On Twitter, the president is again raising doubts about the legitimacy of mail-in balloting — resuming his efforts to undermine public confidence in the election.
Those efforts — plus his repeated refusals to commit to a peaceful transition of power if he loses to Joe Biden — awakened many to the possibility of a coming electoral crisis. But Lawrence Douglas, professor of law, jurisprudence, and social thought at Amherst College, has worried about the possibility for some time.
After the last presidential election, when Trump made the baseless claim that Clinton had won the popular vote only because millions of unauthorized immigrants had cast fraudulent ballots, it was widely dismissed as an absurd spasm of Trumpian narcissism.
Yet in a January 2017 opinion piece in the Guardian, Douglas warned that a similar attempt to cast doubt on the 2020 election results by a sitting president could do enormous damage. And in a book he published this spring called “Will He Go?: Trump and the Looming Election Meltdown in 2020,” he ran through some of the most worrisome ways the contest could go sideways.
Douglas recently spoke with me via Zoom, from his home in Sunderland, Mass., about the harrowing possibilities — and about where a bitterly contested election would leave the country. The interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
How worried are you?
I’d say I’m very worried. In the book I lay out three catastrophe scenarios. The last one I described, I think, is more than likely to actually happen.
You call this the “big blue shift” scenario. Can you explain?
The “blue shift” is a phrase that a colleague at Ohio State University named Ned Foley coined. And it simply recognizes that if you look at past elections, provisional and mail-in ballots tend to break for Democratic candidates.
That’s, in part, because urban returns take longer to count and provisional ballots tend to be cast by younger, lower-income people.
And [the phenomenon] is going to be all the more pronounced in this election [with the pandemic]. There was a poll that was released on Aug. 26 that suggested that about 20 percent of Trump’s voters intend to vote by mail-in ballot and about 60 percent of Biden voters intend to vote by mail-in ballot.
These mail-in ballots, once they’re counted, are going to break overwhelmingly in Biden’s favor. And that, of course, explains why Trump is engaged in all these baseless, preemptive attacks on the integrity of mail-in ballots.
So Trump basically tries to leverage whatever lead he has on Nov. 3 into a claim of reelection — [dismissing] the evaporation of that lead, with the counting of mail-in ballots, as the product of fraud.
Take us to a swing state like Wisconsin. If it has a close and disputed result, how would that play out?
If the election turns on very narrow margins in a handful swing states like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, then I really do think that we could see something very chaotic happen. The count of mail-in ballots — at best, it’s going to take a long time, and at worst it’s going to be disorderly, heavily litigated, and the source of all sorts of rumors.
And if the count really drags on in states like Wisconsin, it could start pushing against statutorily important dates. States really have to figure out who won their state by Dec. 8. And Dec. 14 is the date on which electors go to the state capitol and actually cast their votes.
What you could imagine happening in the swing states is that the Republican legislatures could agree with Donald Trump and they could basically say, “The count of these mail-in ballots, it’s been incredibly messy, and mistakes have been made, so we’ve got to go with these Nov. 3 results.” And they certify Trump as having carried their state.
It’s critical to point out that Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania — they all have Republican legislatures and Democratic governors. And that increases the possibility that the legislatures will say “Trump carried our state,” the governors could come along and say “No, Biden carried our state.” And then you have a situation that the country last saw in 1876, in the notorious Hayes-Tilden election, where you had three states — at that time, it was Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina — submit these competing electoral certificates. And then it’s really Congress’s responsibility. …
Let’s say Biden is eventually declared the winner after a bitter fight over the results. Where does that leave us? Will that poison the well for the 40 percent of voters who are Trump’s hardcore supporters? What happens to our democracy?
I do think it will be very hard to walk things back. The incredibly dangerous game Trump is playing is that he’s eroding our confidence in our electoral system. A constitutional democracy can’t really survive if people don’t believe that the outcomes of that system are trustworthy. And if you don’t believe the outcomes are trustworthy, then your attack on the system can be packaged as a defense of democracy, rather than as an active usurpation.
The thing that we need to bear in mind is he’s not going to disappear if he loses. He’ll be out there, continuing to insist that Biden’s not a legitimate president and that our system is corrupt. And perish the thought if he loses this election, he could still run in 2024.
Do you see any way that this goes well?
I think the best-case scenario is for him to lose very decisively. The election really turns into a referendum on his toxic politics, and it shows that the American people have rejected his toxic politics.
