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Notes -
I want a vice presidential debate top level post.
So JD Vance sounded pretty good here overall. If you ask me, both speakers were miles ahead of their presidential candidate counterparts, which is sad. There is probably a lot that can be read from the debate, but I did want to discuss a couple moments making waves on other social media. First I will mention I was surprised to hear JD Vance support nuclear energy, and I will also mention a lot of people were probably unhappy with how he handled the gun control/mass shooting question. But back to the two I wanted to mention
The first such moment originated from a fact check:
Tim Walz responds to his statement, and then a debate moderator comes in with this:
I will cut it off there to not balloon this post. You can read the transcript here.
It seems many blue tribers saw him complaining about a fact check and seeing a win. Why would you complain about fact checking other than if you were lying? This is another example going back to Scott's post about the media rarely lying. Hey, they're temporary asylum seekers, so since they were allowed in with little hindrances to speak of, they're legal. Fact checked. This is an example of why I tend to dislike fact checking in a debate. It introduces an opportunity to use unfavorable framing on an opponent with lawyerspeak on technically true things. Let the candidates do it themselves if they want.
Next up, the January 6th and failure to concede the election:
Once again, there is more to this exchange than that. I said earlier that they had good performances, and I'll go further here and say that JD Vance had a pretty great night. I'd never heard him speak before and he sounded very well spoken, very well informed, and brought up many issues that I so dearly wished that Donald Trump would have brought up, like specifically naming the asylum system and mentioning the partial birth abortions allowed in Minnesota (I noticed Tim Walz's denial was not fact checked). That is to say, JD Vance is competent and might have won against Kamala Harris, representing a return to civil debates and "normal" politicians, despite the "weird" allegations.
But he is really dragged down on this issue. It's lame he has to defend election denial claims in the first place, and leave room for challenging more later. I know many of you have strong feelings on the truthfulness of the claims. I will say this: if someone goes and makes those claims, they shouldn't run again. That is very powerful ammo for the other side. And it's far from the only ammo. I am very disappointed with the rhetoric Trump throws around. His lashing out against Taylor Swift reads as totally pathetic. And it is sad to see someone with as much talent as JD Vance have to try to slip around all this crap coming at him, from both Tim Walz, the debate moderator, and untold amounts of unhappy people on Twitter.
This reminds me of my previous post on the brutal NPR fact check of Trump.
Really though, I think it was a poor choice by Vance to even remotely accept the frame as a "fact check". His answer is excellent and correct. When speaking to me, I will hear "fact check" in this context as meaning "pedantic bullshit that's irrelevant to the core claim". I will hear his explanation of how these migrants have become technically temporarily legal, and think, "exactly, the fact that this has a veneer of legality is the core problem, we must stop this". But yeah, other people still believe that a media "fact check" is actually just them checking the facts, so I think it would have been smarter to say something like, "you agreed to not argue with Governor Walz and I about our statements".
My stance on January 6 and the quality of the 2020 election has already been articulated at length. I think it's politically unfortunate that the more popular position is that January 6 was a calamity and that the 2020 election was good and fair. I suspect that Vance's honest position is much closer to mine that Trump's, which is that the 2020 election was bad and unfair, but not exactly "stolen". Either way, he's kind of stuck because he can't directly contradict Trump, but also doesn't want to say very unpopular things. I'm not sure what I would say in his spot. I suppose pretty much the same things - his opponents egged on riots all through 2020, insist on keep elections insecure so we can't actually trust them, and want to censor anyone that questions the quality of elections. Maybe that's a losing position, but it's one that I do sincerely believe is basically accurate.
If Trump represents an existential danger to American democracy and an imminent threat of fascist tyranny, then it would be irresponsible for patriotic Democrats and all upstanding citizens to not to cheat or bend the rules in any manner they could get away with. Democrats should not hold election integrity and fairness as a terminal value--not when the stakes are this high. Besides, the amount of lies, disinformation, and election interference coming from Trump, and malefactors like Russia, is artificially boosting Trump's popularity among low information voters. If Democrats have an opportunity to put their thumb on the scales without completely invalidating the election, then it should be their duty to do so. One or two somewhat shady elections is a small price to pay for stopping Trump. The remaining question is just whether it will be enough to make a difference.
I don’t believe it.
Most people aren’t Raskolnikov. They don’t make decisions like this. At most, they use such a ghoulish, utilitarian calculus as a post facto justification.
No, if there was cheating, it was banal. The first thought was “hey, I can get something I want.” The second, if it happened at all, would have been “no one will notice.” That’s sufficient to explain the kind of crimes that @Walterodim suggested. Fudging counts, encouraging false statements. Voting for your dead parent.
But the “existential danger” theory proves much, much more. If you’re convinced Trump is Turbo Hitler, why are you stopping at a fake ballot? Where’s your manifesto and your one-dollar stamps? How did you suddenly become amazing at judging risk, such that no one gets caught in the act?
The Venn diagram between Trump haters, principled utilitarians, and election officials has to be vanishingly small. Perhaps that’s why he’s had such an hard time finding evidence of fraud.
I see it as more a prospiracy, and it's mostly small actions on the margin by many individuals. There are almost certainly some more bold cheaters, but I just think they must have gotten away with it. It's not like it's easy to prove, and it has recently gotten even harder. The people who are most able to investigate are uninterested in doing so, because they don't want to discover cheating for various reasons. Easier to leave the "investigation" to a bunch of wingnuts who can easily be discredited and ignored. So long as the Democrats aren't cheating too much, and they are doing it to hurt Trump, I think most of our institutions are quite happy to turn a blind eye (including a lot of Republicans). This kind of cheating is itself less dangerous than people beleiving it is happening, so it's tolerated so long as it is simultaneously denied. There are limits to this, but I think activists have gotten quite savvy about how to game these election systems.
Assassination attempts are kind of a proxy here. For every one person who is willing to try and assassinate Trump, how many are willing to cheat if a good opportunity presents itself? Probably a lot, and a lot of those people will get themselves involved in the electoral process.
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