What If: the 2024 President Election Is an Honest-to-God Harris Landslide

Update: All of this was wrong. All of this was a lie. All of America is fucked up, don't tell me otherwise.

I'm still thinking about that USA Today report about early voting where Kamala Harris has a 63 percent lead in the ballots over trump's anemic 34 percent (with the difference going to third parties, natch).

Given how most of the modern - at least 21st Century - Presidential elections were not so heavily favored either way - balancing between 52-47 percent or closer - seeing THAT huge of a lead is stunning (and stirring up way too much hope for my own good, I admit it).

Logic dictates that the early voting is not a full representation of the likely voter turnout for this cycle. We're barely at a quarter of expected turnout - although with a week to go the numbers will go up - and more than half of the voters tend to wait until Election Day (some because they're still undecided, many because it's kinda traditional) anyway. We should expect a downward shift on that percentage lead to where the voting share fits the trends of a closer (say 55-45) election result.

We could be looking at the likelihood that a large number of Democratic - or Dem-leaning Independents - are voting earlier than the more traditional Republican voters who wait... except those early voting numbers show a near-level balance of Dem and GOP voters. So that narrative's a bit off.

The implications I'm seeing are 1) this is how the voting trends are going, and 2) there's a shocking number of Republican voters adding to that 63 percent Harris lead that can't be ignored.

So (dammit, my giddiness is getting the better of me), we are within the realm of positing a "What If": What if Harris really is getting close to 63 percent of the national vote this November?

One thing we shouldn't do is speculate on the final turnout numbers. Although there's signs of increased voter registration, there's still no guarantee of increased voter turnout (although the turnout numbers did go up in 2020 due to excessive use of mail-in ballots that made it easier to do so).

So let's go by the 2020 total turnout count, which was 158,429,631 Americans.

If that percentage trend (63) persists for Harris, she's looking at roughly 99,810,667 votes.

(jaw drops)

Considering Biden got roughly 51 percent and a total of 81,283,501 votes, I'd say that's a huge boost to the collective Democratic ego.

By comparison, trump's possible 34 percent will garner around 53,866,704 votes. It will be a decided drop off from the 74,223,975 he got in 2020 and also below his 2016 numbers of 62,984,828. It would be a massive rejection by voters tired of trump's antics the third time around.

Not only would the percentage difference be huge (Harris will win by 29 percent) but the vote total will be embarrassing (Harris will win by 45,943,963 votes). trump and the Republicans will try to scream "stolen votes," but on a scale that large there's no way even Far Right judges will buy that (or risk challenging it). 

(Also: Try imagining trump calling the Georgia Secretary of State and begging him to "find me 45 million votes.")

It would be a legitimate blowout for a Presidential election, something we haven't seen in decades. Looking back, the next closest election with that huge a percentage win gap was in 1984 when Reagan demolished Mondale 58 to 40 percent. Reagan won the Electoral votes of 49(!) states with roughly 54 million over 37 million. There's a reason why Democrats have campaigned with little joy until now, and that smackdown inflicted a ton of PTSD for years afterward.

You could consider Nixon's victory in 1972 over McGovern one of the biggest results in all of U.S. history - where he won 60 percent over McGovern's 37 for a massive popular vote win 47 million over 29 million - but then you have to remember Nixon and his CREEPs orchestrated a dirty tricks campaign to guarantee running against a massively unpopular McGovern.

The most recent Democratic win on this scale would be in 1964, with LBJ riding on Kennedy's legacy and against an (then) extreme conservative opponent in Goldwater where Johnson got 61 percent over Goldwater's 38 percent and a 43 million over 27 million popular vote turnout. 

I could go back to 1936 when FDR blew Alf Landon out of the water with a 60 percent vs. 36 percent result, but you get my drift. Harris getting 63 percent would top every other electoral trouncing to achieve a Blowout For the Ages. Even if that percentage slides down, if she's anywhere near Reagan's 58 percent turnout we're still talking a huge win trump and the GOP can't lie about.

One other thing that accompanied those big blowouts in 1984, 1972, 1964, and 1936 (and even the milder landslides we'd see from Eisenhower's 1952-1956 wins for example) were the Electoral College results (maps are from the 270towin website):

It would be pretty to see a Harris/Walz Electoral Map where most of the United States will color in as Blue...

I would argue that back in those days the geographic divisions between Democratic and Republican - or Liberal and Conservative - voters were not as severe as we have today. Back then, the states were pretty well mixed between the major parties, and moderates between them would slide one election to the next between candidates without fear of being disloyal. 

You could get an Electoral College map that would overexaggerate the popular vote wins because the winning candidate got past the bare minimum to win there (Mondale almost lost his home state in 1984 by 2000 votes! And we know how Hillary lost Wisconsin and Michigan by similar margins to our detriment...). In today's partisan environment - and where liberals and conservatives relocated to states more attuned to their worldviews - it's not as likely for Harris to flip so many states Democratic the way LBJ and FDR did in their day. 

Having said that, if Harris is garnering - and keeping - 63 percent of voters by Election Day, that HAS to mean a large number of once-solid Republicans are abandoning their partisan stance (at least for this cycle), and across a number of otherwise solid Republican-held Red states to where a massive Electoral College win is in the pipeline. Not just Harris keeping the states Biden won in 2020, and not just flipping key battleground states like North Carolina and maybe Florida, and not just the almost-real possibility of finally flipping Texas: I'm talking nearly every Red state could be in play with those numbers (save for of course deep Red states like West Virginia, South Carolina, Utah, Wyoming, and Idaho). Dear 9 readers of this blog: Even ALASKA is in play.

...

Okay, with all THAT said, this "What If" fantasy is pretty to think so, but in the real world my track record for predicting things hasn't been all that great to begin with.

Like I said near the beginning of this wishful thinking, that early 63 percent lead can easily slide down as more voters show up and if more of them are leaning Republican and trump. The trend may look nice but actual voter turnout is what counts, and the early pro-Harris counts from Republican voters could just be that voting bloc getting their ballots done before they change their minds.

But... given that a sizable GOP voter bloc IS voting Harris and getting away from the once-rigid partisan voting habits, we ought to consider the reality that Harris is getting way above the now-standard 50-to-52 percent of winning we've seen in recent cycles. Even if Harris matches the more modest result of Obama's big win in 2008 of 53 percent, we're talking 83 million votes (a nice boost over 2020) and numbers that trump can't challenge.

Voter turnout remains key, fellow Americans.

We need 99 million or so of y'all to show up and vote Harris/Walz for the blowout we need to keep America free from trumpian misrule.

This is what 99 million Harris votes could look like

Let's do this.

What If: A Different Dynamic for a Democratic 2024

Let me state officially for the record that I am terrible at this prognostication shit.

Not just the fact that I never do well at the Powerball lotteries (cries), but that I'm terrible at plotting out how these 4-year presidential cycles go. When the horserace starts up and the primary candidates line up to get humiliated, I tend to be off by a candidate or three when the official lineups survive to their convention celebrations.

I mean, last year I jumped ahead of everything to try and guess the 2024 election results thinking that it was going to be a repeat matchup between Biden and trump. Granted, certain facts were unavoidable: Biden was the sitting incumbent and they always run for a second term; trump had bullied and cowed the Republican party into taking him back a third time as a candidate retained his maniacal MAGA voting base in spite of a few hopeful candidates like DeSantis and Haley challenging to be a fresh candidate for 2024. A second round of Biden v. trump was kind of a given.

