“Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,” states the Declaration of Independence. Just not Republican-led governments … under which consent of the governed is unwelcome and actively opposed.
“It’s just sad when a political party has so lost faith in its ideas that it’s pouring all of its energy into election mechanics,” said Wisconsin state Sen. Dale Schultz (R). “I am not willing to defend them anymore.”
That was March 2014. Schultz condemned his party’s attempts to limit access to the polls.
“It’s all predicated on some belief there is a massive fraud or irregularities, something my colleagues have been hot on the trail for three years and have failed miserably at demonstrating,” he said.
Six years later they are still failing miserably yet still trying to make it harder to vote. I recently counted 20 of their vote suppression methods. Ari Berman came up with a few more.
Republicans are filing election-related lawsuits in Nevada, Texas, Pennsylvania, Minnesota … everywhere, actually. Those actions have been largely a failure too, but party lawyers are just getting warmed up. They’ve challenged the rules. They’ve challenged the methods. They’ve challenged voting days and hours. The Trump administration has slowed the U.S. mail.
Now Republicans are challenging individual voters, maintaining the pretext their efforts are only about ensuring elections officials are scrupulously following the law:
“The other side has given every indication that they will challenge every ballot they can, at every step of the process,” said Chad Dunn, general counsel for the Texas Democratic Party and co-founder of the UCLA Voting Rights Project.
“The mask is off. This isn’t about rooting out any mythical voter fraud. It never was,” Dunn said. “This is about raw power and obtaining power by any means necessary.”
A quote I use on the back of my GOTV planning guide states a very different philosophy:
“We think that voting actually is not just a private vote for the person who gets the vote, but a public good, and that the more people who vote, the more legitimate the elected officials are, and that they represent the actual values of the electorate.” — former Colorado Senate Majority Leader Ken Gordon (D-Denver), Colorado Statesman, 7/27/12
It’s not Lincoln, but it’s American. One wonders if our opponents are anymore except on paper.
“It doesn’t have to be this way,” MSNBC’s Chris Hayes declared in a commentary Friday night.
No, it does not. Harris County, Texas added drive-through voting to its election-support efforts, and made 24-hour service available over the last day of early voting. Nearly 10,000 voted between 7 p.m. and midnight. Hundreds more voted in the wee hours. If you build it, they will come.
“What I like about engineering is that you can’t manipulate the laws of physics and mathematics,” Miguel Valencio said. “As we’ve seen lately, election laws are not the same.” Valencio arrived to vote about 1 a.m. He works for an oil-field services company and was angered by Governor Greg Abbott limiting county residents to using a single drop box for absentee ballots. He had not been enthusiastic about voting for Joe Biden, but Abbotts’s actions convinced him to vote in person.
A Democratic upset in a 2018 race for "Harris County judge" just might deliver Texas to Biden. Meanwhile, recent Dem wins in PA State Supreme Court races could thwart voter suppression in that tipping-point state.
I have writtenmanytimes about the ongoing vote suppression schemes by the Republican Party and traced the argument that undergirds it all the way back to the founders, one of whom, John Jay, had a favorite maxim: “Those who own the country ought to govern it.” Those who believe they “own” the country have wanted to keep the right to vote to themselves from the very beginning and the fight for universal suffrage has never stopped.
Since the civil rights movement finally ended Jim Crow and secured the right to vote for Black citizens throughout the country, the Republican coalition of conservative (mostly) white people who seek to retain their privilege as a higher caste is the faction that seeks to restrict the franchise. It isn’t as easy to do that as it used to be.
As far back as the 1980s, Republicans put together a legal strategy and formed a network of lawyers devoted to suppressing the vote of racial and ethnic minorities as much as possible. They sought to restrict immigration and end birthright citizenship because they believe these people will threaten their “ownership” by voting for the Democratic Party. They went from state to state to try to pass voter ID laws and in recent years they have marshaled the forces of the Department of Justice and the federal judiciary to make voting as difficult as possible.
Much of this has been justified by a supposed need to stop rampant voter fraud, which is nonexistent on any systematic scale. To the extent it happens at all, it’s usually Republicans who profit from it. These are all solutions in search of a problem which only serve one purpose: preventing Democrats, mostly people of color, from voting.
In 2013 when the Supreme Court decided in Shelby v. Holder to gut the Voting Rights Act, ruling that the country “has changed” and Congress should pass new laws to reflect “current conditions,” it was clear that the court under Chief Justice John Roberts was sending a signal to the conservative judiciary that voting rights were back on the agenda, big time.
