772 search results for ""voter fraud""

Back in September, Politico’s Anita Kumar reported that for the previous year the Trump campaign had been assembling a team of election lawyers from all over the country to familiarize themselves in local election laws and prepare “prewritten legal pleadings that can be hurried to the courthouse the day after the election, as wrangling begins over close results and a crush of mail-in ballots.” The effort was led by “a 20-person team of lawyers” from major law firms who were overseeing a strategy in “key states the Trump campaign is targeting, like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan.” It sounded like a very serious and professional operation, one which came as no surprise to me, since Republicans have specialized in disenfranchising Democratic voters for many decades.

Trump himself repeatedly made clear on the campaign trail what he planned to do, from contesting the validity of mail-in ballots to declaring himself the winner on election night regardless of whether the votes had been counted and filing a flurry of lawsuits contesting the election with an eye toward having “his” judges (including newly-minted Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett) deliver the election to him if necessary. I don’t think anyone can possibly say they are surprised at how he has reacted to losing the election.

In the weeks before Nov. 3, Trump did have that team of high-powered legal talent arguing cases around mail-in ballots and shifting deadlines in various states, some of which did make it to the Supreme Court. But then the election actually happened and vote-counting began, and since then Trump’s crack team has been been remarkably unsuccessful. The good lawyers have either been pressured to to quit or threw in the towel themselves as it became patently obvious that they had no evidence of voter fraud.

That hasn’t stopped Trump from plowing ahead anyway with the self-described “elite strike force” led by his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, last seen prior to the election with his hand down his pants in the latest Borat movie and famously presiding over a post-election press conference at a landscaping company next door to a sex shop and a crematorium. Trump was evidently impressed by Rudy’s performance in both venues, because he gave the former LifeLock spokesman (hat tip to Salon’s Roger Sollenberger) full authority to conduct the legal strategy to overturn the election results by any means necessary.

CNN reports that Giuliani has taken full control. For instance, upset by what he was hearing from three of the lawyers assigned to argue one of the Pennsylvania cases, the man once described as “America’s mayor” fired them on the spot and took over the case — which was being argued the very next day — himself. He hadn’t been inside a courtroom in more than 30 years, and it showed. He was very nearly laughed out of court.

Giuliani was undaunted. He immediately pulled together the other members of the “elite strike force”: Sidney Powell, who is former national security adviser Michael Flynn’s Fox News lawyer; veteran right-wing husband and wife team Victoria Toensing and Joe diGenova, also Fox News lawyers; and over-the-top Trump defender and campaign lawyer Jenna Ellis. None of them have any expertise in election law, but then they don’t have a legal strategy either.

Having lost over and over again in court, Trump and his team have switched to their Plan B, which, as longtime Democratic strategist Chris Marshall spelled out in detail in Salon on Thursday, is to delay the certification of the vote in certain states and try to get Republican legislatures to assign electors to vote for Donald Trump instead of the actual winner, Joe Biden. This is based on the theory that if they can create enough chaos around the election results, Republican loyalists will rise to the occasion and “save democracy” from the Democrats, who are allegedly stealing the election.

This idea has been pushed by conservative talk show host Mark Levin and picked up by the right wing as a way to keep their beloved president in office for at least four more years. It’s a theory that is very unlikely to prevail, particularly since the Supreme Court just decided a case on “faithless electors” last July, in which the justices made it very clear that whatever the founders may have anticipated in the 18th century, our democracy today demands that electors express the will of the people. It will take some convoluted intellectual gyrations for them to conclude that state officials can simply change the results at their discretion.

In order to blow the smoke as thick as possible, Giuliani and the “strike force” held a press conference at Republican National Committee headquarters on Thursday which was so surreal that it may have displaced the COVID task force briefing where Trump suggested that people might inject disinfectant as the all-time weirdest press conference of the Trump era.

Giuliani, Powell and Ellis held forth for 90 minutes, going full Infowars and throwing out one insane conspiracy theory after another. They said that Dominion voting machines had been created by former Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez (who has been dead for seven years) and financed by George Soros, the Clinton Foundation and “communistic” countries China and Cuba. Just in case that didn’t work, the corrupt Democrats had also rigged the vote with a sophisticated computer hack that was only foiled because Trump won so overwhelmingly that it tripped up the algorithm which allowed the “strike force” to catch them in the act. Also, the mail-in ballots were fraudulent because so many of them were filled out properly. (Yes! The fact that there were very few problems with mail-in votes was somehow evidence they were fake!)

Meanwhile, rivulets of black liquid were running down Giuliani’s face as if he were an extra in an Alice Cooper video from the 1970s. The assumption is that it was some kind of temporary hair dye. But it could have been embalming fluid, for all we know.