What I hadn't counted on was a mainstream media desperate to hijack the electoral process to force their own choice on a national electorate, hammering on Biden for being too old over and over even as he beat down his younger primary challenger Dean Phillips by 90 percent of the party vote, as well as hammering on trump for also being too old as well as facing criminal indictments and 34 felony convictions no wait, the media still hasn't hammered him on that. Gee, wonder why... /sarcasm

We saw what happened after the early debate between Biden and trump got the media riled up for Biden's scalp: Biden read the room, realized he wasn't going to win back the Beltway mob that was a little too eager to throw the election to trump, and made the move to pass along his primary gains to his running mate Kamala Harris, ensuring a smooth transition for the Democratic campaign while giving the would-be kingmakers in the press both middle fingers.

So now, instead of facing the likelihood of a repeat performance of 2020 results - although possibly switching out Georgia for North Carolina, as things looked in the polls - we're facing a different dynamic for 2024, with massive enthusiasm boosting Democratic chances across the electoral board while the Republicans find themselves doubling-down on an older, out-of-touch, and hate-filled ticket.

I had posted the 2020 Electoral Map as a foundation for what the 2024 map would be when it was Biden:

from 270towin.com 

But now with Harris, what should we expect?

Well, electorally, probably more of the same. The partisan nature of the modern electorate has calcified most of the states into their Red/Blue status for the most part. Only a handful of states - Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina - would be considered battlegrounds, where the shifting independent votes and overall voter turnout matter a whole lot more than in say California or New York or Tennessee or (alas) Florida (Texas keeps threatening to flip, so voter suppression keeps that GOP Red).

But the way Harris is redefining the campaign - and spurring more voter interest at levels not seen since 2008 - is making it more likely the battleground states that went for Biden in 2020 are near-locks this election. Yes, I know the polls can't be trusted. And yet. Depending on what bounce Kamala gets post-convention this week, even on-the-fence states like Georgia and North Carolina could well turn into solid gains. Not merely winning by hundreds of votes but tens of thousands, well out of reach for trump and the GOP to whine that the election was "stollen".

Also 270towin.com 
I'm projecting Kansas and Nebraska to flip Blue
because Walz's appeal to the Midwest is THAT good!

So don't be surprised that trump whines "stollen election!" just like he did in 2020. This is the easiest part of any guessing game with how the 2024 November results play out: trump will scream that he "won" and never concede even the states he honest-to-God never had a chance to win anyway.

Remember this fact: trump can never admit he ever loses.

So what will trump do when confronted with the likelihood he is not only going to lose the popular vote for the third time in a row, but also the likelihood he is going to lose the Electoral College for a second time?

All the signs point to trump scheming with his cronies and state-level allies to stir utter chaos and not allow elections to get certified in the first place.

In 2020, trump and his cronies tried to cook up plans to have "fake electors" put in place to override the legitimate electors giving Biden the Electoral votes - from Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Arizona - in order to flip the 270 needed from Biden to trump. Those "fake elector" schemes didn't exactly work, and there's criminal trials and plea deals happening in Georgia, Michigan, and Arizona as we speak (with trump delaying the Georgia one to save his ass before this year's election). Obviously, setting up fake electors didn't help him.

So now trump is taking aim at making sure the votes from certain counties and states don't even count at all. Via Sam Levin at the Guardian (US):

Nearly three dozen officials who have refused to certify elections since 2020 remain in office and will play a role in certifying the presidential vote in nearly every battleground state this fall, according to a new report by the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (Crew), a watchdog group.

The report underscores the concerns that Donald Trump and allies will attack the certification process at the local level as part of any possible effort to contest a loss in the election. In a presidential election, there are tight deadlines at the local, state and federal levels to certify the vote. Delaying the vote at the local level could cause states to miss deadlines and open up protracted court battles and give oxygen to conspiracy theories...

Certification is generally considered a ministerial duty and the officials charged with doing it can’t unilaterally decide not to officialize election results, legal experts say. Ballot disputes and discrepancies are typically adjudicated before an election moves to the certification stage.

“Each of these states have procedures for examining potential voter fraud and voter irregularities and none of those procedures concern the certification process at the country level. In other words, there are things you can do. County elections officials denying certification is none of those things. That’s not allowed under the law,” said Noah Bookbinder, the president and CEO of Crew.

No effort to block certification thus far has been successful. Each time that local officials have tried, they have been either forced to certify by a court, outvoted by their fellow commissioners or reversed course...

Just because it hasn't happened before doesn't mean it won't happen now. trump has broken a centuries-long Good Faith effort by our governments to abide by the ceremonial acts of bipartisanship, especially when it comes to elections. Granted, we've had broken and corrupt elections at local, state, and arguably federal levels over the years, but for the most part they were aberrations or part of local corrupt political machines that our Civil Rights era of the 1960s and 1970s cleaned up.

The last time I can think of an honest-to-God broken electoral process - to be fair, elections like 1960 and 2000 were procedural question marks (it's just that the Supreme Court over-reached in deciding the 2000 results) - at the Presidential election level was 1876 when the Republicans raised a stink about the electoral results from several states, which forced a congressional committee to "recommend" the results in such a way the Republicans with Hayes won (literally by one committee vote).

It's painful - not ironic - that trump is aiming to stir enough chaos this election cycle to force a repeat of 1876: Get enough (Republican) elections officials to refuse to certify results, which will deny Electoral counts for Harris (and himself) to where no one gets over the 270 hurdle to win the College, and then force the matter into a possibly-Republican-controlled House of Representatives to anoint trump "the winner" even if trump officially loses the popular vote by more than the 7 million in 2020.

If there's any good news, it's that 1) the states where trump's cronies can pull these stunts were likely going Republican in the first place, 2) the battleground states where trump could try this and fail - like Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Arizona - have enough pro-election players in office to prevent this from happening, and 3) there's a chance the voter turnout in enough states will be so overwhelming for Harris/Walz that the local elections officials will have no legal excuse to avoid certifying and not even risk it for trump's sake.

Because much like the fake electors scheme trump and his cronies cooked up, the plans to force non-certification are likely violating a lot of state and federal laws as well (via Marina Villeneuve at Salon): 

“I think there's every indication that Trump and perhaps other candidates will try to disrupt or overturn results if they lose,” said Ben Berwick, a former DOJ trial attorney who is now counsel leading advocacy group Protect Democracy’s election law and litigation team.

Berwick said four years after Trump and his allies failed to overturn the results of the 2020 election based on unsubstantiated allegations, the rule of law still weighs against such legal arguments. Protect Democracy released a March report that stressed that courts and lawmakers have created a certification process that will hold up to manipulation.

“Bottom line is, there is really nothing that local election officials and state election officials can do legitimately or legally to overturn election results,” he said. “That doesn't mean it won't be tried...”

Isn't it just like a convicted felon (trump) to think that illegal acts are perfectly normal things to do? But I digress.

Harvard Law School professor Lawrence Lessig, a 2016 Democratic presidential candidate and the co-author of the book “How to Steal a Presidential Election,” said he's more troubled by potential scenarios where Trump and allies could exploit gaps in existing election law, put pressure on state legislatures or governors and get their case to the Supreme Court.

All those scenarios, Lessig said, require more than actions by local election officials alone.

“I think all of these strategies require something more than just as county officials or election boards screwing around with the results,” he said. “We don't know what's actually being planned, beyond what we've seen on the surface so far.”