After all that, it’s a bit much to see establishment Republicans express shock at what’s happening in this election. Politico reports:
“What we have seen this year which is completely unprecedented … is a concerted national Republican effort across the country in every one of the states that has had a legal battle to make it harder for citizens to vote,” said Trevor Potter, a former chair of the Federal Election Commission who served as general counsel to Republican John McCain’s two presidential campaigns. “There just has been this unrelenting Republican attack on making it easier to vote.”
No kidding.
Nonetheless, I must at least agree that throughout these last few decades of challenges to voting rights, Republicans have always at least upheld the pretense that they were operating in good faith. It was never believable, but the charade of concern about voter fraud or illegal immigrants voting was the tribute o hypocrisy that vice paid to virtue. They acknowledged, however spuriously, that vote suppression for the express purpose of stealing elections was undemocratic.
As with everything else in the Trump era, such adherence to old-fashioned notions of right and wrong are no longer operative. In this election we are seeing a vote suppression effort of unprecedented scale, with no serious attempt to justify it other than an exercise of sheer partisan power.
The Republican standard-bearer has such a big mouth and is so crudely dishonest that they really have little choice in the matter. He openly declared that if he loses it can only be because the election was rigged by the Democrats and he seized upon mail-in voting during the pandemic as the method by which they would do it. Of course he said the same thing in 2016 without even that much explanation, so it’s clear that this is just his all-purpose excuse for any possible defeat. Donald Trump can’t lose, according to him; he can only be cheated out of his win. The effect of this self-serving propaganda has been to make Republicans hold out for Election Day while Democrats have been voting early in large numbers, many of them by mail.
The Republican lawyers and operatives who have fanned out to all the swing states are following Trump’s lead. As Chris Hayes spelled out on MSNBC on Thursday night, they are filing hundreds of lawsuits, challenging voting laws and procedures all over the country to restrict the ability to vote and disqualify legal ballots based upon a variety of contrived rationales.
In one case, Justice Brett Kavanaugh even backed up Donald Trump’s inane demand that the vote count itself must stop on election night so as to avoid the “suspicion of impropriety” if votes counted later should “flip the results,” which is a ridiculous way to frame the legal issue:
Repeat after me: "All votes have never been counted on election night." These graphs show the number of votes that were counted and reported in 2016 after Wednesday morning following E-Day. Even "quick count" states had work to do. pic.twitter.com/3sSpbwNgkF
None of this has anything to do with fraud. They can’t possibly know that fraud will have taken place ahead of time. These challenges are solely based upon the assumption that most of these ballots will be votes for Joe Biden and other Democrats. They’re not even trying to hide it.
The Supreme Court has so far kept to the federalist rationale that has always held (with the notable exception of the Bush v Gore decision) that election laws are the purview of the states, with Roberts joining the three liberals (and newly seated Justice Amy Coney Barrett not weighing, in but not recusing herself either.) On the other hand, Justices Neil Gorsuch, Sam Alito and Clarence Thomas, along with Kavanaugh, all appear to be ready to create a federal interest in deciding election cases out of whole cloth.
When Barrett joins post-election cases (as she almost surely will) it is highly likely that the court will vote to throw out massive numbers of ballots that arrive after Election Day — at least if Donald Trump is ahead in the count. Those will number in the tens of thousands, at least.
All this for that unfit reprobate. You’d think Republicans might be willing to sacrifice a few years in the wilderness just to get rid of Trump. But apparently not. Their party seems to be willing to completely delegitimize our democracy on every level on his behalf.
The best hope for saving the country from this disaster is for everyone to get their vote in on or before Election Day and for the media to refrain from naming a winner until the votes are counted. This year everyone will have to be patient and hope that all the legal firepower Republicans throw at us won’t be enough to overcome an insurmountable Biden win. It’s not right that Democrats have to jump through such hoops, particularly in the middle of a lethal pandemic, but the other side is ruthlessly focused on maintaining power by any means necessary and there simply isn’t any other choice.
One of the more interesting (and somewhat confounding) polling results in this election cycle has been the belief among members of both parties that Donald Trump will win re-election, regardless of who they’re actually planning to vote for. His approval rating has been stuck in the low 40s throughout his term, which is unprecedented, and he’s been behind in the polls from the beginning of the campaign. Yet most Americans still remain convinced that he is going to win. This is from Gallup in early October:
Regardless of whom they personally support, 56% of Americans expect Trump to prevail over Biden in the November election, while 40% think Biden will win. Republicans are more likely to believe Trump will win (90%) than Democrats are to think Biden will (73%). Fifty-six percent of independents predict that Trump will win.
