You know what really gets to me about all of this? Why don’t these voters care about the 200,000 Americans who have lost their lives? Had this have happened this way under Hillary, they have impeached her already. It’s shameful the GOP continue to prop up this deadly leadership, lie to their base and the real risks to people’s lives. It’s shocking Trump is doing as well as he is in the polls. How can these voters not hold him responsible when by every metric he has failed this country?
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No worries, it’s just that the numbers really weren’t all that far off. It’s just that when someone(s) REALLY wants something to happen, and an analysis says that’s what’s GOING to happen, and it doesn’t end up turning out that way…many cry foul.
Telling the future isn’t an easy thing to do. For example, the odds of being in a fatal car accident in one’s life are about 1/103. That means that you or I PROBABLY won’t be. But, given a sample size of 103, one probably will. People make predictions based on samplings, put odds on sports games, etc, etc, and get upset when something unexpected happens. Well, something unexpected happened. Here’s hoping it doesn’t happen again.
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And the camps. Don’t forget about the camps.
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You’re right. But just like the weather report, sometimes you get rained on when the forecast calls for sunny skies. Polls are just point in time directional evidence. They’re inherently flawed, which is why they’re better used as a temperature check than a crystal ball
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Very nicely put!
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No one wants the military involved in the elections…
“I believe deeply in the principle of an apolitical U.S. military,” Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in written answers to questions from House lawmakers released last month. “In the event of a dispute over some aspect of the elections, by law, U.S. courts and the U.S. Congress are required to resolve any disputes, not the U.S. military. I foresee no role for the U.S. armed forces in this process.”
But that has not stopped an intensifying debate in the military about its role should a disputed election lead to civil unrest.
On Aug. 11, John Nagl and Paul Yingling, both retired Army officers and Iraq War veterans, published an open letter to Milley on the website Defense One. “In a few months’ time, you may have to choose between defying a lawless president or betraying your constitutional oath,” they wrote. “If Donald Trump refuses to leave office at the expiration of his constitutional term, the United States military must remove him by force, and you must give that order.”
Pentagon officials swiftly said such an outcome was preposterous. Under no circumstances, they said, would the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff send Navy SEALs or Marines to haul Trump out of the White House. If necessary, such a task, Defense Department officials said, would fall to U.S. Marshals or the Secret Service. The military, by law, the officials said, takes a vow to the Constitution, not to the president, and that vow means that the commander in chief of the military is whoever is sworn in at 12:01 p.m. on Inauguration Day.
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Swell. So now, by “Executive Order,” he’s now going to declare the US Constitution Null and Void? He’s just jealous of Vladimir Putin.
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The financial markets are watching closely, and this is a good prognosis for Biden, and greater stability and growth in the economy if he wins and takes both Houses. I am sure people will take note here, even if the R’s think that ACA should not exist and that Biden is about ‘socialized’ medicine and creating a ‘welfare state.’ (from what I am hearing from my calls to the voters)
A victory for Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, a Democratic takeover of the Senate and defense of the party’s House majority in the November elections would be the best outcome for the U.S. economy, according to an analysis released Wednesday by Moody’s Analytics.
In an analysis of potential Election Day outcomes based on the economic proposals of President Trump and Biden, Moody’s found that a Democratic sweep would bring the quickest return to full employment, highest number of jobs added and best rebound in economic growth.
“The economic outlook is strongest under the scenario in which Biden and the Democrats sweep Congress and fully adopt their economic agenda,” wrote Moody’s Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi, who provided economic analysis for the late Sen. John McCain’s (R-Ariz.) 2008 presidential campaign, and economist Bernard Yaros.
Zandi and Yaros modeled four potential outcomes of the November election: a total Democratic sweep; Democrats holding the House and taking the White House but not the Senate; a total Republican sweep; and a extension of the status quo with Trump in the White House, Democrats in control of the House and Republicans in control of the Senate.
They gave Biden winning but contending with a GOP-controlled Senate a 40 percent probability, two more years of the status quo a 35 percent chance, a Democratic sweep a 20 percent chance and a GOP sweep a 5 percent chance.
Zandi and Yaros argued that a total Democratic sweep would bring the biggest boost to the economy because of Biden’s plans to spend trillions on infrastructure, education and the social safety net while boosting trade and immigration. They also argued that the higher taxes proposed to fund part of these plans would not slow the economy in a meaningful way.
“Greater government spending adds directly to [gross domestic product] and jobs, while the higher tax burden has an indirect impact through business investment and the spending and saving behavior of high-income households,” they wrote.
