citizens under 45 only turned out in numbers comparable to those of their elders, they could run this joint, and in no time take over the Democratic Party and leadership in Congress.

It is one thing for critics on the sidelines to ask if the party is built for this. It is another to step up and show them how it’s done. They could be Steele’s someones to step in.

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Election Day is still over two months away. A presidential campaign challenging an incumbent must already be planning for a transition in government that, if it loses, might never come. This election, both campaigns will be planning moves and counter-moves for winning a chaotic outcome. They are not the only ones.

The Transition Integrity Project ran a series of war games in June to simulate what might happen after Election Day. About 100 bipartisan players from former Hillary Clinton campaign chair John Podesta to former Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele, plus pundits and academics participated.

“The inability to imagine Trump has always been his greatest advantage,” Stuart Stevens (“It Was All a Lie“) told Politico last week. TIP’s players imagined quite a lot. They ran four post-election scenarios: an ambiguous outcome (think Bush-Gore 2000), a narrow Trump victory, a narrow Biden victory, and a big Biden win.

“We anticipate lawsuits, divergent media narratives, attempts to stop the counting of ballots, and protests drawing people from both sides,” explains the post-simulation report. (TIP did not attempt to game out the intricacies of the legal actions themselves.) “The potential for violent conflict is high, particularly since Trump encourages his supporters to take up arms.”

The New Yorker’s Eric Lach describes what happened:

In the first scenario, the results from three states—North Carolina, Michigan, and Florida—remained too close to call for more than a week. On Election Night, Trump’s campaign called on Biden to concede, citing in-person-voting returns, which looked good for the President. But as the absentee ballots in these states were counted, the numbers swung toward Biden. This was “blue shift,” a phenomenon observed by Foley and other academics in recent elections, wherein in-person-vote totals have tended to skew Republican, while absentee voting has skewed Democratic. Blue shift is what kept the Democratic House wave in 2018 from being immediately apparent on Election Night—the mail votes cast in California that fall took weeks to count, an outcome that former House Speaker Paul Ryan, a Republican, described at the time as “bizarre.” This year, with Trump explicitly making mail voting a partisan issue, the blue shift is likely to be especially pronounced. And Trump is, in turn, expected to denounce this easily explainable phenomenon as nefarious.

As the votes were being tallied in the game, Trump pounced. The team playing as his campaign called on the Justice Department to use federal agents to “secure” voting sites and tried to enlist state Republican officials to stop the further counting of absentee ballots. The Biden team, in response, called for every vote to be counted and urged its supporters to attend rallies calling for the same. During subsequent turns, Trump tried to federalize the National Guard, and both parties sought to block or overturn results in key states. Eventually, North Carolina was declared for Biden and Florida was declared for Trump, leaving Michigan as the deciding state—there, a “rogue individual” destroyed ballots believed to be favorable to Biden, leaving Trump with a narrow lead. Michigan’s Republican-led legislature certified Trump’s victory, but the state’s Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, refused to accept the result, citing the sabotage, and sent a separate certification to Congress.

It was 1876 all over again, Lach writes, citing the chaotic aftermath of the race between Samuel Tilden of New York and Rutherford B. Hayes.

“If there’s a contested result, the only way that either Trump or Biden, for that matter, can effectively contest a result that goes against them is if they create a plausible narrative that is backed up by their media factions that they actually were the legitimate winners of the election. That the seeming results that went against them in fact, in some ways, are not legitimate,” Nils Gilman, TIP co-founder, told Politico. Gilman is vice president of programs at the Berggruen Institute in Los Angeles.

The first “move” by each team was often decisive:

These war games were hypothetical imaginings of extraordinary circumstances. But an election in a pandemic year with a President declaring in advance that the vote will be rigged are extraordinary circumstances. “One big takeaway is that leaders really need to know what exactly their powers are, and what the powers of others are, and think through some of these options in advance,” Rosa Brooks, a law professor at Georgetown University who helped convene the Transition Integrity Project, told me recently. “Because if things go bad, they’ll go bad very quickly, and people will have to make decisions in an hour, not in a week.”

