Another thought on Trump stealing the election that takes his light calendar this week into consideration…
Does Trump currently seem to be in a mental and physical state capable of leading a covert operation to steal the election? I would say: absolutely fucking not.
And if that’s the case, then everything would need to be in place for the steal right now, ready to go without further work on the part of the Orange Führer.
Above, I argued that such an operation would be very complicated, and no one seems to disagree. Are these guys just that good that the whole thing is plug-and-play at this point? Is it the case that they went from total clowns in 2020 to the ultimate black ops team in 2024?
I have little doubt that there will be some sort of bullshit during and after the election by fascist actors, but I have much doubt that any of it will be effective.
Moderating: Please remember attack the posts and not the poster. This is crossing the line to me. If you want to make it personnel, take it to the pit please. You can even do it as a spin-off thread with ease.
So please don’t do this again.
How to Reply as a linked Topic:
Click Reply, in the upper left corner of the reply window is the reply type button, looks like a curving arrow point to the right.
Choose Reply as linked topic and it starts a new thread. As an example, you can choose GD, IMHO or The Pit for it.
Actually as of today, that seems very unlikely. The last 5 major polls all put Harris ahead of Trump by a growing margin. I mean who knows what it will look like in 2 weeks, but I think the gap will widen as they point out what an unhealthy lying old man Trump is and how weird his VP pick is.
So Trump can still win, thanks to the damn electoral college, but the popular vote is slipping away from his hands.
And this is where I think getting David Plouffe on board is a genius move. Granted that we’re a long way from 2008 — socially, not chronologically — Obama’s ground game was a thing of beauty.
Populist voters have a generally high level of distrust, and so are even more reluctant to respond to pollsters than than rest of us. At least – that’s what happened in the 2016 and 2020 cycles. While this doesn’t prove you need to add points to Trump’s numbers, it is consistent with the real substantial possibility Trump is ahead in the popular vote as of today.
Switching to Harris shook up the race – I expect there to be ups and downs from here on in.
To answer the OP question another way: I recall in distant past elections, where opinion moved around, it being said if only the election had been a few days sooner or later, the result would have been different. This has a significant possibility of being the case again. If so, Donald Trump can win just by being lucky in election day timing.
Whatever ups and downs there may be, I expect the sheer desperation of much of America to not have a president who’d be 82 when he finishes a second term and 2) the thrill of history-making of having the first woman president and 3) sheer fatigue of eight years of Trump’s obnoxiousness to combine to make unstoppable-force momentum for Kamala.
It would have to take not one, but multiple October Surprises for Trump to stop the water built up behind that dam.
I heard him say that he’s never seen Trump laughing except at someone else’s expense; that is, he laughs at the misfortunes of others, or when making fun of them, but never shows genuine amusement in good will. (Note that @Aeschines 's follow-up is not a counterexample, given this proviso).
The True Believers aren’t going to be the ones cooking up any effective political attacks. It will be done by some very sharp, very cynical political operatives of the Roger Stone mold, possibly focus-grouped to death and given some trial balloons on dark corners of the Internet (who knows, maybe here?) before trying to boost it to virality sometime after the Democratic national convention.
Or, who knows? The cynical politcal operatives might speak Russian, or Chinese, or Korean.
That only makes sense - in the Trump view of the world, any deal has a winner and a loser, and since Putin won that means that Biden must have lost. He has no concept of a win-win situation.
So a lot of credit to Karl Rove who put a lot of effort and importance into winning at the state legislature level. Brilliant.
I reckon all this stuff about states certifying voter results and vice-presidents then certifying those results is in the Constitution somewhere. There is no precedent for a sitting vice president certifying himself as president, unless you count John Adams in 1796, Thomas Jefferson in 1800, Martin Van Buren in 1836, and George H. W. Bush in 1988.
Steve Bannon is broadcasting the roadmap to all the state legislatures and governors what they need to do post-election day. Heck, what they ought to have done four years ago and by now we could just cancel elections altogether. Dunno if that’s quite what Karl Rove had in mind but he made it all possible and nobody’s asking his opinion anyway.
Maybe this election is already as irrelevant as Nate Silver’s poll numbers. Vote or stay at home. Stop the steal or go ahead and steal it. It’s all right there in the Constitution.
This Democracy Docket article quotes Lauren Miller Karalunas, who co-wrote a detailed white paper on this topic earlier this year for the Stanford Law & Policy Review. This white paper is free to read - see the PDF link in the post below. It offers a well-researched deep dive into specifics, including immediately-applicable remedies to the prospect of individual local election officials refusing to certify results.
A bit of correction: The twelfth amendment in 1803 set up the VP’s participation in certifying elections. So just Van Buren and Bush Sr. certified themselves.
In another reality, Al Gore certified himself as president in 2000, but in this reality Florida was not agreeable to the election and the Supreme Court concurred.
Yes, and we have our work cut out for us. Here’s the latest electoral map from Larry Sabato’s group at U of Virginia:
Summary:
Republicans 235
Democrats 226
Toss-up 77
Rating Changes:
GA: Lean R to Toss-up
NH: Lean D to Likely D
MN: Lean D to Likely D
So we need to aim for a solid win while the fascists have wrong-footed themselves. Then we need to support President Harris. Over the medium term we need to undermine the supports for American fascism - that would be Fox News.
Definition: Fascism is a political ideology opposing democratic elections while scapegoating low-power minorities to rile up their base, and maintaining a quieter sort of support from their monied funders. Nazis were fascists but so were Mussolini of Italy, Franco of Spain, and the WWII Japanese militaristic government.
The 12th Amendment provides that, “the Electors shall . . . make distinct lists of all persons voted for as President, and of all persons voted for as Vice-President . . . which lists they shall sign and certify, and transmit sealed to the seat of the government of the United States, directed to the President of the Senate; the President of the Senate shall, in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the certificates and the votes shall then be counted.”
The Vice President does not “certify” any result of the election. His role (made explicit in the 2022 amendments to the Electoral Count Act) is solely ministerial. He opens the certificates of election and hands them off to clerks. Any challenge regarding the legitimacy of the certificates must be determined by Congress with the VP having no vote or role.
Boy, maps like that are truly depressing - that we have such huge swaths of out country populated by folk who would support Chump. Such a magnitude of ignorance and ugliness.
Yeah, it’s pretty scary when you realize the only thing that occasionally saves the country by electing decent leadership is the population density on the west coast and the northeast, and a couple of swing states. Electoral maps like that one are always depressing.