How can this be? Well, of course it all depends on what the definition of “win” is.
The explanation for the Democrats and many Independents is obvious. With all of Trump’s talk about mail-in voter fraud and lawsuits and promises of intimidation at the polls, they believe it’s possible that he will pull out all the stops to create or fake a victory regardless of the legitimate electoral outcome. With his statements to the press that he wants the ninth Supreme Court seat filled in order to ensure a victory, it’s not being all that paranoid to assume it could happen.
Meanwhile, the Republicans are living in an alternate universe in which Trump holds a massive lead in all the polls and is heading for a landslide. They believe this because he tells them that every day.
It’s unlikely we will have full results on election night next week, since some states won’t even begin counting mail-in votes until that day, while others allow ballots to arrive some time after Election Day. There’s certainly the possibility of lawsuits if contests are close. Nonetheless, we will probably know the winner within a few days — Trump’s scenario that it could take “months” is hot air — and it’s worth pondering how the two sides will react.
According to this Reuters-Ipsos poll, more than four in 10 voters on either side will not accept the results of the election. It doesn’t go into details, except to say that 22% of Biden supporters and 16% of Trump supporters say they would engage in street protests or violence if the other side prevailed. But let’s look at the reasons that might happen.
Obviously, if Trump prevails there will be an uproar among Democrats despite the fact that a large number of them believe he’s going to win anyway. But in the unlikely event that he wins outright without any legal shenanigans, partisan court victories, discarding of valid votes or intimidation at the polls, I suspect they will be even more shell-shocked than in 2016, but will accept the outcome with depressed equanimity. If they take to the streets under that circumstance, it might be to stage a protest against pollsters for their overwhelming incompetence. Joe Biden has had a steady and substantial lead in all the polls for months now.
On the other hand, if despite a clear defeat at the ballot box, Trump nonetheless finds a way to “win” through lawsuits decided by right-wing judges who throw out legal votes or takeovers by GOP state legislatures, there will be a massive outcry. People understand that Republicans might try this, but that doesn’t mean they’ll stand for it. In that scenario, our nation would face the worst constitutional crisis since the Civil War. God help us if that comes to pass.
But what about Republicans? They’re already living in a miasma of disinformation, conspiracy theories and lies. Alex Wagner of Showtime’s “The Circus” interviewed a bunch of fanatical Trump-supporting militia members and reported tat for whatever reason they believe Trump will win in a 50-state landslide:
.@alexwagner discusses her conversations with militia leaders w/ @NicolleDWallace: "They are entirely certain that Donald Trump is going to win in a landslide which is something you hear Trump say too. Trump has not opened the door up to this even being a close election." pic.twitter.com/pBX7F7OVOl
Reporting from Trump rallies on cable news inevitably shows the same attitude even among the more mainstream voters. Trump’s supporters simply do not believe that he can legitimately lose. And why should they? Their Dear Leader — the only source of information they trust — has said so explicitly, over and over again. In fact, that claim has already been institutionalized:
Multiple social media analyses, including one conducted by a group of nonprofit researchers on behalf of NBC News, have detailed how a collection of the president’s relatives and members of his inner circle, along with far-right media manipulators and an online army of disciples, has created or spread false or misleading content that supports his “rigged” narrative, while his campaign is urging supporters to join an “army” and “defend their vote.”
Every single day, Trump is out on the campaign trail threatening to defy the election results. His newest rationale (one of many) is that “they spied on his campaign” and he didn’t get a “friendly transition” in 2016, so he sees no reason to give the Democrats one in 2020:
Trump came into office with a peaceful transition of power. Hillary conceded promptly. Obama tutored him. To suggest that it wasn’t a peaceful transition is ludicrous and to use that as some excuse for him to not transition is absurd. https://t.co/CqKXDOQ3z6
What this adds up to is this: if the polls are right and Biden wins the election by a healthy margin, Trump voters almost certainly won’t accept the results. Put yourself in their shoes and it isn’t that hard to see why. Four years ago, a lot of Hillary Clinton voters felt as if they’d had the wind knocked out of them by that shocking and unexpected result. That’s what these Trump voters are going to feel, except that the dissonance will be a thousand times worse. They are expecting a Trump landslide, and have been told by him that the only way he can possibly lose is through fraud on a massive scale.