What may end up happening will be the same thing that happened in 2020: trump will scream that "illegal immigrants voted" or that Democratic officials "switched out ballot boxes" or some other "stealing my win" excuse. Anything to claim that "the wrong people voted that shouldn't have." And yet for all that screaming, when trump and his lawyers are called to prevent their evidence of "voter fraud" they still won't be able to present evidence that massive voter fraud on the scale they're claiming even happened. They will find scattered individual cases of potential fraud usually committed because that voter was confused, not criminally involved in a conspiracy.

It will then be up to the courts - at the state and then federal levels - to accept trump's conspiracy claims without any actual basis in fact. Many courts won't, because they have to rely on evidence on which to base their decisions. This is something that can well vex the US Supreme Court itself, which we've seen bend over backwards several times to give trump all the wiggle room he needs to escape accountability.

Can a Roberts Court truly throw out all lack of evidence and simply go by trump's claims lies that the 2024 election results were wrong if Harris actually wins? If they do that - if at least five Justices side with trump in spite of the popular and Electoral votes, if they decide on a matter more far-reaching than anything settled in Bush v. Gore - we will have a judiciary essentially invalidating the very concept of free and fair elections for all time.

Gods help us if that happens.

The best way to make sure it doesn't? Massive voter turnout on a scale so convincing for Harris/Walz and the Democrats that any claim of fraud by trump is laughable, to where Roberts and the other Far Right justices won't even risk the end of the U.S. Constitution to save trump.

Elections still matter. Voter turnout still matters, especially in this election cycle, when trump is poised to lie and bluff and bully his way out of certain electoral doom.

For the LOVE OF GOD AND COUNTRY AND THE CONSTITUTION, America, get the vote out this election cycle and vote for Kamala and Tim and for every Democrat up and down the ballot. Get the vote count for Democrats over 81 million again, while trump and JD show every sign of sliding well below the 74 million trump got in 2020.

P.S. one of the other funny thoughts I've had if trump tries to pull off his "don't certify" stunt with local elections officials: Many other elected officials like state legislators and U.S. congresscritters are going to rely on those same election results. It's been proven that not everyone votes a party line: Some candidates will get more votes than others from the same party due to various Indy/moderate voters refusing to vote a straight ticket down the ballot. What happens in a county where trump doesn't win it and screams at the elections official to not certify, but a lower-ticket guy like a state Senator did win and needs that election certified to keep his seat? They can't cherry-pick the ballots: Either the voter was legal to submit a ballot or not at all. 

This could lead to a rather interesting dynamic where the state-level Republicans can't side with trump in order to keep enough seats to control the state legislatures to try and steal the election for trump anyway. This particular paradox can prove most interesting...

trump's Objective: The Denial

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.

Georgia Indicts trump and his Big Lie

At last.

Stephen Fowler over at NPR has the basics: 

A grand jury in Georgia has indicted Donald Trump for his role in failed efforts to overturn the state's 2020 election results, implicating the former president as the head of a sweeping conspiracy to subvert his defeat.

It's the fourth indictment in as many months for Trump, the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination. And it's part of a massive case brought by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis under Georgia's racketeering law, ensnaring a number of defendants that the DA alleges acted as part of a coordinated effort to pressure officials to change the election outcome.

In an indictment handed up Monday, an Atlanta-based grand jury outlined a series of charges against Trump, including violation of the Georgia RICO law and solicitation of a violation of an oath by a public officer.

RICO by the by is a racketeering charge, meaning trump and others engaged in a wide-ranging conspiracy to commit multiple crimes. Emptywheel - you know what I need to call her by name, so hello Marcy Wheeler! - has more details on the implications of trump getting hit by RICO:

To explain how, I want to first show that the indictment is, fundamentally, about protecting the integrity of Georgia’s government and elections. To see that, it helps to read counts 2 through 41 before reading the RICO charge, which is laid out in 70 pages describing 161 overt acts, many of which took place outside of Georgia...

LIES TO AND SOLICITATION OF GEORGIA OFFICIALS

Count 2 though Count 7: False claims and illegal requests made, many by Rudy Giuliani, before the fake electors scheme. These were lies told to official bodies of Georgia state government, and charging them is an attempt to prevent corruption in state government.

Count 23 through Count 26 charge Rudy, Ray Smith, and Robert Cheely with false claims and solicitations on December 30 — similar in structure and purpose to Counts 2 through 7.

Count 28 charges both Trump and Mark Meadows for the January 2 call to Brad Raffensperger. Count 29 charges Trump for the lies he told during the call.

Counts 38 and 39 charge Trump with lies and solicitations of Brad Raffensperger on September 17, 2021.

FAKE ELECTORS

Count 8 through Count 19: These are a series of six paired charges tied to various kinds of fraud involved with the fake electors. In each pair, the first count charges David Shafer, Shawn Still, and Cathleen Latham for doing the fraudulent thing, and the second count charges Trump, Rudy, John Eastman, Ken Chesebro, Ray Smith, Robert Cheely, and Mike Roman with soliciting the fraudulent thing. They’re a near parallel to the Michigan charges against the fake electors, except that in Georgia only the three most culpable fake electors are charged, and there’s a mirror charge for Trump’s side of the conspiracy.

ATTEMPTS TO ENTRAP RUBY FREEMAN

Counts 20 and 21 and : These charge two efforts to defraud Ruby Freeman by offering her help when in fact they were an attempt to entrap her.

Count 30 and Count 31 charge aspects of a plot to get Kanye’s publicist to travel from Illinois to Georgia to entrap Ruby Freeman into making false claims.

LIES ABOUT GEORGIA

Count 22 charges Jeffrey Clark for his attempts to get DOJ to claim the Georgia election was fraudulent.

Count 27 charges Trump and Eastman with lying about Georgia’s results in a lawsuit.

TAMPERING WITH COFFEE COUNTY TABULATORS

Count 32 through Count 37 charge Sidney Powell, Latham, and two others for tampering with the Coffee County vote tabulators. Again, this has a parallel in the Michigan charges against Matt DePerno and two others.

LIES DURING THE INVESTIGATION

Count 40 charges David Shafer with false statements told during the investigation.

Count 41 charges Robert Cheely with perjury for false claims made during the investigation.

As I understand it, these are the charges on which the RICO conspiracy is built. The RICO conspiracy gives prosecutors additional tools and penalties with which to prosecute this (similar to the conspiracy law charged at the federal level)...

That's a lot of criming (relax, Spellchecker, we can use slang while blogging), but what are the implications surrounding these particular indictments compared to the other three (and counting) trump and cohorts are facing? Why is this one a bigger deal than most?

One of the common elements in the Georgia indictment is the word "lies". Over and over, DA Willis spells out how trump and company lied and kept lying to other state officials in order to get them to violate the integrity of the 2020 election results. They have trump lying in a lawsuit, they have one underling Robert Cheely charged with straight-up perjury to the grand jury, they had people lying to county-level elections official Ruby Freeman to get her to "confess" to rigging ballots.

All of these lies, serving to the Big Lie that trump pushed and keeps pushing about the 2020 results. trump's Big Lie that the election "was stolen" and he "fairly" won.

I blogged about trump's Big Lie before, and why he can't stop:

Trump has made it clear he views the world in the simplest of terms: That people are divided into Winners and Suckers, and that HE (champion and most excellent of the former group) shall never be lumped in with the latter.