I’ve just thought that the Social Security TF should be called the JC Fund (after Jesus Christ). The fund contains a finite amount of cash to draw down on — all of three years of full payout; not counting one left alone to keep the TF legally solvent and able to provide funding automatically in the event of a temporary FICA tax shortfall — and an endless load of new applicants as the decades roll along.
Soooo; either the managers have been able to ascertain the exact date of Jesus Christ’s return and that the fund will be adequate until them — or — the managers are planing to exercise the function of “the loaves and the fishes”. :-O
Republican President Donald Trump leads strongly among those who say they are unlikely to vote by mail, while Democrat Joe Biden has a solid lead among voters overall, suggesting that results will shift toward Biden as mail-in votes are tallied after Election Day, a new national survey finds.
Trump leads, 68 percent to 23 percent, among those who say they are very unlikely to vote by mail. Biden, however, leads among all voters, 50 to 40 percent, according to a report on the survey released Friday by researchers from Northeastern University, Harvard University, Rutgers University, and Northwestern University.
“There will therefore likely be enormous shifts toward Biden after election day,” David Lazer, a Northeastern University political science and computer science professor who worked on the report, said in an e-mail.
“The pattern of a shift toward Biden driven by mail-in voting is quite robust across the country. We anticipate a shift toward Biden in every state,” the report said.
The report added to the mounting evidence that the presidential election could be a disaster. Trump has been trying to raise doubts about the legitimacy of mail-in balloting — and he has repeatedly refused to commit to a peaceful transition of power.
The report said that, amid the coronavirus pandemic, “a huge number of people plan on voting by mail,” with nearly 59 percent of voters somewhat likely or very likely to do so, a finding the researchers had also noted earlier this summer.
“At the end of election night, Trump may have an apparent lead in both the popular vote and the Electoral College, yet solidly lose by week’s end,” the report said.
“The unprecedented logistical challenge of counting for all states, with by our estimate as many as 82 million votes arriving by mail … combined with the fact that some states do not start counting mail-in ballots until Election Day, and the certainty of millions of late arriving ballots, means that there will likely be a sizable and systematic shift in the vote count toward Biden after election day,” the report said.
The report focused on nine states that are considered competitive and won’t begin counting votes arriving by mail until the day of the election, or will accept late-arriving ballots. The nine states are: Texas, North Carolina, Alaska, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Nevada.
In some of the states, the shift toward Biden may be “relatively small,” and Election Night results may stand, the report said. “However, other states — including the key battleground states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — have much greater potential for what appear to be Trump leads on election night giving way to Biden leads as mail-in ballots are counted over the subsequent days.” …
WASHINGTON — The White House moved aggressively on Friday to revive stimulus talks that President Trump had called off just days earlier, putting forward its largest offer for economic relief yet as administration officials and embattled Republican lawmakers scrambled to avoid being blamed by voters for failing to deliver needed aid ahead of the election.
The new proposal’s price tag of $1.8 trillion, which Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin presented to Speaker Nancy Pelosi in a roughly 30-minute phone call, was nearly double the original offer the administration put forward when talks began in late summer.
It was the latest indication that the White House was eager to backtrack from Mr. Trump’s decision on Tuesday to abruptly halt negotiations, and it reflected a growing sense of dread both at the White House and among vulnerable Senate Republicans facing re-election about the political consequences of his actions. The offer also highlighted the deep and persistent divisions among Republicans — most of whom have balked at a large new federal infusion of pandemic aid — that have complicated the negotiations for months.
Now, with Mr. Trump pressing to “Go Big,” as he put it in a tweet on Friday, he has raised the prospect of pushing through a plan that his own party refuses to accept, giving Ms. Pelosi and Democrats fresh leverage to dictate the terms of any deal.
On Friday, she was continuing to push for more provisions and other details from the administration. While Mr. Mnuchin’s latest offer “attempted to address some of the concerns Democrats have,” Drew Hammill, a spokesman for Ms. Pelosi, said it did not include an agreement on a national strategy for testing, tracing and other efforts to contain the spread of the virus, which the speaker has called for in recent weeks. “For this and other provisions, we are still awaiting language from the administration as negotiations on the overall funding amount continue.”
“I do hope we will have an agreement soon but, as you say, they keep changing,” Ms. Pelosi said on MSNBC. Referring to Mr. Trump’s tweets that temporarily ended the negotiations, she added that the president “got a terrible backlash from it, including in the stock market, which is what he cares about. And so then he started to come back little by little, and now a bigger package.”
