Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/09/15/what-happens-if-trump-loses-th.html
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ugh, paywall. anyway, your TL;DR is the jolt of fear-based adrenaline i needed to get going this morning.
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This is some scary shit. We’ve seen where four years of counting on norms and institutions to check Trump’s worst instincts has gotten us, and I think we’re seeing some folks start to come around to the realization that “he can’t do that, it would be unconstitutional!” is not quite as persuasive as it used to seem.
We’ve never been in these waters before, with a President who literally doesn’t care if the system of government as we know it survives his term, and anybody who says they know what this all will look like a year or five years from now is selling you something.
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Here’s a better article without a paywall:
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Did anyone catch the recent news article about the loon in charge of the CDC? If anyone else said these things they would be carted off for a psychiatric evaluation. With these type of people in charge, virtually anything is possible, because nothing is off the table for them. They are literally in a battle between good and evil - and they KNOW they are right.
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We’re never going to be able to get rid of the Electoral College (just too much Big State vs Little State politics), but we very well could enforce proportional representation among Electors in all States instead of the one or two who do that now. That would at least eliminate the handful of perpetual swing states problem.
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thank you! still terrified, lol
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Anyone who’s not preparing themselves for this now is fooling themselves. Our liberal democratic institutions have been under a conservative onslaught for the last 40 years, and they’re not going to save us this time.
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Fear solves noting. Panic solves nothing. Fatalism solves nothing.
The single most helpful thing you can do is make a game plan for the election, and help others do the same. Make that landslide.
P.S. Also, I find visualizing Trump tumbling down the boarding stairs to Air Force One immensely heartening. A taking a cough in his unmasked face at a rally. Or getting dragged into a water hazard by a hungry gator on the Mar-al-lago golf course.
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I highly recommend Fivethirtyeight. They are committed to facts and statistics based analysis, but make it digestible for the general public. The article I linked to even gives some of the surprising stuff Democrats might do.
One of the sections I check all too often is the meta-analysis of poll data that generates Monte Carlo style simulations and breaks it down to the probability of who will win. It’s updated several times a day. Make sure to scroll down. It even gives probabilities of different scenarios.
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I like their little fox character too.
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If Trump does not grab total power, then many of his powerful supporters will go to prison. As this gets more obvious, more pressure will be put on Trump to grab total power.
Pressure builds…
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The morbidly curious part of me wants him to refuse to leave to finally catalyze a resolution to this infection, otherwise it just seems like we’re kicking the can down the road. People clearly voted for Trump because they were tired of politics as usual that weirdly manifested as a populist demagogic wannabe dictator and, as much as I hate that orange-faced fat fuck, people are trending towards voting for Biden simply to get Trump of there. Trump, however, won’t go away until he’s shuffled off the coil and his 4 obnoxious kids (including J-dog) will be unable to fill his authoritarian clown shoes. I sincerely hope that Trump was just a perfect storm anomaly of “rich”, populist, charismatic, old, white, male, and narcissistic who already happened to own a real estate business that can easily milk the government. Even if Biden wins, OAN and Fox News will gladly keep giving him oxygen to yell and scream and bitch and moan and render Biden’s presidency effectively meaningless.
Like the junkie passed on the railroad tracks, we simply haven’t hit rock bottom yet.
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Agreed, but I also don’t think it is panic or fatalism to hope for the best and plan for the worst. And this President is showing us he is more than capable of delivering the worst.
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Our greatest fear should be the next guy. The one with more than two functioning brain cells. If 40% of the population still supports Trump it won’t be hard for a smart version of him to pick up another 11%.
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I do spend too much time watching the YouTube crazies but to them, Trump has already won the election and he is waiting until November 4 to unleash a horror show where all Democrats and any Republicans who fail to do as they are told by orange shitler will be sent to Guantanamo Bay and executed for treason. I hate to say it but democracy could very well be at stake here.
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Vote and prepare for the worst.
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“We” couldn’t. Individual states could, and you’d have to get each state to agree individually. Including those “perpetual” swing states. Which actually shift every 10-25 years or so, and really like the attention and benefits brought by the outsized importance.
It also wouldn’t neccisarily line things up with the popular vote in any real way.
But there is this.
Which essentially end rounds the entire thing, and places the US on a popular vote system by awarding all a state’s electors to the winner of the national popular vote. It doesn’t require convincing all states, so long as enough sign on to hit 270 electoral votes it works. And it’s remarkably close to coming into effect. If all the states currently planning to pass it do so, you’re at 260. Convince a couple of small states and the Electoral College is a technicality by the next election.
I think this is why the GOP have been running test cases about faithless electors. Republican Governors have vetoed the bill in several red states, and in many others the GOP has stalled debate and prevented votes. Like statehood for DC and Puerto Rico they seem to view it as an insurmountable problem for future elections. And they frequently smear it as a Democrat plot to rig elections.
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