So just on this mindset alone, trump cannot admit – not to others, not to himself – that he lost... 

In one respect, trump lost in 2016: The Popular vote clearly went for Hillary. But due to the broken and anti-democratic nature of the Electoral College, trump squeaked into winning three battleground states with literally mere hundreds of votes that gave him their Electoral Votes instead. It should be noted that trump promptly crowed – against all evidence – that he had won a LANDSLIDE, not just the College but also the Popular vote, and claimed it was the greatest victory in history (ignoring the Electoral and Popular vote blowouts of 1984 and 1932 (we don't count Nixon's 1972 blowout because the cheating exposed by the Watergate scandal negates that)).

Trump can't crow like that this time. The illusion of the Electoral College can't grant him that excuse. So he has to settle on denial. Constant, whining denial that he's the victim of voter fraud and to get us to pity him back into office...

The horrifying thing was how easily trump got fellow Republicans to buy into his Big Lie all because the GOP fears the loss of political power:

The Republicans are stuck with the Big Lie because it happens to fit this One Truth:

The Republican Party cannot and will not share power with a Democratic Party they view as un-American and thus illegitimate.

Somewhere back in time - you can argue happening between the rise of the conservative Southern Strategy in the late 1960s or the rise of Saint Ronnie in the 1980s or the corruption of Newt's Contract On America in the 1990s - the Republican Party bought into the idea that only they were true God-fearing God-chosen Gun-worshiping patriots...

But the Republicans have a problem. Where their One Truth was merely a world-view that did not expose itself to self-destructive implosion (Republicans could keep believing it and still function rationally in polite society), the Big Lie is a direct attack on the Real World that sooner rather than later is going to hit the Brick Wall of Unbreakable Facts. The Big Lie compels trump's believers into direct action - SEE the January 6th Insurrection - and these actions have legal consequences where the Big Lie has not and cannot prevail.

The Republicans are betting on their Big Lie carrying them forward into the future. But it's a Big Lie stuck in the past of a failed 2020 election, pushed constantly by a Big Liar in trump who cannot avoid his impending fate either in civil or criminal courts.

With the Georgia indictments, we are at that moment of Truth for the Republican Party as a whole. DA Willis and her team are making a direct rebuke to trump's Big Lie, confronting it with facts and evidence that not only were the voted counted fairly but that trump and his people intentionally worked to subvert those fair counts.

I am paraphrasing Jean-Luc Picard here, in one of the greatest quotes about the quest for justice. Courtrooms are crucibles: In a courtroom we burn away irrelevancies (the lies and misunderstandings) until we are left with a pure product - the truth (based on fact), for all time. For all of trump's bullshitting at his rallies, for all of the deflection and deception by the Far Right media, for all the spineless quibbling of other Republican leaders who fail to hold trump to the factual truth, in a court of law those lies and deceptions cannot withstand scrutiny. trump will confront - at last - the lies he's been telling to everyone and even to himself, and that those lies have no power to keep him in power.

The reason why I remain so optimistic - giddy, even - about the criminal cases leveled against trump is that these courtrooms are going to be the few places where trump will be held accountable for the ongoing costs of destruction and ruin he has built up over the decades. trump's greed, trump's racism, trump's sexism, trump's rage, trump's delusions of grandeur... All of that finally getting added up and presented as a bill way past due that he has to pay.

Let trump face his lies and failures before the 2024 elections. Let the nation come to terms with the reality that trump should never hold any elected office again.

Let justice be done. Let truth prevail. At last.

So I Own a Copy of the Repo Man Soundtrack, I Play the Coup D'Etat Song A Lot

The government gets overthrown/
A sudden force, a major blow/
Over out, the new comes in

Coup d'état/
Give me a bomb/
A molotov/
It's a coup d'état!
- "Coup D'Etat," The Circle Jerks

Okay, technically what trump is trying to do with all of these lawsuits, all these attempts to nullify millions of votes in only the battleground states he lost, it's what's called an "autogolpe" for a self-coup when the current leader in power tries to overthrow the rest of government from within. But everyone understands what a coup d'etat is, so it's easier to call it a coup attempt.

Okay, not to scare anybody but Monday December 14 is when the Electoral College officially gathers to cast their votes to officially choose the next President of the United States starting January 2021. Once that happens, trump can whine all he wants about "fake voters" and "stolen election" but Biden becomes President. The only thing stopping that from happening is if enough of the 306 Electoral pledged to Biden turns Faithless, and votes for trump to get him past the 270 votes needed. There's still a chance - Gods help us - there's Electors who would turn against their own candidate of their own free will (so watch out for bribes, and YES "Saturday Night Live" did a skit of that back in 2016 about stopping trump), however most states have rules in effect to discourage that sort of flipping.

Okay, I did say "The only thing stopping that from happening," what I meant to say was "The only LEGAL thing stopping that from happening." We're talking about trump here, we're talking about a Republican Party abetting his attempts to break the democratic process of elections. We are facing the possibility that trump will try something ILLEGAL to avoid the official counting of his greatest loss.

Okay, there's good news that the Supreme Court tossed out Texas' blatantly unconstitutional attempt to nullify votes cast in other states, something the court decision noted "Texas had no legal standing" to do, with every Justice saying a big NO including the three Far Right Justices trump put on that bench (even with Alito and Thomas kind of saying they would have allowed the hearing because they ALWAYS want to hear a case conflict between states for the sake of posterity, but even then those two sided with the others noting Texas had no standing anyway). That pretty much means trump has no legal recourse left to nullify 81 million votes and steal a second term for himself.

Okay, I still point out "no legal recourse" for trump, because there's still an illegal recourse left to him.

Okay, I'm talking straight-up coup d'etat.

Calling up the National Guard to seize control of major cities, getting his Proud Boy Neo-Nazi Klansmen militias to set fire to the streets, anything like that.

Something he could do Monday morning is go to the cameras, announce that he has "absolute proof of massive voter fraud," and even without showing one whit of that proof proclaim a national emergency to prevent the College from gathering at all. He could then arrest the Electors, and/or the Democratic leadership from Biden and Harris on down to Pelosi and Schumer and some of the Governors he doesn't like (especially Whitmer in Michigan), trump might even try to arrest the Republican Governors like Georgia's Kemp who refused to break their own state laws to steal the election for trump.

Okay, if trump tries ANY of that, it's going to be probably the most chaotic Monday since (checks notes) December 17 1860 when South Carolina's secession conference voted unanimously to quit the Union.

Okay, tomorrow is going to be a pretty stressful day.

The Five Reasons trump Refuses To Concede (w/Update)

(Update: Thanks as always to Batocchio for adding me to Crooks&Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up! Stay safe out there, readers, wear the damn masks and watch out for coup attempts)

We're about two weeks into the reality that Pennsylvania called for Biden, clinching the Electoral count he needs. We're two days out from Georgia finishing their recount efforts – they have rules to recount if a result is too close, and it was looking that way for both the Presidential ticket and one of the Senate races – and confirming that Biden won that state (arguably the first real crack in the GOP Southern Strategy we've ever seen, more on that another time) pretty much putting Biden at 306 Electoral Votes to trump's 232 (in a great irony, this is the mirror result of 2016 where trump had 306 to Hillary's 232, except this time Biden also has the Popular Vote locked in).

And here's trump still, denying the results, screaming about fraud, and sending mixed messages and different lawyer teams into (and out of) various states trying something, ANYTHING, to get the courts to flip the majority will of Americans so HE can outright steal a second term and stay in power.

