Yeah, fuck. That’s a terrifying read. It sorta helps focus all jambalaya of thoughts I’ve had over the past few weeks about what might happen.
Everyone’s looking forward to this election being over? This coming Wednesday will be a turning point for our nation. He’s gonna lose, could very well have the election called by Wednesday morning, and that’s when the truly fucked-up, unbelievable, unprecedented, third-world shit starts out of his mouth/fingers and from his followers.
72 hours, people. We’re probably gonna start seeing shit we never thought we’d see in this country. (And I say this after four years of seeing some pretty fucked up shit.) I’m getting my sphincter sufficiently-puckered, cuz November 3’s gonna be interesting, but I suspect November 4’s gonna be downright terrifying. I pray I’m wrong.
Yep, these idiots tried to run a Biden/Harris campaign bus off the road. As far as I have heard there have been no repercussions or arrests. This is crazy.
They’re not “idiots.” They’re fascist anti-democratic insurgents. We need to stop coddling the nationalist fascists and start treating them like what they are, an existential threat.
My final prediction, understanding that people such as those in the NY Times article and here on the Dope are justifiably worried: Biden is going to win the election by a margin plenty wide enough that Trump and Co. will have no choice but to accept it. As for what people in the general populace will do, I really have no idea. But it could certainly get interesting.
ETA: NY Times article linked to above by GreenWyvern.
I think it’s fine to be prepared for worst cases but I am really skeptical that any of the “election stealing” scenarios will come to pass. Trump can do very little on his own and the idea that Republican state legislatures and the supreme court will conspire to hand Trump a win after he loses is far fetched. The US election system may be messy but it’s also decentralized and a lot of the election will be managed by Democratic secretaries of state and governors.
It’s quite likely that Biden will win Florida and finish the race on Tuesday. If not, Trump will no doubt rage about mail-in ballots but he won’t be able to stop the counting and in all likelihood Biden will win after a few days.
I hope it doesn’t happen. But it’s not far-fetched at all. Every Republican-controlled apparatus in this country has been working overtime to subvert democracy since 2016 at least. Why do you think it’s far-fetched for them to try to do exactly what they are suggesting they’re going to do?
Increasingly, this is the scenario that concerns me.
BlockquoteThey are worried that the president could use the power of the government — the one they all serve or served within — to keep himself in office or to create favorable terms for negotiating his exit from the White House. Like many other experts inside and outside the government, they are also concerned about foreign adversaries using the internet to sow chaos, exacerbate divisions and undermine our democratic process.
Biden is projected to be the winner by most, if not all major networks, by the afternoon or evening of November 4th. But well before then, the Trump team is challenging the results in specific states, already filing a slew of lawsuits, which by itself is enough to cause at least some uncertainty about the outcome and the legitimacy of the result.
What usually happens is the loser, though disappointed and perhaps reluctant to admit that 4 years and hundreds of millions, or billions, of dollars later, concedes that the journey is over. In this case, that is probably not going to happen. There will be ugly, razor sharp pronouncements about how their presidency is being stolen from them, which will of course draw swift and overwhelming rebuke from all of the Democratic party, and rightfully so. Unfortunately, however, what we might have is a constitutional crisis, and an outright political crisis, in the making. Trump would first try to find the second most legitimate way to win an election after winning an election: use the law and the courts. Why not? It’s been politically tilted the last few years.
But if he’s not satisfied with that, he might just start encouraging right wing terrorism with law enforcement standing by, winking and nodding at vigilantes as they do their thing. All of this would almost certainly be amplified by Russian information war specialists.
For now, we have to settle for not knowing the unknowns, but I agree with HappyL. We’re a few days away from finding out how strong our system is.
From that article on the Texas lawsuit:
“Two lawsuits by the group of plaintiffs have been filed in recent days after a similar challenge was already rejected by the all-Republican Texas Supreme Court.”
“The state’s Republican leadership, meanwhile, has stayed silent on the issue.”
If this is part of a gigantic plan to steal the Texas election, it’s not looking particularly well-organized. And if Trump is planning to steal the election I am guessing it will be equally ineffectual; he will rage on Twitter and scream at his staff and nothing much will happen. The votes will get counted and if Biden has in fact won he will become President.
I don’t think anyone reading your post would get the impression that there was this, well… well-organized effort underway, and certainly not that it had achieved such success already. While it certainly isn’t true that (and would be cartoonishly stupid if) there was some “gigantic plan” underway that depended on this specific lawsuit achieving one specific result, there are plenty more ways to cheat people out of their votes than this one. And they’ve already done a lot of them, in Texas and elsewhere, via litigation and otherwise. This is something that I believe is well understood, and frequently remarked upon with grave sobriety, until the context is a claim that it might actually amount to something concrete.
I don’t understand the cognitive dissonance that can make it so that nearly every Democrat or Democrat-inclined-voter I’ve ever heard talk about it has called Trump a fascist, an existential threat, a traitor to the country, needed to be impeached or the republic was lost, and so on, and yet so many are still capable of dismissing out of hand the idea that he might actually do what somebody like that does.
What I am seeing is the usual voter suppression tactics that the GOP has been using for many years. Sometimes they work but often they backfire in terms of making voters even more determined to vote. I think they are especially likely to backfire when, as now, the main candidate openly talks about how he is not going to respect the election result. In the closing weeks of 2016 Trump managed to hone in on a populist message about how he would drain the swamp and fix the economy. He closed the gap with Hillary and pipped her at the post. This time his final message has been attacking Hunter Biden and whining about how the election is rigged against him. It’s not an appealing message and his polling deficit against Biden hasn’t budged.