“Longer-term growth under Biden’s policies is also stronger because on net they expand the supply side of the economy—the quantity and quality of labor and capital needed to produce goods and services,” they added.
Zandi and Yaros projected the U.S. to gain 18.6 million jobs during Biden’s first term if his agenda is enacted by a Democratic legislature, with the unemployment rate dropping to just above 4 percent by the second half of 2022. Those gains fall to 13.6 million jobs with a return to full employment by summer 2023 if the GOP holds the Senate.
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Here comes the counter attack from the T Administration, an HHS campaign with a ‘defeat despair’ over Covid created by Michael Caputo, who took a leave of absence for personal reasons.
Sounds like propaganda to me…
The public awareness campaign, which HHS is seeking to start airing before Election Day on Nov. 3, was largely conceived and organized by Michael Caputo, the health department’s top spokesperson who took medical leave last week and announced on Thursday that he had been diagnosed with cancer. Caputo, who has no medical or scientific background, claimed in a Facebook video on Sept. 13 that the campaign was “demanded of me by the president of the United States. Personally.”
“The Democrats — and, by the way, their conjugal media and the leftist scientists that are working for the government — are dead set against it,” Caputo told his Facebook followers in the Sept. 13 video. “They cannot afford for us to have any good news before November because they’re already losing. … They’re going to come after me because I’m going to be putting $250 million worth of ads on the air.”
The campaign is indeed under investigation by Democrats, who have charged that the massive ad blitz is an attempt to boost Trump’s standing on Covid-19 before the election and have unsuccessfully called on HHS to halt the contract. POLITICO first reported the planned campaign.
HHS has defended the campaign as proper and insisted that it will not be co-opted by political pressures. "There is no room for political spin in the messages and materials designed by HHS to help Americans make informed decisions about the prevention and treatment of Covid-19 and flu," said Mark Weber, a career HHS public affairs official, in a statement. Caputo delegated the project to Weber before taking medical leave.
The White House did not respond to questions about the campaign’s goal, referring questions to HHS. Two officials said it was not accurate that Trump “demanded” that Caputo work on the project.
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Wall Street is shunning Trump. Campaign donations to Biden are five times larger
The securities and investment industry donated just $10.5 million to Trump’s presidential campaign and outside groups aligned with it, according to a new tally by OpenSecrets. It has sent nearly five times as much cash, $51.1 million, to Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.
That means Trump is losing the fundraising race among Wall Streeters by a slightly greater magnitude than in 2016. During that cycle, former New York Senator Hillary Clinton and groups aligned with her raised $88 million from the securities and investment industry, while Trump took in just $20.8 million.
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Added the debate schedule, thought I’d remind y’all too.
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These are strong warnings…
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This helter skelter approach to this election is beyond imagination because the ‘what if’s’ are too overwhelming. The fact that T cheats, has cheated, and his enablers are all about keeping their power, what would stop this scenario of placing doubts on mail-in voting, and getting the state’s electors to call in the vote, agitation from T’s base.
No doubt a lot riding on it…and we are seeing panic about it - 
Probable upside - High voter turnout, integrity held at the polls, and votes that would be overwhelmingly for BIden - those would certainly make it a lot easier to call the election.
Possible downside - T/Barr and all the R states coming in strong with legal actions, spreading doubt on the voter returns, lots of civil unrest calling for militia-type reaction from the Federal Government, conspiratorial messaging abounding and a final vote from the conservatively packed Supreme Court.
I think we are going to have a big wave 
I think the voters are amped up.
What could go wrong - a LOT. This article covers all of it.
With less than six weeks to go before Election Day, and with over 250 COVID-related election lawsuits filed across 45 states, the litigation strategy of the Trump campaign and its allies has become clear: try to block the expansion of mail-in balloting whenever possible and, in a few key states, create enough chaos in the system and legal and political uncertainty in the results that the Supreme Court, Congress, or Republican legislatures can throw the election to Trump if the outcome is at all close or in doubt. It’s a Hail Mary, but in a close enough election, we cannot count the possibility out. I’ve never been more worried about American democracy than I am right now.