It's both horrifying – trump is no longer hiding his obsession to rule as a dictator – and hilarious – his efforts are so pathetic even wimp fights are more brutal.

So just to pass the time – until the moment when trump decides to go full coup d'etat and call out his Proud Boys supremacist militias to overthrow the state governments, or he succeeds in convincing three state legislatures (Michigan's, Pennsylvania's, and Georgia's) to ignore the votes and illegally seat their own pro-trump Electors – here's my five cents on why trump is behaving this way.

Reason One: trump's narcissism.

We've known going into this nightmare that trump is pure Id, even more than his Ego. Operating on impulse and on the bare minimum of self-awareness let alone awareness of others.

Trump has made it clear he views the world in the simplest of terms: That people are divided into Winners and Suckers, and that HE (champion and most excellent of the former group) shall never be lumped in with the latter.

So just on this mindset alone, trump cannot admit – not to others, not to himself – that he lost. Granted, he's lost before: His many bankruptcies should be viewed as admissions of failure, except that thanks to his lawyers and through the mercies of bankruptcy laws trump was able to wiggle his way out of responsibility and still claim himself a successful businessman who “gamed the system.” His failure with the USFL vs. NFL antitrust lawsuit should be a glaring example – if you ever read the jury findings, you'll see how the jurors recoiled from trump's bullshit and saw him as the instigator and not the victim – except that trump still blames everyone else for that folly. The Trump University scam that was haunting him during the 2016 campaign itself should be viewed as a loss, except again he worked out a plea deal that guaranteed the settlement would cast no blame nor lingered on the open fraud he and his cronies committed.

In one respect, trump lost in 2016: The Popular vote clearly went for Hillary. But due to the broken and anti-democratic nature of the Electoral College, trump squeaked into winning three battleground states with literally mere hundreds of votes that gave him their Electoral Votes instead. It should be noted that trump promptly crowed – against all evidence – that he had won a LANDSLIDE, not just the College but also the Popular vote, and claimed it was the greatest victory in history (ignoring the Electoral and Popular vote blowouts of 1984 and 1932 (we don't count Nixon's 1972 blowout because the cheating exposed by the Watergate scandal negates that)).

Trump can't crow like that this time. The illusion of the Electoral College can't grant him that excuse. So he has to settle on denial. Constant, whining denial that he's the victim of voter fraud and to get us to pity him back into office.

Reason Two: Republican Denial of Democratic Party legitimacy

In this, trump is not acting alone. One of the reasons why trump's attempts to subvert the election results is ongoing is because the rest of the Republican Party has no choice but to agree with him.

Just as trump has to deny Biden his victory, the Republicans have to deny the Democratic Party theirs. The whole point of GOP gerrymandering and voter suppression efforts is to reduce the majority advantages the Dems hold across most of the large-population (and most battleground) states. Remember, Republicans are currently in power as a minority (political, not ethnic) party.  If the Democrats hold at least two parts of the federal government – the Executive, and part of the Legislature with the U.S. House – that reduces the strength they have on the national stage, and makes them vulnerable – through investigation and oversight by a Dem-controlled Justice Department – at the state level as well.

The more trump screams that Biden cheated and stole the election from him, the easier it becomes part of the Far Right Narrative that the Republican party can shill on Fox Not-News and other wingnut outlets. The Narrative will repeat the story they sold to the world when Obama was in office: The Democratic leadership is illegitimate and must be obstructed for the greater good. Where the GOP sold that by accusing Obama of being a Fake American (dirty Mooslim Kenyan Usurper Socialist), they will repackage by accusing Biden of being a Fake President (demented anti-Catholic Usurper Socialist).

We're seeing the ramifications of that right now. A little-known agency in the Executive branch (GSA) that oversees the Transition period is refusing to recognize Biden, cutting off Biden's team from coordinating with the government to ensure a smooth entry in January. Considering this can hamper Biden's ability to manage an out-of-control pandemic as well as handle any foreign disruptions, this singular act of spite can get people killed...

Reason Three: Making Money.

One of the greatest sins of the Citizens United court ruling has been to let the political campaign system turn into a financial free-for-all with little oversight and too much cash getting wasted on Gods-know-what.

We've already seen glimpses of this with the growing scandal revolving around trump's banished campaign manager Brad Parscale. We're seeing more of it right now in the past two weeks where trump's campaign – and other Republican PACs – have been spamming email requests (more like demands) to their voting faithful to help pay for the legal fees of trump's ongoing lawsuits to nullify thousands of mail-in ballots he doesn't like.

Thing is, you need to read the fine print in these fundraising emails: A number of them state that depending on the amount donated the first amount – say, the first $5,000 of a donation – won't go to the legal effort. That money would go instead to pay off debts in trump's campaign instead (and maybe even to trump himself).

It's another grift. Trump is trying to squeeze out every last penny from his sucker fanbase. Always the dollars, always the fucking dollars.

Reason Four: There is nowhere else for trump to go after all this, except to jail.

I keep harping on this fact: trump's whole life has been a series of escalating con games, moving up from property ownership and renting, to land speculation, to casinos, to golf courses, to team sports ownership, to marketing books, to marketing junk, to marketing himself as a celebrity, to marketing himself as God-Emperor. Every step a con, scheming his way into a fantasy life of permanent wealth he can never attain because he's borrowing too much and spending too much. Every business move collapsing onto itself due to his own mismanagement and abuse, setting himself up just enough so he can jettison the failure and move on to the next big deal.

This is pretty much how he gambled his way through life, and how he scammed his way – through bullying the Republicans into accepting him as a candidate, through bullshitting his way through every primary, through overwhelming the national media to give him free airtime 24/7 to shill his campaign – into a White House he really didn't earn or deserve.

Once in the White House, trump behaved the only way he knew how: Grabbing everything he could in fits of greed, cutting corners by ignoring rules and practices set in stone to ensure legal norms were upheld, and letting his underlings waste time and resources to pander to his whims. Trump violated the Emoluments Clause from Day One, for God's sake. Aided and abetted by a Republican-controlled Congress until 2019, trump ran rampant allowing his agencies to fleece the taxpayers at will, promoting cronyist behavior at every turn. 

The Hatch Act – separating the needs of election campaigning from the powers of the Presidency – was broken so many times by his handlers and then by trump himself that the law itself currently isn't fit on paper for use as toilet paper.

And all of this – thanks to trump firing agency-level Inspector Generals and abusing the Justice Department as his own law firm defending every corrupt act in trump's administration – happened with little oversight and legal accountability, right up to his getting impeached for using foreign policy to compel another country to interfere with our own elections. With a Republican-controlled Senate covering his ass, trump never had to worry about the consequences of every sin he's ever committed.

Until now.

With all the things he's done – before and during his tenure – trump was protected by a questionably legal standing order that sitting Presidents are immune from criminal investigations and charges (civil matters is a different matter per Jones v Clinton). Once trump is officially done as President – the second Biden swears his Oath of Office on January 20 2021 – trump is criminally liable for every potential criminal act, especially the Emoluments violations as well as any national security violations he may have done. Granted, there are statutes of limitations, from what I've heard they last five years so any law he broke in 2017 has to be reviewed and charged by 2022.