Powell later made the rounds to expand on their theory and she made no bones about what they hope to do:

You’ll notice that she just blithely uses the term “overturn,” as if that were perfectly normal.

If that doesn’t work, the “strike force” are also talking about a Plan C, which would be to delay the vote certification for so long that the states can’t send Biden’s required 270 electors to Congress by the deadline, which under the 12th Amendment to the Constitution would throw the election to the House, where every state’s delegation gets one vote. As luck would have it Republicans hold 26 of the 50 delegations. Surprise!

Is any of this remotely possible? Sure. It’s unlikely, but it’s possible. It’s tempting to think this is all so nuts that it could never possibly happen, but we thought everything Donald Trump has done over the past five years was nuts, and here we are. All our hand-wringing about this plot being un-American and destructive to our democracy is sadly irrelevant — not just to the preposterous Giuliani and the equally preposterous Trump but to the entire Republican Party. They have learned the power of total shamelessness, and it is profound. I would never count them out.

My Salon column

“That press conference was the most dangerous 1hr 45 minutes of television in American history. And possibly the craziest. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you’re lucky,” tweeted Chris Krebs of Rudy Giuliani’s press conference on Thursday. Trump recently fired the former DHS election security expert. By tweet, of course.

The presentation filled with conspiracy theories, Giuliani’s dripping hair dye, and promised evidence yet to see the light of day, made one wonder if Giuliani’s “crack team” had been smoking some before taking the podium. It was too bizarre to recount in detail. Watch Aaron Rupar’s highlight reel here, if you dare.

Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, a lawyer for former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, falsely claimed Donald J. Trump won the election “by a landslide.” She spun a conspiracy theory about Dominion Voting Systems, Smartmatic technology software, and the late Hugo Chavez of Venezuela creating software for flipping Trump votes to Biden. But Trump’s support was so “overwhelming in many states that it broke the algorithm,” she said. Later, Powell told Lou Dobbs, “The entire election, frankly, in all the swing states should be overturned and the legislatures should make sure that the electors are selected for Trump.”

Trump, as always, is trying to bend reality to his will. His people are attempting a coup in plain sight.

Multiple legal experts swear on their diplomas that Trump’s legal efforts are so looney, ham-fisted, and contrary to accepted law that they can never overturn the election. Those who make their living practicing law have more confidence in it than I for containing people who treat the law as a matter of convenience for themselves but primarily as a weapon to wield against enemies. Trump has made a career out of defying the law.

But Trump is nothing if not relentless (Washington Post):

DETROIT — President Trump has invited the leaders of Michigan’s Republican-controlled state legislature to meet him in Washington on Friday, according to a person familiar with those plans, as the president and his allies continue an extraordinary campaign to overturn the results of an election he lost.

Trump’s campaign has suffered defeats in courtrooms across the country in its efforts to allege irregularities with the ballot-counting process, and has failed to muster any evidence of the widespread fraud that the president continues to claim tainted the 2020 election.

Trump lost Michigan by a wide margin: At present, he trails President-Elect Joe Biden in the state by 157,000 votes. Earlier this week, the state’s Republican Senate majority leader said an effort to have legislators throw out election results was “not going to happen.”

But the president now appears to be using the full weight of his office to challenge the election results, as he and his allies reach out personally to state and local officials in an intensifying effort to halt the certification of the vote in key battleground states.

After the Wayne County’s Board of Canvassers certified the election after a contentious meeting this week, Trump himself called one Republican member, after which she tried to rescind her certification. Not possible, said Michigan’s secretary of state’s office. So now Trump is going over her head. *

Too many made the mistake of counting Trump out in 2016.

JPMorgan is covering its assets:

Much of Wall Street views the Trump campaign’s efforts to overturn the election results as a desperate sideshow destined to fail. But JPMorgan is telling clients there’s still a chance that this process descends into chaos. It is 2020, after all.

Michael Cembalest, chairman of market and investment strategy at JPMorgan Asset Management, warned in a report Wednesday of the “remote risk of an American horror story” and “constitutional mayhem.”

Cembalest, who helps oversee $2.2 trillion in assets, pointed to President Donald Trump’s Tuesday night firing of the top US election security official, Attorney General William Barr’s decision to authorize prosecutors to probe alleged voter fraud and the fleeting drama over certifying election results in Michigan’s largest county.

“Bottom line: a LOT of very unorthodox things have to happen for Trump to be reelected,” the JPMorgan strategist wrote. “Even so, I’m not ruling anything out.”

Chess legend, Vladimir Putin opponent and democracy advocate, Gary Kasparov, issued this short thread explaining his view of what the outgoing president is doing with his attempted coup.

In Trump’s twisted mind, reality is what he says it is.

There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling transmission….