Much of the blizzard of election litigation concerns the casting of ballots by mail, a means of voting that has exploded thanks to COVID-19, and the fears many people have of voting in person during a pandemic. Rules for casting mail-in ballots vary from state to state, and some are onerous during a pandemic, such as a requirement to have an absentee ballot notarized. There are also serious questions about timing; even without all the tumult at the United States Postal Service, some states allow voters to request absentee ballots in the period close to the election, and there is real fear that voters will not get their ballots back in time to elected officials to be counted. Some state and federal courts have responded to these lawsuits by relaxing technical requirements, such as allowing ballots to be counted if they arrive after Election Day so long as they are postmarked by Election Day (or if they arrive shortly after Election Day with no postmark, given that USPS does not always put a postmark—or a legible one—on ballot envelopes).
Trump has made repeated and loud unsubstantiated claims of widespread voter fraud in relation to mail-in ballots, even though he and his allies have voted by mail themselves and even as the campaign has begun encouraging more mail-in balloting among his own supporters. The Trump and Republican litigation strategy has been to fight efforts to expand voting by mail: They have opposed expanded use of government drop boxes to return absentee ballots, extension of deadlines for ballot return, and state decisions to proactively send mail-in ballots to all active registered voters. Four states—California, Nevada, New Jersey, and Vermont—are doing so this time, joining the five other states that already conduct their elections almost exclusively by mail. The Trump campaign has through litigation attacked the expansion of mail-in balloting in Nevada, so far unsuccessfully, and Attorney General William Barr has ridiculously claimed that election officials—led by a Republican secretary of state—will somehow “find” 100,000 ballots to help Joe Biden win the state if Trump is in the lead.
The Trump strategy of fighting the expansion of mail-in balloting appears to be twofold. To begin with, the campaign appears to have made the calculation that lower turnout will help the president win reelection. This may explain why Pennsylvania Republicans are planning on going to the U.S. Supreme Court to argue against a state Supreme Court ruling allowing the counting of ballots arriving soon after Election Day without a legible postmark. They argue that doing so unconstitutionally extends Election Day beyond Nov. 3 and takes power away from the Pennsylvania Legislature to choose presidential electors.
The first argument is not a particularly strong one: A decision to accept ballots soon after Election Day without a legible postmark does not extend Election Day as much as it implements how election officials determine if a mailed ballot was timely mailed. It recognizes the reality that many ballots have been arriving without postmarks and uses proximity to the election as a proxy for timely voting. Virginia and Nevada recently adopted similar rules, in light of pandemic-related mail delays. The Trump-allied Honest Elections Project is fighting a consent decree over a similar extension in Minnesota.
The argument about the state Supreme Court’s ruling usurping legislative power to set federal election rules echoes a parallel claim that was made during the disputed election in 2000. The question is whether a state supreme court usurps legislative power when it interprets election rules in line with both state statutes and the state constitution. The argument that a state supreme court applying a state constitution in a voting case usurps legislative power is weak to me, but it was convincing enough for the more conservative members of the Supreme Court that decided Bush v. Gore .
The fighting over things like postmark rules are fights on the edges, the kind of trench warfare that will only matter if the election comes down to hundreds of ballots in a key swing state essential for the Electoral College outcome. But there’s a second play here as well, one that is far more worrisome.
The idea is to throw so much muck into the process and cast so much doubt on who is the actual winner in one of those swing states because of supposed massive voter fraud and uncertainty about the rules for absentee ballots that some other actor besides the voter will decide the winner of the election. That could be the RBG-less Supreme Court resolving a dispute over a group of ballots. Indeed, on Tuesday, Vice President Mike Pence suggested that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s replacement needs to be seated, possibly without so much as a hearing, in order to decide “election issues [that] may come before the Supreme Court in the days following the election,” including questions involving “universal unsolicited mail” and states “extending the deadline” for ballot receipt. (Never mind that a 4–4 split on the court on an election issue is unlikely.) It could be a Republican legislature in a state saying it has the right under Article 2 of the Constitution to pick the state’s winner in the face of uncertainty. Bart Gellman in the Atlantic recently quoted a Republican operative imagining these state legislatures saying, “All right, we’ve been given this constitutional power. We don’t think the results of our own state are accurate, so here’s our slate of electors that we think properly reflect the results of our state.” And it could be Republicans in the Senate—if they keep their majority—not counting Electoral College votes that were cast for Biden based upon manufactured uncertainty. This would lead to a dispute with the Democratic House and lead to a political struggle over the presidency.
The president has been laying the groundwork for these claims for months, and just Tuesday his son, Donald Trump Jr., baselessly suggested that Democrats will “add millions of fraudulent ballots that can cancel your vote and overturn the election.” (The video remains up on Facebook even though it contains blatant election disinformation. Facebook has added a label to the post, however.)