The other thing the Presidential status protected trump from were the criminal and civil matters he broke before he ran for office, such as the sexual assaults that have been documented and especially the one (maybe more) awaiting his DNA sample in civil court. Trump had mastered – thanks to his army of lawyers, the only ones he ever really pays well – the tactics of delay delay delay to force his legal opponents into giving up and dealing out. However: he's used that trick too many times, he can't use being in office as an excuse after January, and he's now at the end of the number of other tricks he can keep pulling off before the judge(s) simply decide to hold him in contempt.

Piling on top of that are the reports that trump – for all his stealing and thievery in office – is broke, millions of dollars in debt, and some of the largest debts are due within the next four months. If he were still President past January 2021, he could delay those debts even further (or pay them off abusing his access to funds, further criminalizing his actions while in office). Alas, he won't be able to do that with Biden winning...

And the most obvious thing of all, the Sword of Damocles dangling over trump's head, are the criminal charges awaiting him with the State of New York. Following on the investigations into trump's bribing of mistresses and illegal use of funds from his now-defunct charity, these are legal matters that even as President trump cannot stop or delay. 

Oh, trump could force his owned Department of Justice to intervene, maybe even arrest state-level officials, maybe even steal off evidence and destroy it all in the Attorney General's office, but it would be such a violation of federalism (separation of Federal and State powers) that it would trigger straight-up Civil War. Trump could try pardoning himself, but Presidential pardons only cover federal crimes, not state. Hilariously enough, New York's District Attorneys could hit trump with criminal charges even if trump had won this election cycle, creating the unique sight of the Commander-in-Chief Loser of the Popular Vote wearing an orange jumpsuit while in handcuffs.

New York's legal system - spearheaded by DA Letitia James - has trump by the short hairs, and he knows it. The only real escape from that was staying in the White House under siege for four years until he got the gardeners to dig him an escape tunnel to Bermuda.

Anyone genuinely dreaming of trump running for the Presidency again in 2024 has to wake up to the reality that by 2024 trump can well be sitting in a safe-watch wing of an upstate New York prison waiting out a 5-year sentence after a jury finds him guilty of at least one count of fraud. Anyone – trump included – thinking he can start up his own media empire to rival Fox Not-News is ignoring this reality as well.

Let me repeat: This is it for him. Trump has nowhere else to go, other than prison on fraud charges, or exile to a country that doesn't extradite to the United States.

Reason Five: Straight-up Delusion

trump has yet to play out every trick he can pull to steal away Biden's Electoral win. Of great concern is the reported effort by the state legislatures in key battlegrounds – Pennsylvania, Michigan, and now Georgia – to ignore the majority votes in their own states, nullify those votes in fact, and directly select their state's own Electors.

This is where the vague wiggle room of laws hurt us. The Constitution itself doesn't spell out how the states select their Electors: it was assumed that every able-bodied citizen under the law (propertied white men first, then all white men, then all men regardless of race, then all women also regardless of race, then all Americans 18 and older) would vote and the states write in laws to accept that, and for the most part it's gone that way. Only rarely – I know of one instance, South Carolina in 1860 had their legislature pick the winner because they feared even a Pro-Union Pro-Slavery Southerner could win – had a state overridden the voting process. Only once since then – the 1876 election where two states could not agree on certifying which Electors to send – had this been an issue (and the solution for that was undemocratic as hell and the results allowed Jim Crow to flourish). 

The expectation is that the state legislators will respect the rights and the views of their state's majorities and choose Biden's roster of Electors to complete the process. The situation won't put trump's ass on the line, it'll be the legislators who would have to deal with angry voters – not just Democrats but even Republican voters who still (yes there are many) respect the right of voting – within minutes of breaking tradition (and even their own state's election laws).

And... it's looking like the states in question - even Arizona - are refusing trump's call to subvert the election results. So this is pretty much a moot point.

After this, trump's only remaining move to stay in power is an outright coup d'etat.

This isn't over yet.

Praying to a Just And Loving Unitarian Goddess for a Sane November 2020 General Election

I can mess around with 270towin maps all day long...

I can stare at the polling maps by the professionals showing good numbers for Joe Biden...

what FiveThirtyEight is projecting this Halloween night, 3 nights out

I can craft 100 different maps of what I hope to see Wednesday morning with a big contented smile on my face:

I'm hoping for a NC/GA/FL/TX flip to help break the Southern Strategy forever...

But I can't rely or wait on hope and neither should you. The Early Voting turnout so far gives me great hope that a large Blue Wave vote is coming... But there's an entire Republican Party from trump down to his hand-picked Far Right judges down to the county-level supervisors and questionable law enforcement looking to get in the way of a clean vote by the American people.

Get the vote out, Democrats. To every Independent Voter out there, this is the year - we need it, to escape the damage trump's mismanagement is inflicting on us right now - you NEED to vote Blue across the board. To every Republican Voter... for the love of God wake up and stop supporting those crooks. Please.

The Game of Demographics 2020 Season

What has trump and the Republicans so terrified about 2020 to where they are threatening to disqualify entire ballots across battleground states?

Because it still all comes down to the Electoral College, and too many large-sized battleground states are basically toss-ups in the polling. Especially the large-sized states that leaned Red for the last 20-40 years.

It's telling that for 2020, the biggest states that went for trump - Texas, Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, Arizona, North Carolina - are either reliably Blue for Biden now or technically within margin of error (say, 3 percent) of going either way. There are good chances that Arizona, Wisconsin, and Michigan are going for Biden. Pennsylvania could go Blue but there are signs it's one of the states trump is trying to trash hundreds of thousands of ballots. The polling on Ohio, North Carolina, and Florida keep fluctuating. 

Also, trump's attempts to flip Minnesota do not seem to be going anywhere at the moment (Biden has a +10 lead on trump as of 9/24).

If we just count the states with double-digit Electoral Votes, and only count the ones we pretty much know are going for Biden or for trump, the map looks like this:

It used to be that the Republicans - the party of conservatism - had claimed Texas as theirs since the 1980s, along with strong holds on North Carolina, Georgia, and Florida all as part of their grand Southern Strategy. That was also true of Ohio and Arizona, both as part of Ohio as a centerpiece of traditional Republican origins and Arizona as part of the western conservative movement that held sway in California.

But a lot had been changing, especially by 2008 when it became clear that a demographic shift was happening, coinciding with a collapse in Republican dominance due to mismanagement, corruption, and foolishness under the Dubya regime. Florida, due to its ethnic and economic diversity, was no longer reliably Republican at the national level (going for Clinton twice in the 90s and for Obama twice in the 2010s). Virginia's cultural conservatism lost its grip and the state is pretty much Democratic Blue since 2010, and that shift is starting to drift into North Carolina.

What's shocking is the shift in voter turnout in once-reliably Red states like Texas, Arizona, and Georgia. These were cornerstones of Republican dominance, and yet they're now close enough to flipping Blue that Democrats are noticeably campaigning in them where they once avoided wasting any previous efforts in them.

For all the gerrymandering, voter suppression, and gamesmanship, the Republicans are losing to a generational shift away from Boomers (aging Far Right who are dying out) and Gen Xers (half -divided between Reagan worshipping believers to jaded Dem centrists) to Millennials and Aughts (rising in age to vote, and vote more aggressively than Gen X) who are more Progressive, burned out by failed Republican agendas (more of them are poor and in debt in larger numbers than previous generations at their age, and a lot of that due to Republican policies), and ethnically-mixed.