Speaking on the right-wing radio host Rush Limbaugh’s show, Mr. Trump conceded that he had changed his position on approving additional coronavirus aid before Election Day, declaring “I would like to see a bigger stimulus package, frankly, than either the Democrats or Republicans are offering.” (Alyssa Farah, the White House communications director, later contradicted Mr. Trump’s assertion, telling reporters at the White House that the administration wanted a final package to remain below $2 trillion, which is less than the $2.2 trillion measure Ms. Pelosi pushed through the House this month.)
Such sums are deeply alarming to most Republicans, who are increasingly contemplating their party’s future after Mr. Trump departs the political scene and are determined to reclaim the mantle of the party of fiscal restraint. Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, warned Mr. Trump in a phone call this week that most Republican senators would not embrace a stimulus measure as large as Ms. Pelosi wanted, an assessment that appeared to play a role in the president’s decision to tweet an end to the talks. …
A businessman-president transplanted favor-seeking in Washington
to his family’s hotels and resorts — and earned millions
as a gatekeeper to his own administration.
… Federal tax-return data for Mr. Trump and his business empire, which was disclosed by The New York Times last month, showed that even as he leveraged his image as a successful businessman to win the presidency, large swaths of his real estate holdings were under financial stress, racking up losses over the preceding decades.
But once Mr. Trump was in the White House, his family business discovered a lucrative new revenue stream: people who wanted something from the president. An investigation by The Times found over 200 companies, special-interest groups and foreign governments that patronized Mr. Trump’s properties while reaping benefits from him and his administration. Nearly a quarter of those patrons have not been previously reported.
The tax records — along with membership rosters for Mar-a-Lago and the president’s golf club in Bedminster, N.J., as well as other sources — reveal how much money this new line of business was worth. …
https://prospect.org/labor/how-osha-went-awol-during-the-pandemic/
Prepare for the presidential election to end in disaster
via @BostonGlobe – October 8
On Twitter, the president is again raising doubts about the legitimacy of mail-in balloting — resuming his efforts to undermine public confidence in the election.
Those efforts — plus his repeated refusals to commit to a peaceful transition of power if he loses to Joe Biden — awakened many to the possibility of a coming electoral crisis. But Lawrence Douglas, professor of law, jurisprudence, and social thought at Amherst College, has worried about the possibility for some time.
After the last presidential election, when Trump made the baseless claim that Clinton had won the popular vote only because millions of unauthorized immigrants had cast fraudulent ballots, it was widely dismissed as an absurd spasm of Trumpian narcissism.
Yet in a January 2017 opinion piece in the Guardian, Douglas warned that a similar attempt to cast doubt on the 2020 election results by a sitting president could do enormous damage. And in a book he published this spring called “Will He Go?: Trump and the Looming Election Meltdown in 2020,” he ran through some of the most worrisome ways the contest could go sideways.
Douglas recently spoke with me via Zoom, from his home in Sunderland, Mass., about the harrowing possibilities — and about where a bitterly contested election would leave the country. The interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
How worried are you?
I’d say I’m very worried. In the book I lay out three catastrophe scenarios. The last one I described, I think, is more than likely to actually happen.
You call this the “big blue shift” scenario. Can you explain?
The “blue shift” is a phrase that a colleague at Ohio State University named Ned Foley coined. And it simply recognizes that if you look at past elections, provisional and mail-in ballots tend to break for Democratic candidates.
That’s, in part, because urban returns take longer to count and provisional ballots tend to be cast by younger, lower-income people.
And [the phenomenon] is going to be all the more pronounced in this election [with the pandemic]. There was a poll that was released on Aug. 26 that suggested that about 20 percent of Trump’s voters intend to vote by mail-in ballot and about 60 percent of Biden voters intend to vote by mail-in ballot.
These mail-in ballots, once they’re counted, are going to break overwhelmingly in Biden’s favor. And that, of course, explains why Trump is engaged in all these baseless, preemptive attacks on the integrity of mail-in ballots.
So Trump basically tries to leverage whatever lead he has on Nov. 3 into a claim of reelection — [dismissing] the evaporation of that lead, with the counting of mail-in ballots, as the product of fraud.
Take us to a swing state like Wisconsin. If it has a close and disputed result, how would that play out?
If the election turns on very narrow margins in a handful swing states like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, then I really do think that we could see something very chaotic happen. The count of mail-in ballots — at best, it’s going to take a long time, and at worst it’s going to be disorderly, heavily litigated, and the source of all sorts of rumors.