If we are lucky enough, the election will not be close, and we will avoid this election meltdown only to start panicking again in the run-up to 2024. But if it is close, all bets are off.
We should not think of the litigation and the wild claims of voter fraud as separate from one another. Instead, they are part of a play to grab power if the election is close enough. There are good legal arguments against a power grab, but if another body tries to overturn the will of the people in voting for president, there will be protests in the streets, with the potential for violence.
This is a five-alarm fire, folks. It’s time to wake up
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Fun fact: My husband is currently looking for a job. He works in IT and hasn’t had any calls back in a long time, so he called the recruiters he’s been working with to ask what the deal is. He was flat-out told that no one is really getting calls right now because so many companies are waiting until after the election to make major hiring decisions. So that’s… something… to know, I guess.
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Makes sense, there’s not much of a future for anyone until we handle this humanitarian crisis.
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The most dangerous conspiracy theory in 2020 isn’t about blood-sucking pedophiles
QAnon is scary, but misinformation about voter fraud poses a bigger and more immediate threat to democracy.
As the 2020 election enters its final phases, it feels like a lot could go wrong in the United States. Reports warn that hackers from Russia and China are targeting both parties, while the fringe conspiracy movement QAnon slips into the mainstream and possibly influences voters. And millions of people are talking about a different conspiracy theory, one that posits that the election has already been stolen.
Believers say this still-unfolding scandal goes all the way to the top. It gets weird, too. According to some, a sinister millionaire is ripping equipment out of post offices so they can’t properly process mail-in ballots. Others say foreign governments are printing millions of fraudulent mail-in ballots and that “deep state” goons are raiding nursing homes to tamper with senior citizens’ mail-in ballots. One way or another, President Trump is almost always supposedly involved in these plots — either orchestrating the conspiracy or fighting the America-hating intruders. And at the end of the day, this conspiracy theory boils down to one very bad but also mundane thing: voter fraud.
Let that sink in. The conspiracy theory that’s catching on — the one to really worry about as the country gears up to elect its future leaders — is not QAnon, which claims that Satan-worshipping, liberal pedophiles are running the country. It’s the one hiding in plain sight, the one that supporters of both parties are pushing, and the one that’s at the center of the most dangerous misinformation campaigns.
The voter fraud conspiracy theory, including related theories about voter suppression, is also what stands to undermine American democracy in a very immediate way, both by suppressing voter turnout and by sowing doubt among voters about the election’s results. That gets even more worrisome when you consider that President Trump continues to suggest that he won’t leave office, regardless of the election’s outcome. When asked on Wednesday if he’d commit to a peaceful transfer of power, Trump said, “We’ll have to see what happens.” He added, “The ballots are a disaster.”
Up to 80 million people are expected to vote by mail — the most in American history — which is leading to concern about the process. According to data from Zignal Labs, online and social media mentions of mail-in voting, including good old-fashioned voter fraud, are more prevalent than conspiratorial buzzwords like George Soros, the Clintons, or vaccines, including one for the coronavirus. Zignal Labs also calculates that, when looking at online discussions of these topics that are likely to be misinformation, vote-by-mail mentions still outnumber those about these other topics.
That said, anxiety about voter fraud is common during any election season — it’s just not usually this unhinged. In most elections, one side thinks the other side is somehow going to steal the election by ballot-harvesting, double voting, machine-rigging, voter suppression, or any other number of methods, and those fears will either be realized by questions raised after a loss or forgotten in the sweet security of victory.
But the pandemic and all the uncertainty it’s created have exaggerated these fears. Just a small number of Americans — especially in states where it’s not yet a widespread practice — have previous experience voting by mail, according to Pew. An intelligence bulletin posted by the Department of Homeland Security has also warned that Russia is likely amplifying misinformation that casts doubts on the integrity of voting by mail. The incumbent president isn’t helping, either. Trump, who has said “mail-In Ballots will lead to massive electoral fraud and a rigged 2020 Election,” continues to find new ways to discredit the process, as have his lieutenants, like Attorney General Bill Barr.
History tells us that the voter fraud conspiracy theory is a bipartisan issue. For decades, competing and even converging theories about voter fraud have come from Democrats as well as Republicans. And according to research, no matter who loses, about a quarter of those on the losing side will likely believe the election was rigged for one reason or another. Believing in a conspiracy theory like this — or any conspiracy theory, for that matter — can be a useful coping mechanism for some.
