The results ended up being resoundingly definitive. And here we are in 2021 and congressional Republicans are petulantly denying the results. Deplorable was an understatement. Despicable, all the way up.
2020 was the “careful what you wish for” year for sure.
I wouldn’t have changed anything. The Four Seasons Total Landscaping debacle and Giuliani literally melting under the hot lights made it all worth it. And not that their legal team ever stood a chance, but you really have to have the worst lawyer on the planet to manage only a single half-win out of sixty-something lawsuits.
You really nailed it. That’s exactly how he played it. The endgame is now in sight.
Nope. Millions of votes would need to be fraudulent to overturn the election, and Republicans, despite many public pleas for evidence, are failing to find even one clear case. They are getting thrown out of court like jazzy Jeff.
In a rational democracy (and fortunately, virtually all world democracies are still rational by this metric), that would be the end of the matter.
And yet, as I heard a family member say just today, there were millions of fradulent votes, the ones by mail. Millions! She didn’t say it, but of course all of them were for Biden. Saw a poll today, 77% of Trump voters believe the election was stolen. 68% of Republicans. Well, fuck them. Let them believe what they want, they more they go into Qanon terrority, the less chance they have of winning in 2024.
Not definitive enough, unfortunately. The long close counts in places like AZ, PA and GA sowed doubts in the minds of susceptible morons. Hence this ongoing debacle. Definitive would have been something like Trump clearly losing Florida and North Carolina and running behind that first night in PA and MI, making it almost impossible for him to claw his way back no matter how the count went. It’s a sad state of affairs that that was the sort of overwhelming victory needed to crush the hopes of his loyal cultists, but there you go.
I think a 15+ million vote margin might have done it, rather than the ~7 million we ended up with.
I wouldn’t say the election was definitive. It wasn’t called until Saturday; other than the 2000 election has any modern election taken that long to call?
It was agonizingly slow. I went to bed despondent on election night, thinking that Trump had somehow won again. While I take a small amount of glee imagining Trump fuming as Biden slowly overtook him–turning him (Trump) into a loser–I think it led him to fight just as hard as if it was razor thin.
If your standard for a definitive election result is that the results are known by midnight on Election Day, there were no definitive elections until the mid-20th century.
Sure it took a long time to count the votes. The results were more than definitive. Can anyone think of an election that featured more recounts than this one? Each recount verified the original result. That’s definiive and then some.
Biden won (by more than Trump brat Hillary, both in the Popular vote and Electoral College. What a loser!) on election night. It was a decisive victory then and there. It just takes time to count votes.
The long counts, particularly in PA (as well as MI and WI) were deliberately mandated by the Republican legislatures in those states to cause the current debacle. They all had the chance to allow processing of mail in ballots to be started before election day. They all refused. Had just PA started counting just a few days ahead of time, PA would have been called for Biden on election night. MI could have been too. Game over.
Again, this was a deliberate strategy on the part of the Republicans to sow chaos.
Thank you for posting this. Exactly! In Wisconsin, as well, where we (I was a poll worker in that state) managed to finish the job quite quickly anyway…but your point still stands, and it’s important.
There was no reason other than the one you cited, to legislate that main-in ballots couldn’t be counted until Election Day.
That’s the Trumpublican MO. Create a problem for no good, rational reason; blame others for the problems this problem engenders; reap the benefits from the problems, including (in some instances) by appearing to “fix” the problem. They do it over and over and over again.
Trump won in a landslide (in his own words) so Biden won in a super landslide or something.
Trump’s paradox: winning 304 to 227 is a “landslide” victory. If you remove one electoral vote, so that he won 303 to 228, is that a landslide? One electoral vote does not a landslide make, so we must agree, yes. But then what if we remove another electoral vote?
Eventually Trump ties 269 to 269, but since 270 to 268 was still a landslide, how can you say a tie is not a landslide victory for Trump?
I don’t see how tanTrump could possibly follow you in an argument involving over 30 steps, even if all the steps are identical. Non sequitur, literally.
Fine, just take 2 steps in the other direction.
304 votes is a landslide victory for Trump. 1 or 2 votes cannot possibly make a difference. Modify the results so that the victor got 306 votes. Ipso facto, Trump won by a landslide!
Eta: I know it isn’t a great argument, but it’s better than the one Ted Cruz is making!
Indeed, the “count later” rule was done so as to establish a narrative, so as to create an environment in which they could get advance warning of things not going their way so they could try to “do something about it”, and so as to facilitate a “throw them away” demand.
Of course some of them did not count on that Republican election officials would say “hey, those were the rules we adopted, we still lost by those rules. It happens.”
Part of the trick is to make it so that things that are NORMAL small bumps in the road in election counts and canvasses could be pointed out as somehow abnormal things that throw everything into question. Blocks of results being added as they are subtotalled rather than one by one, mistake corrections made on the fly because of an unbalanced tally sheet so we need to look for where someone failed to carry the one, disputed or invalidated individual ballots, that happens in every damn election at this scale. Just that under normal circumstances they happen and are mostly caught at the immediate precinct level and you have enough totals early enough that you know where the trend’s leading and what nitpicking may arise does not get any publicity. At most you had a Gore situation where someone concedes and then later in the early morning it turns out in one decisive state it’s not what it appeared so whoa, wait, I take that back.
Now, because of the stumbling blocks with the mail-in vote, you had that process stretched over several days in multiple states, providing the opportunity to point at things and say “see? This is WRONG: THIS is why we have to ensure Trumpublican majorities in all state legislatures and Congress in '22, to make sure only the right votes will be counted in '24!”
You can’t design the election to take a long time to count the votes by not allowing the votes to be counted as they come in and then use that as evidence that the election, which was not by any measure close, was a close one because it took a long time to count.
And let us please not forget the mind-boggling efforts to slow the US Mail so that ballots would not be timely received or timely counted. No one is even considering the impact this had on the election anymore, but it was huge. It is completely unacceptable. For anyone else, this is a federal crime. I hope Louis DeJoy is one of the first to go, even though I know Biden can’t fire him directly.