The difference between then and now, of course, is that Clinton and Barack Obama and every Democratic official immediately accepted the results and their supporters largely agreed voters that Trump had won, at least under the antediluvian constitutional machinery of the Electoral College. There is every reason to think that Trump will do quite the opposite, and I’m afraid there’s no reason to believe we can depend upon Republican officials to step up and do the right thing.
And there’s that undeniable pall that hangs over the whole process, with the possibility that well-armed Trump supporters who have been told they simply cannot lose the election will try to take matters into their own hands. After all, some militia-style goons have already plotted to kidnap and “try” Democratic officials for “treason.” We can’t predict how far they’ll be willing to go if their world is turned upside down by an unexpected electoral defeat.
Shortly after the election in 2016, I wrote an column about the “sore winner” syndrome, in which angry Trump supporters were assaulting Democrats and screaming at them on the streets, even though their guy had won the election. This reflects a longstanding attitude among this political faction in which it’s never enough to win by normal means — they can’t be happy about it until they force their rivals to admit they were wrong and offer an unconditional surrender.
Imagine what these people might do when they lose.
If Democrats are serious about dealing with this outrageous judicial power grab, it’s long past time that they went nuclear on the people who have been facilitating it. This twitter thread by election law expert Rick Hasen, which points to a couple of excellent articles on the subject, tells the tale of a corrupt behind-the-scenes puppet master who has fundamentally changed American life in ways that will reverberate for generations:
I’ve been calling on my conservative friends to condemn Leonard Leo, one of the key players in building the Federalist Society and promoting Trump’s judges to the federal courts, for backing a group trying to suppress the vote. But now there’s evidence of Leo’s self-dealing.
Here’s the piece@Dahlialithwick and I wrote @Slate in May on how same people pushing conservative judges for the court were spawning more voter fraud myths through the “Honest Elections Project” backed by Leo to defend laws making it harder to vote.
Then @Dahlialithwick and I followed up in this@Slate piece showing same people providing financial backing to get three former Bush lawyers from Bush v. Gore on Supreme Court are pushing legal theories going to SCOTUS aimed at suppressing the vote.
Leo’s activities with Honest Elections Project are despicable. His group is advancing crackpot theories which could be used to try to get the courts, which he helped to stack with conservatives, to accept sham voter fraud arguments which could affect voting outcomes.
And now comes this expose from @CREWcrew@RobertMaguire_ which shows that in addition to Leo’s despicable political conduct, it looks like Leo and a lot of people are getting rich while obscuring that through a series of organizations and corporations.
Some of my conservative friends have condemned others, like Kris Kobach, for advancing false, unsupported and dangerous theories of massive voter fraud used to try to suppress the vote and sway elections. But crickets about Leo, even after I’ve called it to their attention.
Why the silence? I hope it is not because Leo runs a very powerful network that puts conservatives on courts and in high positions, and it is fear of what opportunities might disappear if Leo were called out.
But his work should be condemned by all principled conservatives.
P.S. Don’t be telling me Leo has “stepped away” from @FedSoc. So what? He’s created this network and has unparalleled influence in this world, making his advancing spurious voter fraud arguments in courts stacked with his judges particularly dangerous. 8/7
Leonard Leo is as close to being a rightwing superhero as there is. In legal circles he is a demi-god. And it turns out that he’s also personally corrupt and just as criminally devious and hackish as all the rest. I don’t know that anyone can count on “principled conservatives” to say anything against him.
That’s an evergreen quote in the Trump era, of course. But it’s particularly apt for this Supreme Court confirmation hearing. Any person with integrity would refuse to allow their confirmation to be rammed through under these circumstances. Coney Barrett does not have integrity. Obviously.
Booker: "Nothing about this is normal. It is not normal that Senate Republicans are rushing through a confirmation hearing, violating their own statements & betraying the trust of the people & their colleagues & failing to take even the most basic safety protections." pic.twitter.com/Sm5XbcYqj9
We know that Leonard Leo and the Federalist Society is behind this of course. Guess what else they are behind? Slate’s Rick Hasen and Dahlia Lithwick have this:
According to new reporting from the Guardian and OpenSecrets, Leo, Carrie Severino of the Judicial Crisis Network, and their dark-money backers are promoting the Orwellian-named “Honest Elections Project” to pressure elections administrators to limit access to the ballot and to undermine trust in elections. The messaging echoes Trump’s baseless claims that various states’ efforts to let people vote by mail are fraudulent—and turns these lies into policy. “The project announced it was spending $250,000 in advertisements in April, warning against voting by mail and accusing Democrats of cheating,” the Guardian explained. “It facilitated letters to election officials in Colorado, Florida, and Michigan, using misleading data to accuse jurisdictions of having bloated voter rolls and threatening legal action. Calling voter suppression a ‘myth,’ it has also been extremely active in the courts, filing briefs in favor of voting restrictions in Nevada, Virginia, Texas, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, among other places, at times represented by lawyers from the same firm that represents Trump.