Also in the mix is the unintended consequences of California's housing crisis of the last ten years: where California had become a jobs Mecca drawing many young adults (mostly liberal-leaning) to the state in the 1990s and 2000s, the insane cost-of-living and overvalued house properties - mostly due to the conservative Prop 13's tax-limiting requirements to keep values overinflated - have driven Cali residents elsewhere... to places like Arizona and Texas. And those ex-Californians did not shift their political views when they moved, meaning they are shifting those states further Left than ever before.

Losing Texas in the Electoral College at the least would be catastrophic for Republicans: Where Democrats can rely on California, New York and Illinois to provide a foundation for Electoral success, Texas was the big one for the GOP. Florida may be almost as big on the counts, but unreliable. Ohio had been that way for both Obama elections. The next largest populated state that Republicans could rely on when (not if) Texas goes Blue would be Tennessee at 11 Electoral Votes. Just look at the battleground map above: If Texas can't be counted on, Republicans are starting with a guaranteed 32 EV compared to Democrats' 174. And there aren't enough small state Electoral Votes to catch up.

Combined with the noted shift in suburban voting habits, states like Florida and Ohio and Texas and Georgia and North Carolina - where most of their largest metros are suburban landscapes - are now honestly up for grabs for the Democrats to win or lose, not the Republicans. Granted, the Republicans can try again to gerrymander those states even more to retain control of their state legislatures and congressional delegations, but they are running out of room and running out of time.

This was a demographic shift expected to kick in by 2040 at the latest, 2028 by the earliest (I had hoped in 2016 that it was sooner than that, ah well). trump's toxicity with suburban families (women in particular) is accelerating the shift.

This explains the openness of trump's war against the voting methods like mail-in balloting, and his blatant call to dismiss ballots and delegitimize the results in the battleground states. This is desperation, not just for him but for the Republican Party as a whole. They can't solidify the corruption of their minority rule without a second trump term to complete the destruction of federal norms.

This is why it's so important for Democratic voter turnout in the states, especially the battleground states. Everything is at stake this 2020 cycle. The fate of state legislatures, Senate seats, census-based redistricting, everything.

Republicans may have the money and the guns, but Democrats have the numbers. And the future. They can win the future this November.

What If: Considering How trump Will Cheat in 2020

I wrote earlier that donald trump has no honest way to win the 2020 Presidential election.

So that means trump is going to cheat.

We're already seeing some of the steps trump is deploying to rig the turnout and thus the results. his latest Postmaster General is sabotaging the United States Postal Service to ensure mailing delays that could prevent mail-in ballots from getting received in time to count.

Other things in play, aside from trump's accusations that mail-in balloting is voter fraud, are AG William Barr's efforts to misdirect investigations into Russian (and other nations') meddling into the 2020 general vote. There's hints aplenty that Barr is setting up "October Surprises" to discourage voter turnout for Joe Biden. 

All of this culminates into a lot of worried speculation - and yes, I am piling onto that dread - of how trump and cronies are going to cause enough disruption into the results that he can shrug off a Popular Vote and also an Electoral College count that would otherwise confirm a Joe Biden victory. 

But can it really happen?

Infidel753 pointed me to a link to a website Electoral-Vote that took stock of all the fears and tried to look at the actual numbers and likely results for November 2020. What the blogger there found was, well here's a few paragraphs:

If we assume there is enough "fog" to give cover to state legislatures to start thinking about shenanigans, that still leaves the pro-Trump forces with some daunting math to confront. Let's start with the states that have Democratic trifectas. Joe Biden is expected to win all of these, and there are not going to be any EV-stealing shenanigans in Trump's favor in these places:

That already puts us (note: well, Biden) at 195 EVs. Now let's add in the states where Biden is expected to win, and the Democrats control at least one chamber of the state legislature (note: meaning the GOP can't automatically fck with the EV):

 

We're up to 233 EVs. Biden isn't going to lose any of these due to shenanigans, either. Note, incidentally, that Minnesota is the only one of the five additional states that has a split legislature. The four others have both chambers with Democratic control.

Now, let's add states where Biden is favored to win, and where there is at least one Democrat who has to sign off on the results (either the governor, the secretary of state, or both):

Now we are up to 305 EVs. Getting into the weeds of what could happen in each state is a bit much, but several things are already evident: (1) Republican-controlled legislatures in swing states would have to be very unified to pull off this scheme; (2) they would face pushback on that, including lawsuits, in many places; and (3) their likely best case scenario, even if they are unified and they prevail in court, is to deny anyone an electoral victory (by muddying the waters until the deadline for the EC to meet has passed) and to throw the election to the House...

So the good news, as long as the voter turnout matches what the polling is currently telling us, is that Biden can easily pass the 270 EV hurdle much like Obama did in 2008 and 2012. And the blogger at Electoral-Vote hasn't counted states like Florida, Ohio, Iowa, and Georgia that can still go Blue for Biden this November.

So the bad news is this: Now we know why trump and his GOP cronies are eager to fck up ballot-by-mails (aka Absentee balloting) to try and mess with ALL states results to create enough chaos to ruin this math. And now we know why Barr is readying the DOJ to cause the chaos, not prevent it.

Going through a current pandemic crisis that can hamper in-person voter turnout is probably one of the reasons - he'll never admit it, but you have to admit the thought has crossed so many people's minds that SOMEBODY in trump's orbit whispered it into his ear - why trump is failing to respond to the crisis at all.

Another element of bad news is, while the Electoral-Vote blogger - I'm not sure whose name in on it, it's either Votemaster or Zenger (hmm, as a Journalism grad I know that name) - knows the Popular vote AND Electoral vote all favor Biden, we can still see that trump and the GOP's endgame is to throw the chaos into the U.S. House. The example here isn't the 2000 Election madness - the conditions for that were different - but the 1800 and 1876 Elections, where political bias favored the Party in control of the House.

The sick rule of the House solution is that the votes are not tallied by Representative - which favors Democrats - but by State Delegation (the group per state) meaning 50 votes not 435 (and DC has not vote in this matter). Thanks to gerrymandering, delegations skew to the Republicans who currently control 26 delegations over Democrats' 23 (one delegation is split). THIS is what worries Never Trumpers, more so that messing with the Electoral College: Barr could either trick or bully enough state legislatures to not accept the popular voting in their states to award Electors, forcing the College to cancel and pass it all to a GOP-bent House.

Thing is, the Electoral-Vote blogger thought of that as well:

An even bigger problem is Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections (1966). While that one was specifically about poll taxes, it also established the broad principle that once the right of people to vote has been extended, the state cannot intervene to dilute the potency of that vote. Taken together, what Bush and Harper suggest is that a state might be on firm ground if they announce on, say, Jan. 1, 2020, that "this year, the state legislature is just going to award our EVs." However, once states allow people to cast actual ballots, that method for awarding EVs is locked in and cannot be altered...

It had happened before, by the way: In 1860, South Carolina didn't host a popular vote, their legislature went and awarded their results to the pro-Slavery Democratic candidate (Beckinridge). This time, it's too late: Any GOP state that's watching the polls swing to Biden (hi, Florida!) right now in August cannot cancel the vote and nominate the Electors. They can do everything else - suppress votes, rig machines, undercount results - but they still run the risk that the popular vote won't go their way.

Which is partly why they're waiting on Barr to release "reports" of mail-in ballots being "rigged" in order to justify negating the popular vote results... but THAT all depends on if the difference in results relies on the mail-ins counting or not (if Biden wins by a wide margin without mail-ins, forget it: Barr would have to argue a way to negate the WHOLE thing, which even conservative courts would choke on).