* I had a client like that once. You’d hear the lead team member paged. Then another and another, working down the chain. He’d call everyone in the office, in turn, asking the same question. He didn’t want the right answer. He wanted someone to give him the answer he wanted, someone to blame when he did what what he wanted to and it went to shit.

Poor wingnuts. They are handcuffed by their shameless kow-towing to Dear Leader Imagine that:

Because Trump won’t concede, many conservatives have found they can’t be open about their plans to counter Biden’s agenda. Some have already faced blowback.

The conservative movement has become handicapped.

Organizations can’t sound the alarm about President-elect Joe Biden’s agenda. Conservative reporters won’t take pitches about Biden’s rumored Cabinet contenders, insistent on covering evidence-deficient claims of voter fraud instead. One conservative group involved in policy advocacy backed off from hiring two soon-to-depart Trump administration officials after growing concerned about the consequences.

And it’s all because of an unspoken rule set by President Donald Trump: Do not acknowledge Biden’s imminent White House takeover.

Those who have run afoul of the dictate have faced swift repercussions. Some have received angry emails from donors accusing them of siding with the “liberal media.” Those who have tried to start revving up the grassroots engine — warning of what could unfold in January, particularly if Democrats win control of the Senate via two runoff races in Georgia — have been likened to turncoats by colleagues.

“I sent out a weekly email and mentioned something about a potential Biden administration and the fallout was ridiculous,” said an employee at one prominent conservative nonprofit.

As Biden’s Jan. 20 inauguration inches closer, this lack of preparation within the conservative movement has some of its top members worried they are unwittingly damaging their joint legacy with the president and creating an opening for the next administration to swiftly pursue a radical agenda. Meanwhile, Trump shows no signs of relenting in his quest to baselessly claim he won the recent election.

“Republicans can’t afford to get stuck in the denial stage of grief,” said Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska, one of only a handful of GOP lawmakers who have congratulated Biden on his victory. Sasse even broke Trump’s unspoken rule by saying he would “crawl over broken glass before allowing the Senate to confirm” some of the names being floated for Cabinet positions in Biden’s administration.

“We’ve got some big fights ahead, and it’d be prudent for Republicans to be focused on the governance challenges facing our center-right nation,” Sasse said.

Several prominent conservatives, granted anonymity to speak candidly about the situation, said they should be readying a legal response to Biden’s promise to sign a series of executive orders on his first day in office that would undo some of Trump’s key policies on immigration, foreign policy and deregulation. And they are frustrated by the lack of pressure Biden has faced to fill his Cabinet with moderate voices who might balance out progressive influences elsewhere in his administration.

As Trump declines to travel to Georgia — instead criticizing the state’s recount efforts in a series of tweets — conservatives have also become increasingly concerned that the Democratic candidates competing in a pair of Senate runoff races there will glide to victory if Republicans fail to communicate, due to fears of upsetting Trump, what Biden and a Democratic Senate could accomplish.

“The winning narrative in Georgia would be that Republicans need the Senate to counter Joe Biden and [Vice President-elect] Kamala Harris when they’re in office,” said one prominent elected Republican. “The problem is you can’t make that case effectively when you’ve got the president telling some of his voters, ‘Don’t worry, Joe Biden is not going to be president.’”

It’s not easy being in thrall to a demented Cult Leader when he really goes off the rails. But they made their beds. And he’s going to be dominating their politics for years to come. Oh heck.

Trump is still flogging the lie that Michigan can’t certify the election.

If you’re not on twitter, you’ve have blessedly missed the cascade of lies like that hour after hour. It’s even more disturbing than usual.

The strategy, to the extent there is one, appears to be to file lawsuits and demand recounts as they simultaneously pressure local Republicans in various states to buy into their tactic of crying voter fraud without evidence and refuse to certify the results. I suspect Trump is still counting on his handpicked Supreme Court to throw the election to him if it gets that far.

And all of it is Trump’s patented method of handling his failures — throw up a bunch of smoke, harass everyone involved and try to make it not worth their while to hold him accountable. He’s not living in the real world this time, of course. It’s not going to happen. But his fallback is to keep his cult excited and engaged even if he leaves office by perpetuating the lie that he actually won and was denied the office by the Deep State and the Swamp. I’m sure there’s money in it.

Update: oy

This piece by Sean Trende gave me hope about the Georgia races. It really is doable:

Control of the Senate is going to come down to two Jan. 5 runoffs in Georgia. Sen. David Perdue came a hair’s breadth from winning his race against Jon Ossoff outright, but ultimately fell just short of 50% plus one. Sen. Kelly Loeffler will face off against the Rev. Raphael Warnock to complete the term of former Sen. Johnny Isakson (the reward for the winner is running again in two years for the full term). 