Whitehouse told us, in an email, that “while Republican-appointed justices on the Supreme Court deliver decisions greenlighting GOP voter suppression, Leo and his network mobilize to tip elections by making it harder for people to vote. We’ve seen this mischief in the records of judges Leo and his dark money groups have packed onto the federal bench; now he’s mounting a direct dark-money assault on the American voter.”
It almost goes without saying at this juncture, but we will say it again: The idea that voter fraud in the United States is widespread has been debunked many times. There’s so little evidence to support the claims that the true aim of such chatter must be to use lies to make it harder for people likely to vote for Democrats to register and vote. The reality is that some Republicans have turned to suppressing the vote—by voter roll purges, voter disenfranchisement, voter intimidation, and the closing of polling places—when they fear they cannot win an election fairly. It is also not in dispute that vote by mail is not rife with fraud, that many states already allow for no-excuse vote by mail, and that attempts to stop the franchise by discouraging mail-in voting are simply the newest flavor of vote suppression for the pandemic era. That’s why the president is dementedly tweeting about it, even as he is being debunked in real time. And that’s why Leonard Leo and his confederates are directing untraceable dark money away from the judge-picking business and into the apparently booming vote-suppression business.
Of course they are doing this. The dynamic duo of McConnell and the orange clown who will sign anything they tell him to sign has been hugely successful to their project. They would love to have four more years to send the country back to some pre-civil war era of white, male supremacy and unfettered capitalism. And they could do it. In fact, they may already have if the Democrats don’t summon the will and the grit to rebalance our courts and return the nation to a democratic republic in which the people choose their leaders.
Leave it to Donald Trump to test positive for COVID-19 just two days after a disastrous debate performance. It’s tempting to think this is yet another of his reality show stunts, but it’s hard to believe that he could get away with faking something like this considering that the Trump White House leaks like a sieve. It’s more likely he does have the virus and his best-case scenario will be that he’s one of the lucky asymptomatic cases and can spend the rest of the campaign testifying to his youthfulness and strength, no doubt attributable to “good genes.”
As the man himself says, “We’ll see what happens.”
Meanwhile, there’s still a lot going on that requires some sustained attention from the American people, none more important than the ongoing threat that the election, now just a month away, is going to be sabotaged. I don’t use that word lightly. It is becoming very obvious that this is being planned and will be implemented in an attempt to ensure that Trump cannot lose.
In fact, according to some incredible reporting by Jim Rutenberg in the New York Times Magazine, Republican operatives were locked and loaded back in 2016, but just didn’t need to pull the trigger. They had lawyers at the ready to contest the election on the basis of “voter fraud” in all those close states if it had gone the other way.
Rutenberg’s story makes the often-overlooked point that this is not really a Trump operation. Sure, he said back in 2016 that he wouldn’t accept the results unless he won and this time he’s telling his voters that the only way he can lose is if the vote is rigged. But this isn’t his idea. He’s just the first Republican to crudely telegraph the plan ahead of time.
The history of vote suppression in America goes all the way back to the beginning, of course. Only white men were allowed to vote. But white supremacists turned it into a winning agenda during Reconstruction and have continued to profit from it ever since. After the Voting Rights Act was passed in the 1960s and racist political power shifted from the Democrats to the Republicans, it turned into a well-funded, subversive, anti-democratic political strategy. During the last couple of decades it’s become the GOP’s life raft. The majority of their almost exclusively white party is in full-blown rebellion against what is soon to be a multiracial, multi-ethnic majority, which for obvious reasons is centered in the Democratic Party.
Donald Trump speaks to all of that, sometimes in blatant terms that the vote suppressors undoubtedly wish he wouldn’t. But I’d bet money that half the blather about voter fraud that everyone assumes are just Trumpisms are things he’s heard from establishment Republicans.