And if the count really drags on in states like Wisconsin, it could start pushing against statutorily important dates. States really have to figure out who won their state by Dec. 8. And Dec. 14 is the date on which electors go to the state capitol and actually cast their votes.
What you could imagine happening in the swing states is that the Republican legislatures could agree with Donald Trump and they could basically say, “The count of these mail-in ballots, it’s been incredibly messy, and mistakes have been made, so we’ve got to go with these Nov. 3 results.” And they certify Trump as having carried their state.
It’s critical to point out that Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania — they all have Republican legislatures and Democratic governors. And that increases the possibility that the legislatures will say “Trump carried our state,” the governors could come along and say “No, Biden carried our state.” And then you have a situation that the country last saw in 1876, in the notorious Hayes-Tilden election, where you had three states — at that time, it was Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina — submit these competing electoral certificates. And then it’s really Congress’s responsibility. …
Let’s say Biden is eventually declared the winner after a bitter fight over the results. Where does that leave us? Will that poison the well for the 40 percent of voters who are Trump’s hardcore supporters? What happens to our democracy?
I do think it will be very hard to walk things back. The incredibly dangerous game Trump is playing is that he’s eroding our confidence in our electoral system. A constitutional democracy can’t really survive if people don’t believe that the outcomes of that system are trustworthy. And if you don’t believe the outcomes are trustworthy, then your attack on the system can be packaged as a defense of democracy, rather than as an active usurpation.
The thing that we need to bear in mind is he’s not going to disappear if he loses. He’ll be out there, continuing to insist that Biden’s not a legitimate president and that our system is corrupt. And perish the thought if he loses this election, he could still run in 2024.
Do you see any way that this goes well?
I think the best-case scenario is for him to lose very decisively. The election really turns into a referendum on his toxic politics, and it shows that the American people have rejected his toxic politics.
I’ve just thought that the Social Security TF should be called the JC Fund (after Jesus Christ). The fund contains a finite amount of cash to draw down on — all of three years of full payout; not counting one left alone to keep the TF legally solvent and able to provide funding automatically in the event of a temporary FICA tax shortfall — and an endless load of new applicants as the decades roll along.
Soooo; either the managers have been able to ascertain the exact date of Jesus Christ’s return and that the fund will be adequate until them — or — the managers are planing to exercise the function of “the loaves and the fishes”. :-O
Perhaps Trump will keep Social Security going
strong what with all the tax money he pumps
into the Trust Fund.
New study says Trump could be in the lead on Election Night but lose by week’s end
via @BostonGlobe – October 9
Republican President Donald Trump leads strongly among those who say they are unlikely to vote by mail, while Democrat Joe Biden has a solid lead among voters overall, suggesting that results will shift toward Biden as mail-in votes are tallied after Election Day, a new national survey finds.
Trump leads, 68 percent to 23 percent, among those who say they are very unlikely to vote by mail. Biden, however, leads among all voters, 50 to 40 percent, according to a report on the survey released Friday by researchers from Northeastern University, Harvard University, Rutgers University, and Northwestern University.
“There will therefore likely be enormous shifts toward Biden after election day,” David Lazer, a Northeastern University political science and computer science professor who worked on the report, said in an e-mail.
“The pattern of a shift toward Biden driven by mail-in voting is quite robust across the country. We anticipate a shift toward Biden in every state,” the report said.
The report added to the mounting evidence that the presidential election could be a disaster. Trump has been trying to raise doubts about the legitimacy of mail-in balloting — and he has repeatedly refused to commit to a peaceful transition of power.
The report said that, amid the coronavirus pandemic, “a huge number of people plan on voting by mail,” with nearly 59 percent of voters somewhat likely or very likely to do so, a finding the researchers had also noted earlier this summer.
“At the end of election night, Trump may have an apparent lead in both the popular vote and the Electoral College, yet solidly lose by week’s end,” the report said.
“The unprecedented logistical challenge of counting for all states, with by our estimate as many as 82 million votes arriving by mail … combined with the fact that some states do not start counting mail-in ballots until Election Day, and the certainty of millions of late arriving ballots, means that there will likely be a sizable and systematic shift in the vote count toward Biden after election day,” the report said.
The report focused on nine states that are considered competitive and won’t begin counting votes arriving by mail until the day of the election, or will accept late-arriving ballots. The nine states are: Texas, North Carolina, Alaska, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Nevada.