Somewhat surprisingly, articles discussing these races have framed the races to claim that Republicans are favored in both. Politico declares that Democrats begin behind the eight ball, while other pieces casually cast Republicans as “likely” or “probable” victors in the Peach State.

I’m not sure that is correct, and would view these races as pure tossups from the start. Here are six reasons why.

1. Biden just barely won the state, and it may not revert to “factory settings.” Any analysis of the Georgia runoffs needs to start with this observation: Joe Biden just won the state. There are obviously enough votes today for a Democrat to win a Senate seat (something that hasn’t been true for two decades). One would think that fact would dominate analysis of these races: All Democrats have to do is turn out their own voters one last time.

Why would analysts overlook this? There is likely a sense that Donald Trump is an aberration, and that the parties will revert to their pre-Trump orientation once he exits the stage. Even if we make the seemingly gratuitous assumption that Trump will have quietly left the stage by January, this overlooks the fact that the changes we’ve seen under his administration are the culmination of trends within the parties dating back over a decade. As I wrote in 2012:

“While I find it highly unlikely that [Rick Santorum will] be the nominee this time out, there’s a good chance that the Republican coalition will fundamentally change in the next 20 years and move toward Santorum’s style of politics. Twice in a row now, the party has toyed with nominating a candidate who combined social conservatism with economic populism; Santorum’s speech last night was essentially a northern version of a speech Mike Huckabee could have delivered in 2008.

“We’ve already seen white working-class voters move toward the Republican Party over the past several decades — a shift perhaps epitomized by the GOP’s special election victory in New York’s 9th Congressional District. If a more credible Santorum/Huckabee candidate could emerge, the party would reciprocate by moving toward these voters. This would have major implications for our political dynamic, and could deal the Democrats a serious blow in states like Pennsylvania and Ohio.

“On the other hand, the Democrats have been moving toward a top-bottom coalition of ‘New Economy’ professionals and minority voters. A Santorum/Huckabee-esque Republican Party would probably hasten the exit of upscale suburbanites from the Republican coalition, and potentially reinvigorate the New Democrat approach to governing that dominated the party’s politics in the ’90s.”

There may be some mean reversion for Democrats among whites with a college degree in the post-Trump GOP, but it is unlikely that it will be a complete backslide. Of course, American politics can’t be explained entirely by white educational attainment. Race, religion, and religiosity all play roles in explaining vote patterns. But given Atlanta’s emergence as a major “knowledge economy” hub, it is difficult to dismiss these changes.

In short, these voters might be Democrats now, in the same way that voters in Northern Virginia are now Democratic. This also will complicate efforts by Republicans to warn against giving Joe Biden a blank check with a Democratic Senate; these voters might be okay with him having one for now.

2. The Democrats’ coalition is different than those in previous runoffs. Part of what fuels media skepticism about Democrats’ chances in these races is the outcome of previous runoff elections, where Democrats have made the postseason in good condition, only to lose in the end.  The most prominent example of this is the Georgia race between Democrat Wyche Fowler and Republican Paul Coverdell in 1992, where Fowler (like Perdue) almost cleared 50% on Election Day, but fell short in the final count. In 2008, Jim Martin forced a runoff with Saxby Chambliss after keeping the race within three percentage points in November; Chambliss won the runoff by 15.

But this might tell us more about the nature of the parties’ old coalitions than anything else. Runoff elections are typically low-turnout events, and when the Democratic coalition in Georgia consisted largely of whites without college degrees and blacks, they were placed at a disadvantage in an election where high-propensity voters dominated.

As the previous point emphasized, that might not be the case anymore. Republicans may find their turnout efforts hamstrung if whites with college degrees in metro Atlanta turn out in force – as they have in past runoffs – but instead vote Democratic this time.

3. Trump voters may be dispirited.  On top of this, there is likely still something of a difference between a “Trump voter” and a “Republican voter.” In many ways this is similar to a struggle that Democrats faced in the late aughts and early ’10s – there was a small difference between an Obama voter and a Democrat, and that caused them headaches throughout his administration. It probably contributed to the drop in Democratic performance in the 2008 runoff.

This time, voters who backed the president because of who he is seem unlikely to turn out in droves for Loeffler and Perdue. In fact, these voters might be disenchanted by the Republican Party’s failure to go all-in on the president’s claims of voter fraud and a stolen election. State election officials, all of whom are Republican, are compelled to admit that there is little evidence of fraud in the state, which runs contrary to the president’s claims. The senators don’t have a lot of room for slippage, so any tension between the state’s message and the president’s message risks being interpreted as establishment Republicans once again being insufficiently dedicated to the president’s success.  Relatedly …

4. Trump might go nuclear on Republicans. I find this less likely than I did on Election Day, but there is still a chance that the president may decide to take out some of his anger on Republicans for not supporting him enough in his legal battles. Since I suspect, at least at this point, that Trump will want to run again in 2024, he probably doesn’t want to antagonize rank-and-file Republicans any more than he has too, and at the very least would want to return to office with as many Republicans as possible in the Congress. Still, Trump is nothing if not unpredictable, so the chance remains.