A lot of us have been chronicling this phenomenon for a long time. For me, the 2000 election was the eye-opener, when it became clear that Republicans were much better prepared to wage a scorched-earth battle to prevail in any election dispute. In a plan masterminded by Trump’s pal Roger Stone, the GOP had teams of lawyers ready to descend on Florida the moment they were called. Some of those lawyers are now on the Supreme Court — or are about to be rammed through a confirmation process, just in time for an election the president has already announced will require a vote in his favor. Again, this isn’t coming from Donald Trump. His loose lips are giving away the game, but he’s not the one who invented it.Advertisement:https://3830d075541d551dc278e230da78e3d1.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.html
For instance, is it even remotely reasonable to think that Trump came up with the idea to stack the Postal Service board with GOP donors, and install a crony to slow down the processing of mail in advance of an election we know will require record levels of mail-in voting? From Rutenberg’s Times Magazine piece:
When Congress headed off for its summer recess with no deal on money for voting or the Postal Service, Trump told reporters. “They need that money in order to make the Post Office work, so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots,” he said. “Now, if we don’t make a deal, that means they don’t get the money. That means they can’t have universal mail-in voting. They just can’t have it.”
He didn’t think of that.Advertisement:https://3830d075541d551dc278e230da78e3d1.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.html
That particular scheme is this year’s contribution to an ongoing, long-term plan to curtail Democratic voting. It is sophisticated and legally complex and its followers have fanned out to every state that may be close, with lawsuits and legal challenges ready to go after the election.
Right now, aside from throwing sand in the gears of the post office, they’re going to great lengths in states all over the country to make it difficult to vote early or drop off mail-in ballots. They’re filing lawsuits against states that want to count ballots that are mailed on or before Election Day but arrive later, a practice that’s been in place for absentee ballots and military ballots for many years. On Thursday, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott abruptly ordered the removal of all but one early-voting drop box in each county. That includes Harris County, the home of Houston — an overwhelmingly Democratic city — which encompasses nearly 1,800 square miles and about 4.7 million people.
If Democrats decide they’d better take the risk and vote on Election Day instead, there are the possible “poll watchers” Trump has threatened to send forth. He could be provoking a disastrous situation all over the country with calls for his voters to storm polling places to “make sure” the voting is fair and their votes are counted, but he didn’t invent this either. This particular form of voter intimidation has been practiced ever since Jim Crow. We even had a former chief justice of the Supreme Court who participated in it as a young lawyer in the 1960s.
In fact, Republicans were so aggressive about such tactics that courts issued consent decrees barring them from doing it in many jurisdictions for years. Those decrees have conveniently been recently lifted, under the same logic that the Roberts court gutted the Voting Rights Act. In that decision, the chief justice famously declared:
Our country has changed and while any racial discrimination in voting is too much, Congress must ensure that the legislation it passes to remedy that problem speaks to current conditions.
Rutenberg’s story lays this entire history out in great detail and shows how it has accelerated during the Trump years. In fact, that’s the real Operation Warp Speed.
So for all of our legitimate worries about Russian interference in our election, it turns out that the most dangerous assault on our democracy is a long-term Republican establishment operation led by a bunch of lawyers from elite schools. Trump is just the first candidate to come along who is corrupt and unpatriotic enough to unleash them completely.
Post-debate analysis continues unabated with multiple calls to cancel the remaining presidential debates as threats to democracy itself. From Donna Edwards. From Frank Bruni. George Will trotted out putrescence to describe his revulsion. What a card.
But for all that, there is little sign the fundamentals of the contest between Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Joe Biden have changed. More worrisome is how the heavy thumbs of Trump supporters might tilt the playing field for him.
The Atlanticconsiders what right-wing militant groups might do on or after Election Day to secure the nation against a perilous slide into pluralism. Trigger fingers among the Oath Keepers and other militia-branded armed gangs are itchy for the glorious second civil war of their Soldier of Fortune fantasies.
Rural Pike County, Pennsylvania’s elections office has turned away prospective voters from New York and New Jersey who relocated to second homes there to escape COVID-19. A side-eyed, “You ain’t from around here, err ye?” has a long tradition in the South, but is by no means unique there. Only the accents change as one explores the Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways. But Pike County is Trump country. So officials discovered a raft of extra-statutorial qualifications former urbanites have to meet before registering to vote there.
Trump plainly urged supporters to head to the polls to “watch very carefully” for cheating. You know, by THEM. He just as plainly stated Tuesday evening he “can’t go along” with any outcome that does not result in his winning. When Republicans win, they have a mandate to lead and when Democrats win, they cheated is a narrative the GOP has spun for decades. The New York Times documents at length the legend of voter fraud to which a coterie of Republican operatives have devoted their careers in efforts to keep the wrong kind of Americans from voting. Especially Americans of a darker hue.
In the end, pollster Stanley Greenberg found little post-debate movement overall in support for either candidate.
