“Us” is a tricky construction most people take for granted
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Except in practice the way they “secure” elections is to limit access.
Is this not more wood for the “Turmp is Putin’s useful idiot” fire? Destabilize western democracies and all that? I’m sure, in their private meetings, that Putin has been telling Turmp that if he loses he should say the other side cheated.
Or maybe he didn’t even have to. He could just be sitting back and watching the own goals…
Newscorp.
Why am I not seeing that name every time someone brings up one of these statistics?
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If you think the election was rigged, might as well not vote next time.
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The reality is sad, but in historical context, probably not unexpected. The bubble is real.
unfortunately, human history has well worn alternatives for people who believe their voice isn’t heard.
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What is most telling to me is that that two board members, Monica Palmer and William Hartmann, apparently weren’t prepared for the intensity of the response. That did surprise me. That is the only way you get this rapid a reversal. It speaks to the self-reinforcing bubble many in the GOP are currently operating in that they would think this would seem normal or in any way acceptable.
Full Post
November 17, 2020 10:33 p.m.
Stunning turn of events tonight in Michigan. The Wayne County Board of Canvassers deadlocked and was unable to certify the county’s vote. Wayne County includes Detroit. The Board has two Republicans and two Democrats. The Republicans refused to certify. But tellingly the GOP Chair said they’d agree as long as Detroit was left out. Basically, they were trying to pull a power play in which they used their power to toss out the votes of the city of Detroit.
The state GOP jumped in and lauded the decision. Trump campaign lawyer Jenna Ellis excitedly predicted it was the first step toward the GOP state legislature tossing out the results of the election and appointing Trump electors to the electoral college. Finally President Trump himself tweeted excitedly that it was a turning point.
But then it all changed.
The GOP board members apparently hadn’t reckoned on the intensity of the response. Within a couple hours they had backtracked and certified the vote. In other words, they backed down entirely and just did the standard and correct thing which is to certify the results of the election.
Reports from on the ground in Michigan suggest the intensity of the blowback was intense. And really that’s hardly surprising. How would you respond if you heard that two relatively obscure partisan functionaries had decided to throw out your entire city’s votes?
The original decision did not surprise me. Much of the organized Republican party is dead set on throwing out the results of the 2020 presidential election and entirely unconstrained by any thought of democratic legitimacy. We’ve seen that in the evolving Lindsey Graham scandal.
What is most telling to me is that that two board members, Monica Palmer and William Hartmann, apparently weren’t prepared for the intensity of the response. That did surprise me. That is the only way you get this rapid a reversal. It speaks to the self-reinforcing bubble many in the GOP are currently operating in that they would think this would seem normal or in any way acceptable.
Stay tuned for more. Even though it was resolved pretty rapidly, I think this is a big story we’re likely to hear more on.
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Most Republicans are idiots.
Just say Rupert Murdoch. He won’t appear in a puff of smoke if you say his name three times, although it sure feels as though he’s that sort of guy…
But in the end, he’s the one who is almost entirely responsible for our modern world. His heirs, like Zuckerberg, have taken it to a new level, sure, but he saw what could be done with modern media and he did it.
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This is the best analysis I’ve seen on why Republican attempts to steal the election are falling flat: the prisoners dilemma.
Talking Points Memo (Consider subscribing! These blogs are paywalled, but most of their content is free.)
Be Thankful
November 18, 2020 10:34 a.m.
We should take a moment this morning to give a big thanks to the Biden campaign team and all the tens of millions of Biden voters. Because under extremely difficult circumstances they made sure it wasn’t close. Biden will win by at least 4 percentage points and likely more like 5. He will win by a 74 vote margin in the electoral college. Under normal, legitimate circumstances a win is a win is a win. Margins are just about bragging and feeling good. But this year it was critical and you can see that from the events of the last 24 hours.
The Trump campaign, with the active assistance or passive complicity of the entire Republican party, is actively trying to steal the election. This is no exaggeration. Republican Senators are calling local election officials and pressuring them to throw out Democratic ballots. Trump electors in Nevada are suing to have a federal court throw out the results of the state’s election and appoint their defeated slate to the electoral college. You saw the aborted grab last night in Michigan. Even with this consider the critical role of Democratic governors in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Nevada.
These gambits are not going to work. But a critical reason they are not going to work is that none of these contests were really that close (close in the sense of recounts and election litigation). Even more importantly there are too many of them. Maybe Trump gets lucky in Michigan but then he has to get Pennsylvania and Arizona. Or he knocks out Georgia but he still needs Pennsylvania and Arizona. It’s just too heavy a lift, too transparent. You need a mix of compliant elected officials, corrupt judges and a corrupt GOP in each state. It’s just too much.