5. Warnock and Ossoff complement each other. Had only Warnock or Ossoff advanced to the runoff, I would probably view the election differently. As it stands, with both of them advancing and able to motivate different portions of the Democratic coalition, they likely enhance the others’ chances. Ossoff’s appeal is rooted in the new, upscale Democratic coalition; he may serve to keep these voters in the Democratic fold.

On the other hand, Democrats’ runoff problems have often been a function of a lack of black enthusiasm. That seems unlikely to be the case this time. Warnock is now close to becoming the first African American senator from Georgia, and his stewardship of Martin Luther King’s A.M.E. church will doubtless be played up in the runoff. Combined, the two of them work hand-in-glove against the traditional decline in Democratic turnout in runoffs in a way that very few other candidates would.

6. Loeffler and Perdue aren’t great candidates. On top of all this, Perdue is a senator who had never before held office and who struggled to win election in what was then still a red state amid a Republican mini-wave. Loeffler is an appointee. Neither has the natural political chops that are developed after years of winning lower profile state representative and congressional races.  They’ve struggled with message discipline and poor choices, and again, they don’t have much room for error.

This isn’t to say that Democrats are the favorites, either. They also have no room for slippage; whites with college degrees may return to the Republican fold; and Democrats may have experienced the defeat of Trump as a cathartic event. Warnock in particular has baggage as a candidate. But the actual evidence that Republicans start out as favorites seems lacking, and we shouldn’t be at all surprised if Democrats win one or both of these races.

I am especially reassured by the idea that Warnock and Ossoff make a particularly good team in terms of turnout. I hadn’t thought about that but it makes sense.

I don’t know what will happen. But I’m hopeful.

Oh, and by the way, the Republicans down there are in a civil war — with each other.

There is no worse time for Georgia Republicans to be engulfed in a civil war. Their presidential candidate just narrowly lost the state, which has long been a conservative safe space, while two competitive runoff races are looming in January that could determine control of the U.S. Senate — and the direction of the country for the first part of this decade.

And yet the war has come, full of double-crossing, internecine accusations of lying and incompetence, and a bitter cleavage into factions over the question of how much fealty should be shown to President Trump — and the extent to which Republicans should amplify his false argument that the election in this fast-changing Southern state was stolen from him.

Republicans in Georgia and elsewhere are now faced with a stark choice. They can stick by Mr. Trump and his rash claims of fraud, and risk alienating moderate voters who may have had their fill of Trumpism — including the thousands who helped turn Georgia blue this month. Or they can break with Mr. Trump, invite his wrath and risk throwing the political equivalent of a wet blanket on conservative turnout for the Senate runoffs in January.

The longer Trump continues this nonsense the less time they have to regroup. In that sense he’s doing the Democrats a favor. Too bad about the damage to democracy but he’s been doing that on a daily basis since the day he came down that escalator anyway so maybe we can hold on for a few more weeks and at least take the gavel away from Mitch McConnell. Nobody has done more than him to destroy our nation.

Eric Boehlert’s Press Run is a must read today. (If you aren’t subscribing already, you really should. You are going to need his independent voice to get you through this time. The media is in chaos.)

Anyway, he writes today about the ongoing obsession with the “Trump voter” and he is 100% correct:

Shining an unprecedented spotlight on supporters of the losing presidential candidate, the press continues its four-year love affair with Trump voters. Forever centering them as the unequivocal focal point of American politics, news outlets are making sure to check in on them as they defiantly reject Trump’s lopsided electoral loss to Joe Biden.

Journalists are swooping into GOP-friendly outposts such as Youngstown, Ohio (ABC News), Colorado Springs (Washington Post), and Mason, Texas (New York Times), for what seem like group-hug sessions, as the press continues to give close-minded Trump supporters a platform to spread untrue claims about the election and about Biden.

“Did I miss all the stories about the 78 million Biden supporters who triumphed — and their wants and needs — and how rural-centric Trump supporters need to reach out and understand the massive urban/suburban majority in America?” asked SiriusXM host, Michael Signorile, watching the flood of media attention given to Trump loyalists in recent days.

The media’s firm fixation on Trump voters isn’t normal — the idea that our politics needs to concern itself with the bruised feelings of voters who supported the presidential loser has no basis in how the press traditionally views the election season. And yet, here we are as the press rushes in to hear and amplify Trump voters’ anger, angst and concern about the president’s loss, and push fabricated claims about voter fraud.