“The structure of the race was totally unchanged,” Greenberg told New York magazine’s Sarah Jones. “If you look at the personal favorability, look at the attributes of each candidate, if you look at who is better on some key issues, there is no change.”
That is, in the race overall. There was notable “slippage” among one key group of Trump supporters:
“When you look at the pre- and post-debate results, and when you look at personal favorability, Trump disappointed the white-working class men,” Greenberg noted. They came away feeling about 7 points less positive than Trump and gave Biden 6 more points.
While they aren’t deserting Trump en masse, the slippage is notable, especially since Trump slightly improved his position with white-working class women. Among them, Greenberg said, “his vote went up from 44 to 53 percent.” The turnaround was powered by their changing opinions of Trump and health care: they headed into the debate favoring Biden on the issue by an 11-point margin and came out supporting Trump by 6 points. When asked generally about “issues affecting the middle class” though, white-working class women mostly sided with Biden.
Trump needed to improve his position on Tuesday and failed. Lost. Voting is already underway in swing states. Votes already cast are off the table, with significant shrinkage in the table forecast before Election Day. Trump who previously insisted his voters show up on Election Day finally encouraged Michiganders to vote early by mail on Monday. This after months of bad-mouthing the security of voting by mail. Hullabaloo alum David Atkins tweeted that “it’s entirely possible that Trump/GOP turnout could hit record lows as his voters refuse to vote by mail, then experience the usual dropoffs from raw e-day vote issues combined with COVID fears.”
Voting on Election Day only also incurs the risk of cold, snow, wind, rain, and traffic depressing Trump’s turnout. Clearly, he is as lousy at campaign strategy as he is at running the country or his other crumbling empire.
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“It’s just sad when a political party has so lost faith in its ideas that it’s pouring all of its energy into election mechanics. I am not willing to defend them anymore.” – retiring Wisconsin state Sen. Dale Schultz, March 2014.
“Trump is an aspiring fascist who would burn democracy to the ground to salve his diseased ego,” Michelle Goldberg wrote Thursday. His niece Mary Trump agrees.
Some Trump followers make a related calculation. If they can’t have their beloved America as theirs and theirs alone, they will kill her so no one else can, à la the traditional murder ballad, “Banks of the Ohio.” (Neil Young’s “Down by the River,” if you prefer.)
So Rick Wilson’s #ETTD thesis was already on my mind before I read Dana Milbank’s afternoon column in Friday’s Washington Post. “Everything” now includes the country itself.
Despite favorable polling showing the presidential contest leaning former Vice President Joe Biden’s way, unease grows that there are more authoritarian shoes to drop the closer we get to Jan. 20 — no matter what happens on Nov. 3.
“This is not a drill. The Reichstag is burning,” warns Milbank, dispensing with his usual ironic stance. “Don’t let democracy burn to the ground.”
Donald Trump’s back is to the wall. Yale historian Timothy Snyder, “a top authority on Nazism and Stalinism” tells Milbank that Trump knows he must stay in power or go to prison. He is no longer trying to win the election. Watch his campaign’s spending for signals. The cheapskate cannot help himself. He will not spend money on a project he expects to lose when he means to remain in power by other means.
Trump is spreading unfounded allegations of mail-related election irregularities and plans to use them to challenge the vote count on Election Day and afterwards. Even before Election Day, perhaps. Whatever he thinks works for him.
FBI Director Christopher Wray testified this week to Congress that “we have not seen, historically, any kind of coordinated national voter fraud effort in a major election, whether it’s by mail or otherwise.”
But White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows dismissed Wray’s testimony on “CBS This Morning” on Friday. “With all due respect to Director Wray, he has a hard time finding emails in his own FBI, let alone figuring out whether there is any kind of voter fraud,” Meadows said.
This, of course, is Grade A bullshit. There is no widespread voter fraud. Republican voter suppression efforts are “predicated on some belief there is a massive fraud or irregularities, something my colleagues have been hot on the trail for three years and have failed miserably at demonstrating,” former Wisconsin Sen. Dale Schultz (R) said in 2014.
The Bush II administration charged federal attorneys with rooting out and prosecuting voter fraud and fired them when they failed to find any. Trump’s own voting integrity commission assigned to prove it exists failed to. There are isolated cases only, as famously committed by a Republican operative in 2018 in North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District race.
Heritage included this because the perp was a Democrat.