“We like knowing that there are causes, and there’s intentionality behind things that happen in the world, and conspiracy theories help with all of that because they impose some structure on a messy, uncertain, random kind of world,” Adam Enders, a political scientist at the University of Louisville who studies conspiracy theories, told Recode. “They tell a story: There’s a winner, there’s a loser, and there’s a bad guy.”
So while it’s tempting to fixate on QAnon and how the many sordid elements of that conspiracy theory might matter in November, that risks missing something even bigger. The conspiracy theory about how voter fraud of some kind will rig the election might not seem so exciting. That might also be why it’s so dangerous.
Calm down about QAnon
QAnon is wild and scary, which is why it’s getting so much attention right now.
The term QAnon refers to a set of far-fetched conspiracy theories about how a cabal of elites — pedophiles who suck the blood of babies to gain special powers — is plotting against President Trump. If you strip out the more salacious words of that description, you’re left with the idea that elites are plotting against the president.
The thing is, there’s little concrete evidence that QAnon is attracting huge numbers of believers, though awareness of it is growing. From March to September, the number of Americans who had heard or read “a lot or a little” about QAnon doubled from 23 percent to 47 percent, according to a Pew survey. (The organization acknowledged that asking the same people the same question twice stands to skew the results.) Regardless, there’s a big difference between knowing about a conspiracy theory and believing in it.
Beyond the sheer number of its followers, the QAnon movement presents a different kind of danger. The growth of QAnon, which the FBI has identified as a potential domestic terrorism threat, coincides with a rise in right-wing extremist attacks and plots, and QAnon specifically has been linked to multiple acts of violence. There’s also overlap between QAnon believers and violent militia groups like the “boogaloo” movement. This is all deeply concerning and a threat to our democracy, too.
And QAnon is, in fact, finding some legitimacy in politics. Around the same time that QAnon believer Marjorie Taylor Greene won her House primary runoff in Georgia, the social media research company Storyful released data showing that membership in 10 large QAnon Facebook groups increased 600 percent from March to July, and the Instagram followings on top QAnon Instagram accounts quadrupled. On top of that, a Civiqs/Daily Kos poll in early September suggested that a third of Republicans believe the QAnon conspiracy theory is “mostly true.” All of this led to a flurry of reports about how QAnon had gone mainstream. Some conspiracy theory experts, however, have doubts about how the movement factors into the upcoming presidential election.
“We’re not finding a movement that’s either big or growing, or well-known,” said Joe Uscinski, a University of Miami political science professor who has been conducting polling on conspiracy theories for a decade. “This seems to me to be nothing more than a case of a media public, of journalists getting trapped in their own media bubble and just repeating over and over again that this is big and getting bigger and going mainstream.”
Some of the most recent polls, Uscinski has pointed out, ask people broadly if they believe in things like QAnon and the “deep state,” and then conflate the results to mean that belief in QAnon is on the rise. In fact, this broad category of conspiracy theories about shadowy elites dates back to the Masons, the Knights Templar, long-standing anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, and beyond. So it seems possible that people aren’t expressing familiarity with QAnon specifically but rather other long-standing conspiracy theories about a deep state.
“Conspiracy theories have always played a role in American politics, as far back as when the Anti-Masonic Party rose to power in the Northeast in the early 19th century,” said Travis View, who co-hosts the QAnon Anonymous podcast. “But even if conspiracy theory belief hasn’t increased generally in the United States, it’s notable that the conspiracy theory community are gathering under the banner of ‘Q.’”
Beware the boring conspiracy theory
So while QAnon certainly isn’t harmless — and may well pose a growing, if not violent threat if it continues to spread — its existence should not distract from the more popular, more imminent, and more dangerous conspiracy theories around voter fraud that are taking hold in the US. While QAnon supporters certainly have their own theories about how this year’s election is rigged, voter fraud misinformation has more people, and more prominent people like Trump, promoting it. That leaves both Republicans and Democrats questioning the integrity of American democracy.
As a result, discourse about voter fraud and other voting-related anxieties is finding a huge audience across the political spectrum. According to data from the intelligence firm NewsWhip, links shared on social media about voter fraud, mail-in voting, or vote-by-mail gathered nearly 99 million interactions over the past three months, compared to about 74 million interactions for stories about QAnon-adjacent topics like child trafficking. Meanwhile, stories that explicitly mentioned the terms QAnon, wwg1wga (shorthand for the QAnon rallying cry, “where we go one, we go all”), and #SaveTheChildren (a hashtag QAnon followers recently hijacked) had just over 15.5 million interactions over the past three months.