After Trump’s surprise win in 2016, news executives beat themselves up for “missing” the story and, led by the Times, launched four years of Trump voter stories — often from Midwestern diners — and presented their worshipful views on Trump as borderline sacrosanct.

“As time went on and Trump consistently proved to be unpopular — his aggregate approval rating never got above 50% — the press continued to plug away at profiling Trump supporters,” Oliver Willis notes this week. “Every misstep and disastrous decision he made in the presidency was greeted with another journalistic adventure into a diner that was inevitably packed with Trump voters who still backed Trump.”

• “I don’t see how Michigan could vote blue after everything that’s happened to us. It doesn’t make sense to me.”

• “Biden is in bed with China.”

• “For me to believe that Joe Biden got 78 million votes, I find that very hard to believe.”

• “I will never accept a Biden win.”

• “These mystery votes all came in for Biden and zero for Trump. Something is definitely fishy there.”

• “I will not believe that [Biden] is a legitimate winner.”

• “Everything I worked for, Biden wants to give to the immigrants to help them live, when they don’t do nothing but sit on their butts.”

There’s nothing wrong with the daily casting a wide net to get the temperature of voters. But that’s not what happened. For years, the media’s voter coverage has been completely obsessed with white, and usually rural Trump voters who adore the president.

Why the endless media desire to still normalize white Trump voters who live outside reality and reject Covid science along with election math? Especially when Americans, by five million votes, just rejected their standard bearer.

Without an ounce of self-awareness, the Post over the weekend noted that sore losers used to be ridiculed in American society. “But Trump’s refusal to concede to President-elect Joe Biden and his insistence, without evidence, that the election was rigged against him has focused a spotlight on a rapidly shifting culture’s growing acceptance of losers who push back against the truth.” [Emphasis added.]

There’s been a “rapidly shifting” cultural movement to accept sore losers, the Post reports, without noting the shift is being fueled by the media, which have completely embraced the sore loser mentality of Trump voters.

Last week, the Los Angeles Times cleared out space just so Trump voters could be heard. “As one small attempt to bridge the divide, we are providing today a page full of letters from Trump supporters,” announced Letters editor Paul Thornton.

The brazen move wasn’t even unique. In 2018, the New York Times did the same thing: “In the spirit of open debate, and in hopes of helping readers who agree with us better understand the views of those who don’t, we wanted to let Mr. Trump’s supporters make their best case for him as the first year of his presidency approaches its close.” It’s funny how “in the spirit of open debate,” neither newspaper has devoted its letters pages exclusively to Democratic supporters.

On Sunday’s ABC News’ “This Week,” Martha Raddatz sat down with a handful of Trump voters who spouted baseless claims about election fraud, while the host offered almost no pushback. One week after Biden flipped five states, including long-time Republican bastions, Georgia and Arizona, none of the Sunday network talk shows featured a panel discussion with Biden voters.

Instead, we get kid-glove coverage of Trump supporters, who are allowed to launch election lies and nasty attacks on Biden, under the guise of news. Here’s a collection of Trump Voter quotes, taken from the recent Post, Times and ABC News reports:

• “It was a recipe for disaster when they decided to have these mail-in votes.”

• “When we deal with globalists and liberalism, I would put absolutely nothing past them.”

What’s the point of this endless media exercise? What’s the news value in providing a platform for Trump voters so they can regurgitate these hollow, and often hateful, claims on behalf of a candidate who just became only the fourth U.S. incumbent president in 150 years to lose his re-election bid?

Trump voters’ feelings aren’t news.

I don’t think the media will ever get past their obsession with these folks. After all, they were pretty much obsessed with them even before Trump came along to claim them. You know, “Real Americans.”

Boehlert offers my readers a nice discount so be sure to subscribe via this link. It’s worth it.

This is powerful:

Howie Klein at Down With Tyranny has a fabulous new website. (Change your bookmarks!) He wrote about these races the other day, focusing on the fact that David Perdue is a lilly-livered coward.

Neither David Perdue nor Kelly Loeffler has much to say other than pre-digested, one-size-fits-all Republican Party propaganda. Even in a red state like Georgia, people are growing weary of their crap. Which is why neither was reelected on November 3 and why each faces a runoff against Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock on January 5.

Today, Perdue, who was beaten up pretty badly by Ossoff the last time they debated, declined to accept an invitation from the Atlanta Press Club to debate before the runoff. Loeffler hasn’t responded but observers say she is likely to follow Perdue’s lead on this, especially because Warnock is incredibly charismatic and she’s kind of a babbling wet blanket.

Ossoff was quick to respond, telling CNN that he had accepted the debate proposal and then tweeting:

Last time they debated Ossoff called him a “crook” to his face– and accurate assessment– and he was unable to defend himself. After that he cancelled a debate he had already scheduled. Ossoff has told crowds that debating is the “the bare minimum” voters should expect from candidates. ..