The incumbent has the advantage in the powers department, TIP cautions, such as “the President’s ability to federalize the national guard or invoke the Insurrection Act to deploy active duty military domestically; his ability to launch investigations into opponents; and his ability to use Department of Justice and/or the intelligence agencies to cast doubt on election results or discredit his opponents …. Participants noted that additional presidential powers subject to misuse include the ability to the freeze assets of individuals and groups the president determines to be a threat, and his ability to restrict internet communications in the name of national security.”

The Biden campaign might attempt to organize mass protests to demonstrate public commitment to “legitimate” process, but more likely activists groups would do this independently of the Democratic Party — harder to organize and coordinate should the internet “go down” in the wake of Nov. 3.

Voting by mail in numbers never seen means “election night” as game night “is no longer accurate and indeed is dangerous” TIP finds. But delays in absentee/by-mail vote-counting, counting errors, ballot rejection rates, legal and street battles are not the only risks.

There are other nightmare scenarios beside Portland or Lafayette Square-style deployment of a camouflaged Praetorian Guard to seize ballot boxes in Broward or Milwaukee or Maricopa Counties. In a close contest, delaying certification of enough electoral votes into mid-December could throw the final decision to the House of Representatives where Republicans are in the minority, but where voting is not by member but by delegation. States get one vote each for one of the top three contenders. Republicans control the majority of House delegations.

Republicans ended up with Trump, Stevens says, through inability to imagine Trump. “So the other 15 candidates running all killed each other to try to get one-on-one with Trump,” he says, “because obviously Republicans weren’t going to nominate a failed casino owner, a maxed-out donor to Anthony Weiner, who talked about having sex with his daughter. Are you crazy?” But they did, and here we are.

What you think cannot happen has happened with regularity over the last few years. Trump won. He separated families at the border and put children in cages. He declared a national emergency on the southern border in February 2019 and diverted Pentagon funds for building his border wall. Wasn’t that illegal? Yes. But he doesn’t care. The Supreme Court let him spend the money while litigating the case. By the time a court ruled the move unconstitutional in June 2020, it was a fait accompli.

Imagine Trump. Hope for the best but plan for the worst. Vote as if the fate of the republic depends on it.

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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.

A public service message on voting by mail or absentee. Rules vary by state.

If you are reading this, you are unlikely to change your mind about 2020 candidates at the 11th hour. Bone up now. Do not forget to vote the down-ballot races and judges (if you elect those). People elected to legislatures this year (in most states) will draw new districts in 2021. Do not wait to vote.

If you live in one of the handful of vote-by-mail states, return your ballot as soon as practicable. By mail or by drop-box. Ballots in those states go out in as few as 18 days ahead of the election. (They tend not to be swing states.)

If you plan to vote by absentee ballot this year, do the same. States mail out absentee ballots anywhere from three weeks to 60 days (North Carolina) ahead of Election Day (see NCSL Table 7). Neither wait to request an absentee ballot until the 11th hour nor wait to return it.

Many voters will be voting by absentee ballot for the first time ever. Follow directions scrupulously. Look at the signature on your driver’s license and be sure when you sign your ballot envelope your signature varies little. (Practice, maybe.) Elections boards use signature matches to verify you are you.

Election Administration and Voting Survey (EAVS) 2016 Report:

The most common reasons for rejection in 2016 were missing the deadline, the signature on the ballot not matching the signature on the state’s records, and the ballot not having a signature. Some of the categories include several reasons for ballot rejection. For example, the category “problem with return envelope” covers reasons such as the envelope was returned but was missing the ballot or multiple ballots were returned in one envelope.