Data from Zignal Labs also shows that mentions of misinformation related to voting have continued to spike, again and again, this election cycle.
Voter fraud exists, but its prevalence is overexaggerated, particularly in modern US elections. As long as Americans have been voting, there have been reported instances of voter fraud, including some sensational ones that have been proven true. The conservative Heritage Foundation keeps a running tally of these that can be found on the White House website. Many of the cases reported therein are linked to absentee ballots, which provides rhetorical ammunition for President Trump, who has falsely claimed that mail-in voting will lead to a “rigged election” and similarly spent much of his 2016 campaign warning of voter fraud. Trump also keeps encouraging people to vote twice, which is illegal.
Republicans nevertheless maintain that, because voter fraud has happened in the past, it’s opening the doors for Democrats to steal this year’s election, when the pandemic is upending many voting norms. Despite Trump’s persistent warnings to the contrary, there were just four documented cases of voter fraud reported in the weeks after the 2016 election.
“We know from decades upon decades of data that while there is voting fraud in the United States, it is incredibly rare,” Sam Rhodes, a political scientist at Utah Valley University who studies fake news, told Recode. “It’s very difficult to swing an election by stealing a couple votes, especially when you consider the decentralized nature of the American federal election system.”
Meanwhile, there’s little evidence that higher levels of voting by mail will lead to more cheating. In the five states where mail-in voting is the norm — Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah, and Washington — there have been virtually no cases of documented voter fraud. What’s ironic is that Republicans historically have cast more absentee ballots than Democrats, which complicates Trump’s claim in August that mail-in ballots “are dangerous for this country because of cheaters.” The president’s rhetoric around voter fraud seems to be resonating within the party. A September Pew survey showed that 43 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents believe voter fraud associated with mail-in voting is a “major problem” in the election.
The voter fraud conspiracy theories conservatives are sharing online are evolving well beyond the president’s statements about mail-in voting, too. The right-wing site Natural News, which has been banned on Facebook after spreading conspiracy theories, has been pushing the baseless claim on its expansive network of sites that Democrats are using mail-in voting to skew the election in their favor.
Some of the voter fraud narratives can get pretty wild. One conspiracy theory making the rounds online is that arsonists set the recent West Coast wildfires in an attempt to shut down highways and prevent mail-in votes from being delivered and to suppress Republican turnout, according to research from the web intelligence firm Yonder. Meanwhile, former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker claimed in a Facebook post that Democrats were spreading a “fake postal controversy in hopes that worried people will vote by mail before the first debate.”
Democrats aren’t immune to voter fraud conspiracy theories, though they tend to worry more about the voter suppression side of things. The “fake postal controversy” Walker mentioned is a reference to the disruptions in the US Postal Service that followed the appointment of Louis DeJoy, a top Trump donor, as postmaster general. Those disruptions included the removal of 711 mail-sorting machines from postal facilities and widespread mail delays. Meanwhile, misleading images of collection boxes being removed from street corners went viral on social media.
All of this led to allegations that the Trump administration was sabotaging the election by dismantling the Postal Service, claims that were swiftly framed by conservatives as a false conspiracy theory about a far-fetched form of voter suppression. Yet, just as Republicans could claim that voter fraud has actually happened in the past, there was no denying the fact that actions taken by the president had disrupted the Postal Service mere months before an election that could be decided by mail-in voting. Trump even admitted to blocking USPS funding because he didn’t want universal mail-in voting.
Conspiratorial thinking of this nature has been a bipartisan issue for decades on both sides, according to a 2017 paper published in Political Research Quarterly . Notably, the authors report, “Republicans are especially prone to believing that people are casting ballots they should not, whereas Democrats are more concerned that they are not able to cast ballots.”
In many ways, conspiracy theories that flirt with the facts are more harmful than those that seem more outrageous. Conspiracy theories about QAnon are not nearly as dangerous to elections as those about voter fraud and voter suppression because they’re so much more believable and embraced by a much larger share of the population. Even if they’re not true — and even if they’re not completely believed — these conspiracy theories can seed doubt in the minds of millions of American voters about the democratic process, and when the media or the president amplifies these theories, those doubts become much more severe.
“The long-term impact of those kinds of stories is that a few weeks after the fact, we know we heard something, and we have a question in our mind,” said Kris Shaffer, technical director of Yonder. “Even if the truth was really clearly laid out, we’ll still have a question in our mind as to what actually happened.”