You can contribute to Warnock and or Ossoff by clicking on this Blue America page at ACTBlue.

You have no doubt heard by now about Lindsey Graham following in Trump’s footsteps and trying to exhort the Georgia Secretary of State to throw out legal votes to overturn the election results for Donald Trump.

The Republican party is a shitshow and there is a pretty good chance they are not going to get their act together before January 5th. This Washington Post reports says they’re worried about it. As they should be:

Republican leaders are increasingly alarmed about the party’s ability to stave off Democratic challengers in Georgia’s two Senate runoff elections — and they privately described President Trump on a recent conference call as a political burden who despite his false claims of victory was the likely loser of the 2020 election.

Those blunt assessments, which capture a Republican Party in turmoil as Trump refuses to concede to President-elect Joe Biden, were made on a Nov. 10 call with donors hosted by the National Republican Senatorial Committee. It featured Georgia’s embattled GOP incumbents, Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, and Karl Rove, a veteran strategist who is coordinating fundraising for the Jan. 5 runoffs.

The comments by the senators and Rove were shared with The Washington Post by a person who provided a detailed and precise account of what was said by each speaker on the call. The person spoke on the condition of anonymity since they were not authorized to divulge the contents of the private discussion.

Most striking was the way the senators nodded toward the likelihood of Biden’s presidency. While Trump keeps insisting that he won the election, making baseless claims of voter fraud and mounting legal challenges, Republicans on the call privately cast those efforts as an understandable but potentially futile protest.

“What we’re going to have to do is make sure we get all the votes out from the general and get them back out,” Perdue said of core Republican voters. “That’s always a hard thing to do in a presidential year, particularly this year, given that President Trump, it looks like now, may not be able to hold out.”

Perdue added that “we don’t know that” yet — and said he fully supports Trump and his dispute of the results in several states. But, he said, “we’re assuming that we’re going to be standing out here alone. And that means that we have to get the vote out, no matter what the outcome of that adjudication is on the recount in two states and some lawsuits, and others. Kelly and I can’t wait for that.”

Perdue noted later that he had confronted an “anti-Trump vote in Georgia” in the first round of voting and said the runoff is about getting “enough conservative Republicans out to vote” in the Atlanta suburbs and elsewhere who might have opposed the president’s reelection.

“I’m talking about people that may have voted for Biden but now may come back and vote for us because there was an anti-Trump vote in Georgia,” Perdue said. “And we think some of those people, particularly in the suburbs, may come back to us. And I’m hopeful of that.”

Perdue’s delicate approach — standing with Trump, but also privately acknowledging that the president’s time in power could be waning and that he carries possible political liabilities — extended to others on the call who tried to balance their loyalty to Trump with their apprehension about what is needed in Georgia to save the GOP Senate majority. It is revealing of the Republican dilemma in the winter of Trump’s presidency, with fear of offending him and his fervent supporters hovering over a cold political reality.

It sounds to me as if the Georgia Dems need to think about ways to make sure those Trump voters know their Senators didn’t stand firms with Dear Leader.

It figures that Trump’s political appointees would ignore any norms about involving themselves in rank partisan skulduggery while they collect taxpayers money. Of course it does:

The federal government’s chief information security officer is participating in an effort backed by supporters of President Trump to hunt for evidence of voter fraud in the battleground states where President-elect Joe Biden secured his election victory.

Camilo Sandoval said in an interview that he has taken a break from his government duties to work for the Voter Integrity Fund, a newly formed Virginia-based group that is analyzing ballot data and cold-calling voters in an attempt to substantiate the president’s outlandish claims about illicit voting.

Sandoval is one of several Trump appointees in the federal government — some in senior roles — who are harnessing their expertise for the project, according to the group’s leader.

The participation of administration officials in the project shows the extent of the efforts by the president’s allies to justify his unfounded allegations of widespread ballot fraud.

They claim this is done all the time and maybe it is. But look at what they’re doing:

Sandoval is part of a hastily convened team led by Matthew Braynard, a data specialist who worked on Trump’s 2016 campaign. Another participant is Thomas Baptiste, an adviser to the deputy secretary of the Interior Department, who also took a leave to work on the project.AD

Braynard said in an interview that several other government officials on leave are also assisting the effort, but he declined to identify them.

The group is analyzing voter rolls and other databases in search of signs that ballots may have been cast illegally, information that Braynard said is being shared with Trump’s campaign. The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

The group appears to be attempting a makeshift version of an effort already conducted by a nonprofit consortium of states, which uses sophisticated data analysis to root out duplicate voter registrations and registrations of people who have moved or died. A Washington Post analysis of vote-by-mail data from three of the states in the 2016 and 2018 elections found that officials identified 372 possible fraud cases among 14.6 million votes — 0.0025 percent of ballots.