This is the point where headaches start forming, and the stress of paranoia/despair kicks in. The solutions rely on a lot of things outside of control at our (yours and mine) level. The Democratic Party has to be ready to call on a legion of lawyers across every state to fight Barr's likely meddling in any and every possibility.

The one thing WE can do at our level is turnout the vote. THAT'S the math we can control. As long as the turnout FOR Biden and the Democrats is high enough, the Republicans can't rig a damn thing. They'll yell and scream, they'll present bad evidence to argue their side, but if Biden is winning places by double-digits in enough states and at percentages close to polling, the Republicans will have a hard time arguing rigged results... and they run the risk at state levels of alienating enough residents to diminish state-level control by the 2022 midterms, if not outright street protests by an outraged majority that will never stop (hi, Belarus!).

Democrats need to ensure enough of their numbers are registered and ready to vote, confirmed to vote for Biden against a corrupt trump that is one step away from tinpot dictator status that haunts all the failed Republics we've seen over the decades.

Elections matter, Americans. Voter turnout matters, Democrats. Come hell or high water or COVID or police crackdowns, every one of us opposed to trump's misrule, every one of us opposed to McConnell's obstructionist destruction, we have to do the math and vote and make it count and make the Republicans answer for their cheating, corrupt ways.

The Bad And the Good Heading Into the 2020 Elections (w/Update)

(Update: many thanks again to Batocchio for linking this site to Crooks and Liars' Mike's Blog Roundup! Please stay and enjoy the dip! (checks fridge) Wait, the dip isn't ready y... NO DON'T GO! Um, uh, maybe if I plugged in my Xbox and share my violent video games...? No? Dammit, where's the pizza I ordered...)

As the primaries heat up and as trump debases our nation further, I am dismayed and heartened by certain thoughts:

trump remains a remarkably unpopular President Loser of the Popular Vote. Ed Kilgore at New York magazine pointed out:

Civiqs shows the president’s net approval ratios being underwater (i.e., negative) in 10 states he carried in 2016: Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wisconsin. ...And it’s not as though he’s on a knife’s edge between victory and defeat in all these Trump 2016 states where he’s doing poorly: He’s underwater by 12 points in Pennsylvania, 11 in Michigan, and nine in Arizona, North Carolina, and Wisconsin. (Note: the narrow wins in PA, MI, and WI are where the experts think trump pulled off the Electoral upset) And there’s virtually no indication that states that narrowly went for Clinton in 2016 are trending in Trump’s direction: His approval ratios are minus 18 in Colorado, minus 15 in Minnesota, minus 12 in Nevada, and minus 27 in New Hampshire. These are, by the way, polls of registered voters, not just “adults,” so they should be a relatively sound reflection of the views of the electorate...

That seems like good news, but then the cynic in me remembers that polling, for all the numbers behind it, is still an inexact science. A lot of factors still determine who wins in November, and Kilgore considers most of them:

If you credit these polls at all, Trump’s reelection will require (1) a big late improvement in his approval ratings, which is possible but unlikely based on long-standing patterns during his polarizing presidency; (2) a campaign that succeeds in making the election turn on theoretical fears about his opponent rather than actual fears about a second Trump term, which won’t be easy either; (3) a big Republican turnout advantage, which is less likely among the larger presidential electorate than it was in 2018; or (4) some diabolical ability to thread the needle despite every contrary indicator, which superstitious Democrats fear for obvious reasons.

What Kilgore is referring to in 4) is the likely interference of Russian meddling, especially considering how Mitch McConnell is refusing to lift a finger to pass election security measures. And don't forget the Republicans' own efforts to suppress voters they know won't vote GOP.

But if the voter turnout still achieves maximum efforts...

The hope is that the best way to counter Republicans' efforts to cheat with the elections is to overwhelm their ability to fudge the numbers. They can cheat, but only to a point. If the polling (which Republicans can't entirely control) is saying their boy trump is ten percent under the Democratic candidate, and the margin of error in the polling is about four percent... if trump ends up winning that state by one percent - when he should have been losing by six at best - well outside of that margin, the stink of it will be impossible to hide. So if the Republicans want to cheat they have to do it in small pieces, to better hide the evidence of it. If only 100,000 voters show up which is often just the extremists, they could well hide their efforts and eke out a win... But if 1,000,000 show up and most of them know damn well who they're all voting for, it gets harder to pull that off...

I still think of the likelihood of voter turnout mimicking the numbers of 2018, when the midterms exceeded the norms and we saw about an eight percent jump in turnout. If there's a similar jump - with similar percentages of Democratic-over-Republican voting - there's a good chance the Electoral College will flip away from trump. Both Kilgore and Nancy LeTourneau at Washington Monthly referred to a Tweeted projected map using the 270towin app which showed this:

From pundit Matt Rogers 

To LeTourneau, these numbers show a trend that highlights trump's overall unpopularity:

I can’t think of an example in my lifetime where a sitting president went into re-election in worse shape than Donald Trump... Trump isn’t merely an overgrown toddler, he’s also terribly unpopular with most Americans. As we’ve seen, he’s bleeding support all over the country, including among lifelong Republicans in Texas. It is also important to keep in mind that it isn’t just that so many Americans disapprove of Trump. As Jeet Heer suggested, “what is more striking is the measure of intensity, which shows that those who dislike Trump do so with a passion.” Doing as Roberts suggests would send a “we hear you” message to all of those people who find Trump’s behavior deplorable...

There's a reason why Rogers tweets a map that shows even Texas, Georgia and UTAH flipping away from trump. The Great Orange Shitgibbon has done nothing to appeal to the moderate voters who oppose his actions on immigration, tariffs, and tax cuts. This is a man who has YET to crack the 50 percent approval ratings on the majority of professional polling services out there (only the ones that lean hard Conservative had him getting over that hump). He's done nothing like the previous Presidents have done - even Dubya - to present himself as a bipartisan incumbent who deserves a second term. He's got more people angry at him during the first term than I ever saw under Carter (who suffered from poor decisions and middling leadership) or Bush the Elder (who suffered re-election during a recession and on the cusp of a Far Right Culture War he couldn't lead).

And yet... and yet... I still have intense anxiety about the sonofabitch cheating just enough to steal a second term.

There's still a lot of time between now and November 2020 for things to get bad one way or another. For every sign of something that could hurt trump electorally - like the oncoming recession - there's always the reality that most of the voters who supported him in 2016 are likely to do so again. They're not driven by practical realities, or their own hardships - tariffs killing off businesses farms and jobs for example - under trump's reign. As Rude Pundit noted back in 2014, the Republican voting base are compelled to vote against the damn dirty hippies in spite of their own needs.

It's why I don't believe that tweeted map just yet. Why I fear Utah - filled with hard conservative Mormons - will NOT vote Democratic blue when the time comes. Why Texas and Georgia can be hopeful possibilities but GODDAMN do the Democrats need to get the VOTE OUT in those states.

And I'd love to think my home state of Florida will come back to their damn senses and vote like they did for Obama in 2008 and 2012... but I am residing in such a deep Red county that I can't help but despair...

These early polling and analyses are helping me cope. But GODDAMN, Americans, you NEED to show up to vote in 2020 and you NEED to vote Democratic across the board.

trump is already campaigning on a racist, hateful, bloody platform. How bad do you think it'll get before we even get to 2020 anyway?