The Heritage Foundation has tracked this stuff for years. Heritage reached back to 1948 to bump its database of “proven instances” over 1,000. For its purposes, “voter fraud” includes any and every form of election malfeasance from vote buying to ballot stuffing to registration and ballot petition fraud to voter impersonation at the polls. The last you can count on your fingers and toes and includes several instances of election workers running the poll and a man trying to prove it is easy to impersonate a voter. They were all caught and prosecuted.
Yes, Trump himself is incompetent. But he is surrounded by acolytes smarter and just as unscrupulous. The Atlantic‘s Barton Gellman this week described how Trump’s attorneys and allies in Republican-controlled legislatures are gaming out how to use legal delays in certifying the election to throw out the popular vote for Biden in key states. They could hand the state’s electors to Trump, either handing Trump an outright electoral win or sending the decision to the U.S. House of Representatives. There, in a “contingent election,” the vote to elect the president is by state delegation, not by head count. Republicans currently control the majority of delegations. *
Because Trump cannot help himself, he has been spilling key details of this evil plan in public like a movie villain just before it goes up in smoke and explosions.
This is where you come in, Captains America. You can do this. You are called to preserve the republic. Register. Vote. Volunteer. Donate. Our local Board of Elections worried it might not be able to staff all 80 precincts on Election Day. Yet, Millennials have stepped up across the country to man polling stations their grandparents cannot because of the COVID-19 risk. Our Board now has met its quota. That younger people are this engaged is also a great sign of what turnout among their cohort might look like on Nov. 3.
This is a fight we can and must win.
* MSNBC’s Joy Reid this week thought it unlikely that GOP legislators would ignore the will of voters they would have to face in the next election. She should visit the home of gerrymandering with “surgical precision” (NC), where for much of the last decade voters have cast a majority of votes for Democrats for Congress, yet receive only 3 seats while the GOP gets 10. GOP legislators who gerrymandered the congressional districts drew their state districts to be Democrat-proof as well.
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How will the coming Supreme Court vote impact the presidential race?
On Thursday, I convened a focus group of 2016 Trump voters—all college-educated women in swing states—to ask them what they thought. What I heard was bad news for Republicans.
Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell seem to hope that nominating a conservative woman to the Court will pull suburban women back into their camp. The group I spoke with indicated the opposite.
Some quick background on this group: It was nine women and I had spoken to them once before (last week on September 16). I reconvened this group because it had an unusually high proportion of undecided voters (Yes, they exist!). Of the nine, one was definitely voting for Biden, one was leaning toward Trump, and seven were very much undecided. But all intended to vote in the upcoming election.
When I logged onto the Zoom call I began the discussion with an open-ended question: “How has your thinking about the presidential race changed—or has it—since we last spoke?”
Their answers surprised me. No one even mentioned the Supreme Court. Instead many of the women volunteered that they were leaning much more toward Joe Biden because of Donald Trump’s recent refusal to commit to a peaceful transfer of power.
Their disgust was palpable.
As one woman said:
I’ve been hearing a lot, especially, about not making it a peaceful transition and it’s just making that bitter taste in my mouth grow a little bit more profound with each passing day. And it gets very frustrating just at the lack of professionalism…But I would say it’s probably pushing me further towards Biden but also pushing me more into looking into the Independent party.
I was caught a bit off guard, because after doing a year’s worth of focus groups, one of the things I’ve learned is that the crazy things Trump says that cause an uproar on Twitter and in Washington often don’t break through to regular voters.
And it’s not anywhere close to the first time Trump has made outrageous norm-busting comments about the integrity of the election. In the last few months he’s suggested postponing the election, encouraged voter fraud by telling people to vote twice, and said he’s entitled to a third term. Why was the transfer-of-power comment different?
I believe the answer is simple: The election is 40 days away and voters are paying closer attention.
I think that last comment is worth thinking about. Most people aren’t political junkies and they may just tune out the noise most of the time. What people like us see as an atrocity a day may just be in the background for a lot of people. But the election is upon us and regular people who aren’t normally engaged are focusing.
And he is acting like a despotic nutcase. I doubt many people will change their minds. But it’s possible that some might. Recall that his approval rating took a precipitous drop when he held those crazy coronavirus rallies in the White House. At the time much of the country was staying home watching TV. And they were stunned by what they were seeing. Likewise, in June when his ratings took another dive after his loathsome behavior after the killing of George Floyd.
There’s no guarantee of course. The timing of events is everything with this guy — he’s always dancing as fast as he can and he often gets lucky. But from the looks of it he’s going to keep ratcheting up the crazy.
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. Scenariosexist 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 9th 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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