In some of the states, the shift toward Biden may be “relatively small,” and Election Night results may stand, the report said. “However, other states — including the key battleground states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — have much greater potential for what appear to be Trump leads on election night giving way to Biden leads as mail-in ballots are counted over the subsequent days.” …
Trump Raises Stimulus Offer to $1.8 Trillion Days After Halting Negotiations
NY Times – October 9
WASHINGTON — The White House moved aggressively on Friday to revive stimulus talks that President Trump had called off just days earlier, putting forward its largest offer for economic relief yet as administration officials and embattled Republican lawmakers scrambled to avoid being blamed by voters for failing to deliver needed aid ahead of the election.
The new proposal’s price tag of $1.8 trillion, which Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin presented to Speaker Nancy Pelosi in a roughly 30-minute phone call, was nearly double the original offer the administration put forward when talks began in late summer.
It was the latest indication that the White House was eager to backtrack from Mr. Trump’s decision on Tuesday to abruptly halt negotiations, and it reflected a growing sense of dread both at the White House and among vulnerable Senate Republicans facing re-election about the political consequences of his actions. The offer also highlighted the deep and persistent divisions among Republicans — most of whom have balked at a large new federal infusion of pandemic aid — that have complicated the negotiations for months.
Now, with Mr. Trump pressing to “Go Big,” as he put it in a tweet on Friday, he has raised the prospect of pushing through a plan that his own party refuses to accept, giving Ms. Pelosi and Democrats fresh leverage to dictate the terms of any deal.
On Friday, she was continuing to push for more provisions and other details from the administration. While Mr. Mnuchin’s latest offer “attempted to address some of the concerns Democrats have,” Drew Hammill, a spokesman for Ms. Pelosi, said it did not include an agreement on a national strategy for testing, tracing and other efforts to contain the spread of the virus, which the speaker has called for in recent weeks. “For this and other provisions, we are still awaiting language from the administration as negotiations on the overall funding amount continue.”
“I do hope we will have an agreement soon but, as you say, they keep changing,” Ms. Pelosi said on MSNBC. Referring to Mr. Trump’s tweets that temporarily ended the negotiations, she added that the president “got a terrible backlash from it, including in the stock market, which is what he cares about. And so then he started to come back little by little, and now a bigger package.”
Speaking on the right-wing radio host Rush Limbaugh’s show, Mr. Trump conceded that he had changed his position on approving additional coronavirus aid before Election Day, declaring “I would like to see a bigger stimulus package, frankly, than either the Democrats or Republicans are offering.” (Alyssa Farah, the White House communications director, later contradicted Mr. Trump’s assertion, telling reporters at the White House that the administration wanted a final package to remain below $2 trillion, which is less than the $2.2 trillion measure Ms. Pelosi pushed through the House this month.)
Such sums are deeply alarming to most Republicans, who are increasingly contemplating their party’s future after Mr. Trump departs the political scene and are determined to reclaim the mantle of the party of fiscal restraint. Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, warned Mr. Trump in a phone call this week that most Republican senators would not embrace a stimulus measure as large as Ms. Pelosi wanted, an assessment that appeared to play a role in the president’s decision to tweet an end to the talks. …
Coberly,
We could really use your contribution here.
The Swamp That Trump Built
NY Times – October 10
A businessman-president transplanted favor-seeking in Washington
to his family’s hotels and resorts — and earned millions
as a gatekeeper to his own administration.
… Federal tax-return data for Mr. Trump and his business empire, which was disclosed by The New York Times last month, showed that even as he leveraged his image as a successful businessman to win the presidency, large swaths of his real estate holdings were under financial stress, racking up losses over the preceding decades.
But once Mr. Trump was in the White House, his family business discovered a lucrative new revenue stream: people who wanted something from the president. An investigation by The Times found over 200 companies, special-interest groups and foreign governments that patronized Mr. Trump’s properties while reaping benefits from him and his administration. Nearly a quarter of those patrons have not been previously reported.
The tax records — along with membership rosters for Mar-a-Lago and the president’s golf club in Bedminster, N.J., as well as other sources — reveal how much money this new line of business was worth. …
Democrats and Republicans rip into the White House’s $1.8 trillion stimulus offer, dampening chances of $1,200 stimulus checks and coronavirus relief before the election
utmSource=twitter&utmContent=referral&utmTerm=topbar&referrer=twitter via @businessinsider
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/maga-terror-trump-militias_n_5f832f7ec5b62f97bac42a7c