Braynard maintained that his project was pathbreaking, saying they had found that many states do not update their voter rolls “very aggressively or frequently.”

“Nobody’s ever done this before,” he said. “These things have to be done to find potential problems.”

David Becker, who led the creation of the interstate consortium, said it had taken more than three years to develop and relied on sophisticated software and proprietary state data that is unavailable to analysts like Braynard and Sandoval.

Becker said the Voter Integrity Fund appeared to be the latest in a series of “shoddy, fly-by-night” efforts to replicate the project and would inevitably flag numerous false positives based on inadequate data.

“I would put absolutely no stock in their analysis,” said Becker, who is now the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research.

They do not care if their analysis is flawed. The point is to make half the country believe the election was stolen so Trump can call himself the “rightful president” once he does whatever he’s going to do after January, most likely declare his intention to stage a presidential rematch.

The incredible richness of these people insisting for four years that the intelligence community, dozens of other countries and the Democrats were all wet in saying that there was Russian interference in the 2016 election, even though they never suggested that it changed the vote count. And here they are scouring the voting rolls in Republicans states frantically looking for non-existent evidence of systematic voter fraud and persuading their voters that they were robbed despite no evidence of it.

And, by the way, they are obviously total morons who just discovered that the voter rolls in most states are inaccurate — and are checked when people actually vote. This stuff is always the case in a country in which the elections are all local and where people move around and, you know, die. It’s been investigated and investigated and there is no evidence of any widespread, coordinated fraud that could have affected the result of an election.

There are ways someone could rig an election. This isn’t one of them and there is no evidence that anything else did either. It’s pathetic whining from a group of sycophants for the worst sore loser in history.

From the “you can’t make this shit up” files:

Another pro-President Trump rally was held at the Michigan Capitol on Saturday as the “Million MAGA March” attracted thousands, including several far-right groups like the Proud Boys, in Washington, D.C.

It was part of a national “Stop the Steal” effort, a massive disinformation campaign about voter fraud in the 2020 election linked to longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone, CNN reports. Stone, who was convicted of several felonies for trying to stop a U.S. House investigation into ties between the Trump campaign and Russia, had his sentence commuted this year by Trump.

[…]

The Lansing rally of a few hundred people Saturday came after a similar gathering last Saturday and small protests during the week.

One of the speakers is blogger and GOP activist Brandon Hall, who says he’s running for Michigan Republican Party chair. That position is currently held by former state Rep. Laura Cox (R-Livonia), who Trump announced at a pre-election rally in Grand Rapids would “be fired” if he lost the state, which he did. Cox has continued to defend the president and make unfounded claims of voter fraud after the election.

“We’re not going to give over our electoral votes to Joe Biden without a fight,” Hall said, as reported by the Lansing State Journal.

What Hall didn’t mention, and neither did the story, is that he has firsthand experience with election fraud. In 2013, Hall was charged with 10 counts of election law forgery, which is a felony. In December 2016, Hall was sentenced to 30 days in jail and 18 months probation for election fraud, the Grand Haven Tribune, FOX-17 and MLive reported.

Hall has been involved with various efforts this year blasting Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s orders to stop the spread of COVID-19. The GOP-majority Michigan Supreme Court in October overturned the 1945 law many orders were based upon.

The state’s COVID-19 cases have soared since October, topping 251,000 cases on Saturday and reaching almost 8,000 deaths.

Whitmer lives in the governor’s mansion in Lansing, which has been a frequent site of heavily armed protests, prompting her to ask for her security to be upped even before an extremist right-wing plot was uncovered last month to kidnap and kill her in a show trial over her COVID-19 orders.

Hall helped organize an April rally in front of Whitmer’s home slamming her coronavirus orders. And he’s tried to organize an impeachment effort against Whitmer that has failed to gain traction, although some Republican lawmakers have signed on.

On Saturday, Hall led the crowd in a “Lock her up” chant about Whitmer, something that broke out repeatedly at Trump rallies in Michigan after the terrorist plot was foiled.

People like to say that Trump is all projection — whatever he accuses the other side of doing is what he does himself. But it’s really a reflexive right wing tactic across the board. Since they have elevated lying, dirty tricks, propaganda and cheating into unapologetically acceptable political tactics they are forced to suggest that this is normal behavior that the other side does as well.

I don’t know if this is a psychological need that stems from their own awareness that they have become grotesquely dishonest people in pursuit of power or whether or not they are just cynically trying to tar their enemies with their own tactics to muddy the waters and possibly make their voters give up on politics altogether.

Either way, American democracy is on a perilous path.