Carefully weigh the potential risks of standing in line for hours at the polls among anti-maskers carrying coronavirus vs. the risks of having your absentee ballot rejected for technical reasons (see above). Those reasons, too, will vary by state. The average rejection rate for absentee ballots nationwide in 2016 was 1% (and 2.3% of those transmitted to voters in North Carolina). The highest rejection rates in 2016 were in Arkansas, Georgia, and Kentucky (over 5%; EAVS pgs. 23-25). With the expected flood of absentee ballots this year, expect that average to be somewhat higher. Read the instructions and execute them with care.

Since the acting president is actively trying to sabotage the U.S. Postal Service in advance of the election, waiting to send in your ballot adds to the risk it will not arrive in time to be counted. A few ballots postmarked in my county as much as 10 days ahead of the March primary return deadline (5 p.m. March 6) arrived too late to count. A few others arriving in time but with no postmark could not be counted. The percent was very small (under 1% of ballots cast), but you don’t want your vote to fall into that percent. Mail your ballot early (instructions will likely tell you how much postage is required) or, better yet, drop off your absentee ballot in person at your local Board office, at a drop box (if your state provides those), or at an early voting site (if permitted). Review and follow ballot return rules for your state (see NCSL Table 10).

Plus, the earlier your local Board receives your ballots ahead of the election, the easier time they will have processing them and managing the inflow. You DO NOT WANT them to have to process a flood of last-minute absentees on or after Election Day. Delays in certifying the election give Trump more time to pimp his theory that mailed ballots were “rigged” somehow against him.

Elections for president must be certified in time for the constitutionally mandated meetings of state electors in December. In North Carolina, a certification delay into December could (state law) throw the decision of how the state casts its electoral votes to the GOP-led legislature. Let’s not do that.

(I’m most familiar with my own state. I’m open to hearing about little-known quirks in yours. I will likely revise and repost this closer to 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.
Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.

First he came for the immigrants and I said nothing …

In his inaugural address, President Trump sketched the picture of “American carnage” — a nation ransacked by marauders from abroad who breached U.S. borders in pursuit of jobs and crime, lured its companies offshore and bogged down its military in faraway conflicts.

Nearly 3½ years later, in the president’s telling, the carnage is still underway but this time the enemy is closer to home — other Americans whose racial identity and cultural beliefs are toppling the nation’s heritage and founding ideals.

Trump’s dark and divisive 42-minute speech at the foot of Mount Rushmore in South Dakota late Friday served as a clarion for his campaign reelection message at a time when the nation — already reeling with deep anxiety over the devastating public health and economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic — is also facing a cultural reckoning over the residue of its racially segregated past.

As he has so often during his tenure, the president made clear that he will do little to try to heal or unify the country ahead of the November presidential election but rather aims to drive a deeper wedge into the country’s fractures.

For Trump, that has meant defining a new foil. If his 2016 campaign to put “America first” was focused on building a wall to keep out immigrants and shedding alliances with nations he believed were exploiting the United States, the president is now aiming his rhetorical blasts at groups of liberal Americans who, he believes, constitute a direct threat to the standing of his conservative base.

At Mount Rushmore, under the granite gaze of four U.S. presidents, Trump railed against “angry mobs” pursuing “far-left fascism” and a “left-wing cultural revolution” that has manifested in the assault on statues and monuments celebrating Confederate leaders and other U.S. historical figures, including some former presidents, amid the mass racial justice protests of recent weeks.

“Their goal is not a better America; their goal is the end of America,” the president declared.

“We are now in the process of defeating the radical left — the Marxists, the anarchists, the agitators, the looters,” Trump told guests Saturday during an Independence Day celebration on the South Lawn of the White House.

In making the case that a radical and violent ideology underpins much of the social justice movement that propelled the nationwide demonstrations, Trump has dropped virtually all pretense that he supports millions of peaceful protesters who have called for broad reforms to address what they see as systemic racism and a culture of brutality in police departments.

Trump made no mention Friday of the victims of police violence, including more than half a dozen black families he met with in the Oval Office last month before he signed an executive order to create national training certification guidelines for law enforcement agencies and establish a database to track police brutality cases.

