It's been noted that as the presidential campaigning shifts away from the primaries - it's all over but the tears - that Joe Biden's ground game is extensive and well-funded while donald trump's is... well... (via Peter Nicholas, Allan Smith, Vaughn Hillyard, Adam Edelman and Ben Kamisar at NBC News):
President Joe Biden has been scooping up record-making donations and plowing the money into an expanding campaign operation in battleground states that appears to surpass what Donald Trump has built thus far.
Flush with $71 million cash at the end of February — more than twice that of Trump's campaign — Biden parlayed his fundraising advantage into a hiring spree that now boasts 300 paid staffers across nine states and 100 offices in parts of the country that will decide the 2024 election, according to details provided by the campaign.
Trump’s advisers would not disclose staffing levels, but his ground game still seems to be at a nascent stage. His campaign hired state directors in Pennsylvania and Michigan last week, people familiar with the recruitment process said.
Combined, the Trump campaign and Republican National Committee have fewer than five staff members in each of the battleground states, said two Republicans familiar with the committee and the Trump campaign’s organizational structures in 2020 and 2024.
It's looking like trump isn't even trying to get the vote out - even for his Republican base.
That's the danger: trump sort of doesn't want voter turnout at all.
If the past two presidential elections taught trump anything, it's that he's not going to win the Popular Vote. Oh, he gaslights that he "won the most votes ever," but he lost the majority of voters to Hillary and he lost also to Joe. The only thing he won was the Electoral count in 2016.
trump can lie all he wants about the Popular vote, but he knows nothing's really changed to his favor this 2024. With his pending criminal trials - especially the one starting this Monday - he risks losing even more voters across the nation before November.
So he's going to take the other route: The cheaters' route. trump's going to sow chaos to prevent the electoral system from working at all.
trump's going to scream - falsely - about "stolen votes" and illegal voters. (via Nicholas Riccardi at AP News):
Former President Donald Trump turned to one of his favorite themes on Friday — the specter of immigrants improperly voting in federal elections. House Speaker Mike Johnson came to the former president’s Florida compound to announce that he would introduce a bill to stop those who are not citizens from voting in elections.
Trump has made baseless claims about this subject before, like in 2016, when he blamed his loss of the popular vote on voting by immigrants, and then appointed a commission to investigate the issue. It disbanded without identifying a single case of a noncitizen casting a vote...
This has actually been a gambit of the Far Right for decades now. Don't forget Kris Kobach has been working as an election denialist out of Kansas for years, always getting into court battles trying to prove there's mass voter fraud... and always failing because there's no proof of it.
What's happening here is the Conservative mindset - the fear - that there are "undesirables" or "non-citizens" threatening to undermine the power and privileges of the "elite" (themselves), getting projected into a Narrative of mass voter fraud that isn't taking place.
And yet, trump is running with this because it justifies his delusions that he's "really popular" and always winning. And the Republicans are happy to play to those delusions because it fits into their belief that "non-Americans" - the ethnic minorities, the women, the young - shouldn't have the right to vote in the first place.
Instead of working a ground game of voter registrations and "get out the vote" drives, trump and his ilk are going to figure out way to sabotage the vote, disrupt precincts and harass poll workers, throw off early voting and mail-in ballot efforts. With trump's takeover of the national-level RNC, the GOP is already spreading the lie that there was massive fraud in 2020 to lay the foundation to trump's claims of unproven voter fraud for 2024.
trump doesn't want to win the Popular Vote. he doesn't even want to win the Electoral College. trump is planning on breaking the entire voting process so that the results all come down to who controls the US House in January 2025, so he can get his MAGA allies in the House to reject any Biden win and just hand the Presidency to trump even if trump got his ass stomped in November 2024.
It depends on two things: How the Electoral College works out and how many state the Republicans control in the House when January 2025 rolls around. If the Electoral College clearly goes to Biden - and trump can't bully or trick enough Blue states to disrupt their Electoral numbers - then it comes down to if the Republicans control either the House or Senate to forcibly reject those results (like trump wanted on January 6th when he sent in the rioters) and send the whole thing to the House where it'll be rigged for the cheater to cheat.
This will all come down to voter turnout for Congress and the state legislatures as much as turnout for the Presidential election.
Elections matter, everybody. And it matters that the Republicans be in NO position to disrupt the results if they don't go their way.
Get the damn vote out, Democrats and Indy voters and whatever Moderate Republicans are left out there. Deny trump any chance to deny OUR votes.
1 comment:
I agree. It's very important that we retake control of the house this time. I'm not as optimistic about the senate, but the Republicans keep stepping in it over and over and who knows? We could get a trifecta if we're lucky and we work hard.
Fergus isn't in office this time, so he shouldn't have as much sway as he did last time, but we have to put that aside and win the damn election first.
-Doug in Sugar Pine
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