This shows up particularly before judges, in a pinch I think Trump would find partisan Republican judges to get him over the finish line. But no one wants to do that for a candidate who’s obviously losing. No one wants to do that in the hopes Trump gets an inside straight across all the other close states.
But if this race were coming down to Pennsylvania alone or Georgia alone there’s a good chance it would be Donald Trump sworn in on January 20th
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What’s disturbing to me is that right after the vote, even a solid majority of Republicans accepted that Biden won. But after relentless repetition of “stolen election” rhetoric from Trump, amplified by social media, they’re starting to believe the lie. It’s like Black Lives Matter - initially it had overwhelming support, but then the right-wing media came up with their own narratives that reduced conservative support for it, drastically.
There’s a scary media environment, right now, one that’s destroying the foundations for democracy in this country.
Yeah, the NYTimes had an article this last Sunday, interviewing Trumpers about that, and they were saying, “The Democrats haven’t earned it.” Which made my head explode.
But I think a big part of what’s missed in the “unity” talk, especially by those on the right, is that Biden is saying, as much as anything, that he’s not going to be attacking Americans like Trump was. People on the right just take that as an assumption, even while Trump actively attacks more than half the country. The expectation of double standards is total.
American conservative Christianity is very vocally against critical thinking. The Texas Republican party specifically adopted, as part of their official platform, an opposition to it, because of that.
Not even that - even their anecdotes about questionable ballots have turned out to be false. All they need is a fiction about questionable ballots and voter fraud, reality be damned.
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If Biden fails to pursue aggressive investigations into all the crime and corruption in the next two years they will get slaughtered in the mid terms and there will be a competent Trumplike person in the oval office in 2025. And then your country is done.
Crime needs to be publicly investigated and punished. Being powerful cannot be a way to avoid legal consequences in any country of laws. It is downright insane to think otherwise, and suicidal to imagine that any effort towards ‘conciliation’ will be received as anything but a perception of weakness.
Your country has just barely dodged a collapse into an authoritarian state. It will take a lot of intense work and open conflict (at least legally) to change the trend. Any weaksauce bipartisanship is tantamount to suicide - they won’t let you win another election unless they are dragged kicking and screaming back into the light.
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I fully agree that “unity” is kind of a wasted effort when only one of the sides sees any value whatsoever in unifying. Biden needs to use the Justice Department to the full extent possible in his Presidency – it is one of the unilateral domestic sources of power he will have the ability to wield, and I think he’ll be making a very significant mistake if he does not.
Nazi cultists don’t want to hold hands and sing kumbaya, I’m afraid.
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I hope the mainstream news media doesn’t paint this as a “both sides” issue. In 2016, most Democrats were shocked and appalled that Trump won … but they accepted that he won the election. (There were fringe discussions of “faithless electors” and giving money to Jill Stein for recount efforts that Stein knew or should have known were futile, but by and large, Democrats accepted the result.) This is not an issue of “my guy lost, so I refuse to acknowledge the legitimacy of the winner.” It’s that exclusively Republicans have been primed—by Trump—to believe any outcome in which Trump loses is necessarily the product of massive, unspecified fraud. It’s also the case that, post-2016, you didn’t have Hillary Clinton filing multiple lawsuits in numerous states seeking to overturn the results. Nor was it the case that Chuck Schumer called up secretaries of state to pressure them into invalidating their states’ results and throwing the election to Democrats. This derangement over the 2020 results is exclusively a Republican thing.
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It’s disheartening that Republicans can win by 50,000 votes in three states, lose the popular vote by 2.8 million, and still get 306 electoral votes.
Democrats, on the other hand, had to win by hundreds of thousands of votes in swing states, and win the popular vote by what will probably end up being 6 million, to get the same 306 electoral votes.
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Even #2 is too good for them.
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Wow, not so sleepy now, huh?
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Yes. Yes. So very yes. The mainstream media and its obsession with “offering equal coverage to both sides’ views” instead of focusing on reporting TRUTH kind of drives me a little crazy. It’s not journalism, by any means.
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Neat 2018 poll showing “67% of democrats believed that Russia tampered with vote tallies in order to get Trump elected.”, but I think there are several things different between then and now.
First off, there are always sour grapes and grumblings from losing an election. There also was documented interference in the election in 2016 and at the very least attempted collusion by Russia. And the fact that Trump lost the popular vote.
All that said, Clinton conceded the race. Yes, there were sour grapes interviews, but there was no legal effort to overturn the race, nor were follower whipped up into a frenzy about a “stolen” election. Cries of “illegitimacy” were due to him losing the popular vote.
If you don’t think Trumps reaction is somehow different than anytime in modern history, then I think you either aren’t paying attention, or are blinded by bias.
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