How is this not fraud? The voters did not elect him. They elected who he claimed he was. They elected a guy who got degrees from certain schools. They elected a guy with employment experience with certain big name finance companies. They elected a guy with certain life experiences that they thought would help him represent them in congress.
Fraud: the intentional use of deceit, a trick or some dishonest means to deprive another of his/her/its money, property or a legal right.
The legal right being deprived is representation in the House by a person with the qualifications and experience they want.
I mentioned this upthread, but the legal mechanism for disputing whether a Representative-elect was “duly elected” is the Federal Contested Elections Act. It requires the Representative-elect’s general election opponent to file a notice of contest with the House within 30 days. Zimmerman did not do so, so this avenue is closed.
The Act was last invoked in 1996 when Rep Bob Dornan alleged that his election loss to Loretta Sanchez was due to rampant voting by illegal aliens. A House committee charged to investigate the allegations ultimately dismissed them.
Which seems, to me, to be yet more evidence that Zimmerman, his campaign, and the New York Democratic Party all managed to seriously screw up in this case. They had knowledge of much of Santos’s lies prior to the election (much less during the 30-day dispute window afterwards), and didn’t actively pursue it.
Politicians have been lying to get elected since before 1776. Precisely how much lying is too much lying to surpass some legally codified definition is likely not a thing you can objectively define.
What I can’t help but think in this sort of case is my perpetual suspicion that the following is true:
The people who run political campaigns usually don’t really know what they’re doing.
Even assuming that the campaign directors can’t choose their candidates and so often get stuck with absolute jackasses, the ineptitude of political campaigns is truly dazzling to me; my honest impression is that there really isn’t much science put into any of this stuff and political campaign jobs are handed out based on nepotism (see: Kamala Harris’s sister) and random chance.
I am just amazed that a major political party in a rich country does not have a central staff of researchers whose job it is to do the most rudimentary background checks on opposing candidates. I know there’s 435 Congressional districts, and that’s a lot, but you’re running a campaign to control the fucking U.S. House of Representatives. I struggle to believe it would be THAT hard to have some low level staffers do a thorough check on opposing candidates in competitive districts, and NY-3 was a competitive district. That Santos’s litany of lies wasn’t revealed long before the election is absolute incompetence on the part of the DNC.
Thing is, the DCCC (and its Senate and Republican counterparts) is more a funding, and messaging coordination at the strategic 30,000 ft. flight level, kind of outfit, and the system relies on the decentralized structure of PACs and local committees and an ecosystem of consultants and strategists-for-hire (ten thousand would-be next James Carville/Karl Rove) for the granular tactical work.
And, in US politics, the candidates and the State parties don’t want “a national central staff” not beholden to them touching anything in their campaign. Provide money and eyeballs and let me do my thing, is their usual reply to the national organization.
The issue is how do you determine why people chose who to vote for Santos. Maybe they voted for him because they thought he had a college degree. Or maybe they voted for him because they liked his tie. Or maybe they voted for him because he was the Republican nominee. But without knowing why people voted for him, you can’t say that it was due to a lie Santos told. And if Santos’ election was not due to a lie he told, than he was legitimately elected.
In a lot of cases people voted for him because of a completely different lie about about critical race theory, or some other made up bullshit, that they heard from someone other than Santos. That’s pretty typical lately when a wealthy, white, suburban district lurches to the right, and sometimes that’s a enough to swing races statewide (e.g. VA-GOV).
“People voted for this candidate because they were told lies,” is true of most Republican candidates. Santos is really not very special is this area.
If it’s to be argued that someone wasn’t legitimately elected due to lies they told about their background, their opponent, stands on issues or intent to pursue policies, then hardly anyone could retain office. Santos is just an unusually virulent example of a widespread disease.
Wonder if his supporters are stocking up on gear to show their allegiance.
I respectfully disagree. At some point, a difference in degree becomes a difference in kind. Santos invented an entirely different human, and ran that human for office. It’s almost as if, upon winning, he said “actually, I’m not going to take this job…I hereby give it to [insert literally any random human here]”. You can’t do that.
Granted, we may differ on exactly where to draw the line — where difference in degree becomes difference in kind. There will be boundary cases.
At the risk of derailing this with partisanship, the people who were voting for George Santos were knowingly voting for a Republican in 2022. It’s hard to argue that they didn’t know they were voting for a liar, even if they weren’t aware of what specific things Santos was lying about. Anybody who objects to lying as a general principle isn’t voting for a Republican.
If the DCCC had exposed his lies for all to see, do you really think that would have changed a single Republican vote for him?
Between not caring as long as he vote the Republican party line, wanting to see him pwn the libs, and believing that the DCCC is the one lying about Santos’s lies, the Republicans who voted for him would have pulled the lever for him no matter what was exposed.
Possibly. Even causing a few voters to stay home and not bother makes a difference, and exposing a Santos as being as bad as he is could motivate more of one’s own base (turnout in NY-3 was maybe fifty percent.) Yes, voters will overlook candidate lies (and that does go both ways) but Santos is not just another politician; he is the most ridiculous case of a liar in politics I can think of in my entire life. He’s worse than Herschel Walker, who at least has the excuse that he appears to be brain damaged.
Campaigning DOES matter or else the results would always be the same - and again, this was not some scarlet red district in rural Alabama. This was a moderately competitive race.
If the attitude is “it won’t change anyone’s mind” then why bother campaigning at all?
Maybe it does, but maybe it shouldn’t. Right now the state party apparatus is supposed to vet the candidates. While they can’t actually forbid anybody from running in a primary, the state committee’s endorsement and funding can make a big difference.
In the old days of machine politics, we ended up with a slate of thoroughly vetted candidates, all the way down the line - and utterly committed to voting the established party line. Activists on both the right and the left decried this, and forced the parties to switch from pre-approving the candidates to letting them fight it out in the primaries and waiting until the voters have spoken to support the party nominee.
In the long run that’s how the parties end up with outsiders like Barak Obama and Donald Trump. Obviously it’s a double-edged sword.
They apparently had not expected it to be competitive until too late in the game. Bad mistake. Had the incumbent run for reelection he might have had it in a walk, but he wasn’t. In this one, as in many others, it would become about the peripheral voters who can go either way and the “soft” supporters on both sides who may stay home if they either feel their vote won’t make a difference or can’t give it in good conscience to their party. The idea behind hitting him hard on it would be for only the hardcore “will vote R even if it is The Joker” types to show up, while enough soft Dems are offended enough to get off their asses.
All things being equal, in retrospect, I think the bad outweighs the good. Ask your average Democrat whether they’d have preferred Clinton in 2008 if it meant no Trump in 2016. I think you’d get a resounding YES.
Yeah, in a district like that, it’s the independents/moderates who would likely be moved by the exposure of some of his more egregious lies. And that would probably’ve been enough to keep the district blue.