“We’re gonna have to see what happens”: Trump’s comments about the peaceful transfer of power, explained
Trump won’t commit because he’s hoping the Supreme Court will save him.
In a remarkable moment on Thursday, President Donald Trump refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power following November’s election.
“Win, lose, or draw in this election, will you commit here today for a peaceful transferral of power after the election?” Trump was asked during a press conference by Brian Karem, the White House reporter for Playboy. It would have been a layup for any other president, but Trump took it as an opportunity to push conspiracy theories about mail voting.
“We’re gonna have to see what happens,” Trump said. “We want to get rid of the ballots, and we’ll have a very peaceful — there won’t be a transfer, frankly. There’ll be a continuation.”
This isn’t the first time Trump has refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power — he said the same thing during an interview with Chris Wallace of Fox News in July.
By refusing to commit to a peaceful transfer of power if he loses, Trump isn’t necessarily alluding to the possibility of deploying federal troops to American streets to quash unrest. But as he’s consistently trailed Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden in the polls by an average of 6 to 9 points in the national popular vote, and a slightly smaller margin in battleground states, Trump has made no secret of his plan to use every tool at his disposal to challenge mail ballots.
The Trump campaign has already filed lawsuits against mail voting in key swing states like Pennsylvania and Nevada. Last month, CNN quoted an unnamed senior Trump campaign official who said “the game plan is to fight [new mail-in voting laws] at every turn,” and reported that the Republican National Committee plans to devote as much as $20 million to contest “voting laws and policies that they view as unconstitutional and potentially damaging to the President’s prospects of winning.”
These lawsuits have been hard-pressed to find a solid legal basis, as mail voting has already been proven to be largely safe from fraud in a number of states. But if Trump can’t ensure a second term at the ballot box, the plan seems to be to ensure it in the Supreme Court.
Trump has been very public about why he’s in a rush to fill Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s SCOTUS seat
Trump’s remark about wanting “to get rid of the ballots” alludes to his ongoing fight against mail voting, which he views as an existential threat to his presidency. He’s not even trying to hide that he’s in a rush to get Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s replacement on the Supreme Court so he can rely on the nation’s highest court to have his back if it ends up weighing in on the tallying of those ballots.
While a typical president would at least pretend to have reasons for rushing a nomination through that goes beyond naked self-interest, Trump, for better or worse, keeps saying the quiet part loud.
During a media availability on Wednesday, for instance, Trump told reporters that “I think it’s better” if Ginsburg’s replacement is approved before the election, “because I think this scam that the Democrats are pulling — it’s a scam — this scam will be before the United States Supreme Court, and I think having a 4-4 situation is not a good situation.”
By “scam,” Trump was referring to the conspiracy theories he’s been spreading for months about Democrats using mail voting to “rig” the election against him. In reality, a number of states (including purple ones like Oregon and deep-red Utah) already have robust mail voting systems that have proven to be relatively impervious to fraud. But Trump realizes that legal challenges to mail voting — which is more in demand this year than ever before because of the coronavirus pandemic — could allow him to challenge a possible Biden victory.
Trump said largely the same thing on Tuesday, when he told reporters that “we need nine justices” because “with the unsolicited millions of ballots that they’re sending … you’re gonna need nine justices up there. I think it’s gonna be very important.”
Of course, there’s no rule requiring that the Supreme Court have nine justices to oversee a presidential election — there were only eight in 2016 because Republicans stonewalled then-President Barack Obama’s attempt to nominate Antonin Scalia’s replacement.
What Trump is really saying is that nine justices are needed to ensure an outcome favorable to him — and Republicans like Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) don’t seem particularly troubled by this.
Why Trump wants a ninth justice on the Supreme Court before November 3
You don’t have to go far back in time to find precedent for the Supreme Court weighing in on a presidential election. The Supreme Court played a key role in 2000 by ruling that a recount in the decisive state of Florida be halted, a move that resulted in Al Gore conceding to Bush.
Trump is quite transparently counting on a similar last-ditch plan if key battlegrounds are trending against him — and wants to make sure the Court is stacked in his favor if and when it comes to that.
Following Ginsburg’s death, the Court is now divided between five justices nominated by Republicans — two by Trump (Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch), two by President George W. Bush (Samuel Alito and Chief Justice John Roberts), and one by President George H.W. Bush (Clarence Thomas) — and three nominated by Democrats (Obama nominations Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, and Stephen Breyer, who was nominated by President Bill Clinton). But Roberts has occasionally voted with the Court’s more liberal justices and can’t necessarily be counted on to side with Trump, raising the specter of a 4-4 vote.