Instead, he warned of a “growing danger” to the values of the nation’s founders — a “merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values, and indoctrinate our children.”

He boasted of federal authorities apprehending hundreds of looters and vandals, even though the number is lower. He warned of “violent mayhem” in streets of cities run by “liberal Democrats.” He celebrated the arrest of a “ringleader” in the unsuccessful attempt from demonstrators to topple a statue of President Andrew Jackson, Trump’s favorite past president, in Lafayette Square across from the White House. And he asserted that schoolchildren were being taught to “hate their own country.”

“This was a deeply divisive speech aimed at what Trump sees as real Americans versus anarchists,” presidential historian Douglas Brinkley said. “That’s not just bigotry to the outside world, but now he’s really attacking millions of Americans as worthless, as socialists, as anarchists.”

I watched both speeches. They were appalling. Just because we’ve been watching this grotesque clown for the last three and a half years doesn’t make it any less shocking when he goes full Stephen Miller. Doing it on the 4th of July just makes you feel sick.

He is fomenting violence now and it’s extremely worrisome. He’s can already claim a body count of 130,000 Americans, for whom he has not even the slightest concern, clearly considering them nothing more than collateral damage in his culture war. Now he wants to see some real bloodshed on the streets of America.

I always thought it was just a little bit weird that so many leftist types bought into the idea that this violent jackass was some sort of anti-war peacenik simply because he wanted to “save money” by ending his predecessors wars. (Reversing anything they did is the only thing he knows how to do)

He loves war, don’t kid yourself. He just wants to fight his domestic political enemies. This has been clear from the beginning.

You didn’t think they were did you?

Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) told CBS News’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday that ending qualified immunity for police officers is “off the table” for Republicans, and that “any poison pill in legislation means we get nothing done.” 

 Ending “qualified immunity,” a legal doctrine that makes it all but impossible to successfully sue police officers, is one of several policy proposals that has gained traction on the left.

• Scott has been tasked with spearheading Senate Republicans’ reform proposal. He told CBS’ Margaret Brennan that his legislation will focus on increasing information sharing, reforming training and tactics to prioritize de-escalation, and changing how departments deal with officer misconduct.
• Scott said he’s interested in de-certification of officers who engage in misconduct, but said that police unions are opposed to that idea and it’s unlikely to get support from the left.

“From the Republican perspective and the president sent the signal that qualified immunity is off the table. They see that as a poison pill on our side. We could use a de-certification of officer, except for the law enforcement unions say that’s a poison pill. So we’re going to have to find a path that helps us reduce misconduct within the officers. But at the same time, we know that any poison pill in legislation means we get nothing done. That sends the wrong signal, perhaps the worst signal, right now in America. I think we’re going to have legislation that can be negotiated, that gets us to the place where something becomes law that actually makes a difference. That’s got to be our goal. 

— Sen. Tim Scott

 House Democrats have introduced a sweeping police reform package that includes proposals like banning chokeholds and no-knock warrants and removing qualified immunity for police officers.

• The “Justice in Policing Act of 2020” aims to broaden police accountability by tracking “problematic” officers through a national misconduct registry for officers over actions in the field.

Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) later told “Face the Nation” that he’s spoken to Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.) and that ending qualified immunity is still “on the table.”

I’d imagine that they will draw out negotiations for as long as possible in the hopes that the urgency will die down and they can just end in a stalemate. Republicans are terrified of their base and I think it’s fair to say that Trump channels them quite well: Dominate! Law and Order! Take back the streets!

It’s possible that they will be forced to pass something but I’ll be shocked if it’s anything even remotely meaningful. But policing is always much more a state and local issue anyway so that’s where the progress will be. It would be nice if the Justice Department did its part in overseeing the investigation of civil rights violations but I’m afraid that will have to wait until a Democratic administration.

In fact, I think almost everything will have to wait until we get a Democratic administration. Let’s hope that happens in January. If not, we’ll have even bigger problems.