That changes if Trump is able to make the third successful SCOTUS nomination of his term. In that event, even if Roberts does up voting with the liberals, the bloc of Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, Alito, Thomas, and whichever conservative replaces Ginsburg would likely be enough to assure that whatever challenge to mail voting the Court ends up hearing on behalf of Trump has a good chance of success.
Since mail ballots tabulated after Election Day could potentially sway the result for Biden, the Atlantic’s Barton Gellman reported that one possibility is Trump proclaiming victory if the margin is close on election night, then citing real or imaged irregularities with mail ballots to try to get them thrown out.
As Ari Berman, a senior reporter at Mother Jones and author of Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America , told me last month, “mail ballots take longer to count than in-person ballots. So you could very much have a situation where the initial returns make it seems like Republicans are way up, because the mail ballots that are largely cast by Democrats haven’t been counted yet.”
A tweet Trump posted in 2018 as mail ballots tallied after Election Day threatened to swing races in Florida from apparent Republican victories to Democratic victories encapsulates the line of thinking he might use to try to discredit mail ballots this time around.
Again, Trump isn’t really even trying to hide that if he can’t win at the ballot box, he’s hoping for a 2000 redux. During a rally in Fayetteville, North Carolina, last Saturday, Trump said, “We’re gonna have a victory on November 3 the likes of which you’ve never seen. Now we’re counting on the federal court system to make it so we can actually have an evening where we know who wins.”
But because so many voters plan to vote by mail this year, it’s unlikely that we’ll know who won the presidential election on election night. That’s not evidence of fraud — it just reflects logistical challenges with tallying mail ballots. Trump, however, is telegraphing that allegations of election fraud could be his last-ditch strategy for holding on to power, and he’s hoping that getting Ginsburg’s replacement on the Supreme Court will help in that effort.
Donald Trump Goes Full Dictator, Vows to Stay in Office Regardless of Election Results
White House Doubles Down on Donald Trump’s Vow to Stay in Power No Matter What
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Significant endorsements for BIden/Harris
Ex Gov of PA Tom Ridge
The Rock - Duane Johnson
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Here comes more investigative work into T’s campaign, with Brad Parscale being tied to $170 million campaign funding then laundered.
KEY FACTS
“The Trump campaign and Trump Make America Great Again Committee disguised nearly $170 million of campaign spending by laundering the funds through firms,” the complaint claims.
It adds that the firms are “headed by Trump’s recent campaign manager, Brad Parscale, and/or created by Trump campaign lawyers.”
The complaint alleges that the Trump campaign paid millions of dollars to campaign-connected vendors without reporting those payments to the FEC, specifically honing in on American Made Media Consultants (AMMC), a firm created by Parscale, which has been paid over $106 million, making it the campaigns largest vendor.
AMMC was ostensibly created to circumvent media buyers, but the complaint points to FCC records that show the campaign has used media buying firm Harris Sikes to place some of its ads, alleging the campaign is “failing to report payments to the firms and is instead using AMMC as a conduit for its payments to the firms.”
The complaint also points to an app called Phunware, which Parscale has said was created and is “directly owned” by the campaign, but which has never appeared in the campaign’s spending reports because, as the complaint alleges, it was paid through AMMC.
Trump campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh denied the charges made in the complaint, telling Forbes, “The campaign reports all payments to AMMC as required by the FEC. The campaign complies with all campaign finance laws and FEC regulations.”
Crucial Quote
By failing to report payments to the campaign’s true vendors and employees, the Trump campaign and Trump Make America Great Again Committee have violated, and continue to violate, federal law’s transparency requirements,” the complaint asserts, adding that such activities “undermine the vital public information role that reporting is intended to serve.”
Key Background
Parscale was named as Trump’s campaign manager in February 2018 but was replaced in that role by Bill Stepien earlier this month. Parscale’s firms have long been the object of media scrutiny for receiving large sums from the Trump campaign and for Parscale maintaining a lavish lifestyle well beyond the means of most presidential campaign managers.
Chief Critic
"Voters have a right to know how campaigns are spending money to influence elections," CLC founder and President Trevor Potter, a Republican and former FEC Chair, told CNN. "This scheme flies in the face of transparency requirements mandated by federal law, and it leaves voters and donors in the dark about where the campaign’s funds are actually going."
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Video:
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The Channel 4 Story:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIf5ELaOjOk&feature=youtu.be
And youtube links no longer work here.
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