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Is there anything the government could feasibly do to nudge Republicans towards accepting the results of the election in the event that Trump loses? Trump himself has a big personal incentive to say the election is "rigged" if he loses no matter what. It redirects the conversation from analyzing the defeat ("how could we do better"), which will inevitably shine a light on Trump's shortfalls, to one where the basic facts of reality are debated instead. The obvious example is the 2020 election. Lesser known was that Trump did the same thing in 2016 when he lost the Iowa primary to Ted Cruz. Now it seems he's preparing to do the same in 2024.
Many Republicans are more than willing to go along with this, mostly due to either negative partisanship or living in a bubble ("everyone I knew was voting for Trump, then the other guy won? Something doesn't smell right!"). If the pain of defeat stings, why not just be a sore loser instead? I've debated many people who thought the 2020 election was rigged, and inevitably it goes down one of three rabbitholes:
Vibes-based arguments that are short on substance, but long on vague nihilism that "something was off". Nearly 70% of Republicans think 2020 was stolen in some way, yet most are normies who don't spend a lot of time trying to form a set of coherent opinions, so the fallback of "something was off" serves as a way to affirm their tribal loyalty without expending much effort.
Motte-and-bailey to Trump's claims by ignoring everything Trump himself says, and instead going after some vague institutional flaw without providing any evidence to how it actually impacted 2020. For instance, while mail-in ballots are a nice convenience for many, there are valid concerns to a lack of oversight in how people fill out their ballots. People can be subjected to peer pressure, either from their family or even from their landlord or another authority figure to fill out their ballot a certain way. However, no election is going to 100% perfect, and just because someone can point out a flaw doesn't mean the entire thing should be thrown out. In a similar vein, Democrats have (rightly) pointed out that gerrymandering can cause skewed results in House elections, yet I doubt many Republicans would say that means results would need to be nullified especially if Democrats had just lost. These things are something to discuss and reform for future elections.
People who do buy at least some of the object-level claims that Trump or Giuliani has advanced about 2020 being stolen. There's certainly a gish-gallop to choose from. The clearest meta-evidence that these are nonsense is that nearly everyone I've debated with has chosen a different set of claims to really dig deep into. For most political issues, parties tend to organically rally around a few specific examples that have the best evidence or emotional valence. The fact that this hasn't happened for Trump's claims is indicative that none of them are really that good, and they rely more on the reader being unfamiliar with them to try to spin a biased story. One example occurred a few weeks ago on this site, one user claimed the clearest examples were Forex markets (which were subsequently ignored), Ruby Freeman, and the Cyber Ninja's Audit. I was only vaguely aware of these, so I did a quick Google search and found a barrage of stories eviscerating the Ruby Freeman and Cyber Ninja narratives. I then asked for the response, preferably with whatever relatively neutral sources he could find, since I was sure he'd claim the sources I had Googled were all hopelessly biased. But this proved too high a bar to clear for him, and so the conversation went nowhere. Maybe there's a chance that some really compelling evidence exists out there that would easily prove at least some of the major allegations correct, but at this point I doubt it.
At this point it seems like the idea that elections are rigged is functionally unfalsifiable. The big question on the Republican side now would be whether to claim the elections were rigged even if Trump DOES win. The stock explanation would be that the Dems are rigging it so they have +20% more votes than they normally would, so a relatively close election means Trump actually won by a huge margin. On the other hand, saying the election was rigged at all could diminish Trump's win no matter what, and it's not hard to imagine Trump claiming "this was the most legitimate election in the history of our country" if he manages to come out on top.
Is there anything we can do to nudge the public into accepting that yes, Governor Cuomo can effortlessly curl 100 lbs dumbells the way you or I can effortlessly life the tv remote? At this point, it seems like "the weights were clearly fake" is completely unfalsifiable.
itsallsotiresome.jpg
Telling me to my face that a campaign that consisted of: -a clearly on the decline Biden, who had been a joke in all his previous attempts, -who only had any credidibility due to having been elevated the the Vice Presidency by Obama (who famously loathed him) as a sop to certain factions within the Democratic party, and who did little to nothing to support his candidacy -who had to have the rest of the party candidates drop out - save for Warren, to split the progressive vote - and rally behind him to stop Bernie Sanders from gaining traction -who routinely "called it a day" by 8 am, held few rallies, and couldn't manage to get anyone to show up when he did -with a running mate whose popularity was so abyssmal she couldn't even make it to the first party caucus
Was, in fact, secretly such a charismatic candidate that he shattered voting results, even above that obtain by historically transformative candidates, is to insult my intelligence. That simply does. not. happen. To ask me to not even question this is to insist that I ignore everything that I have ever seen about Presidential campaigns, to forget everything I know about general voting trends, to just have amnesia about how elections work, and how voters vote, in general. Such a claim falls well within the "to even claim this happened is evidence you're lying" territory; it may as well be the poster child for "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
To go on to claim that in spite of more than doubling the number of write-in ballots - and thus, the number of people voting remotely for the first time - we managed to get ballot rejection rates down to levels practically indistinguishable from zero!. In most cases, we were able to reduce the rate of rejection by five-fold! I guess we were all wrong about the Boomers!
Wait, no, we weren't; such a claim, again, flies in the face of reality. This simply does. not. happen. Ever.
But wait, there's more! I am also to simply ignore Georgia closing up polling stations due to a water main bursting, sending observers home, then dumping votes that went 100% for Biden that were totally already counted before Republican observers were given the boot, nothing to see here, it's honestly disturbing you'd even think to question such a thing, really. I am to simply take in stride that observers were kicked out, and windows blocked from outside observation, totall normal, totally legit, only a loony would think there might even be the barest scintilla of a possibility that something untoward was going on. Why, it's only fair that the Dems would insist on obstructing any attempts to crack down on obvious avenues of vote fraud, as such actions are prima facie evidence that Republicans are just sore losers, as there can certainly be no justification for such efforts!
But this is all old hat at this point; this "debate" has been had with you on the reddit, and here, ad nauseum. You will never offer anything other than the most perfunctary of rebuttals, with a sneer for anyone who disagrees.
That post made a lot of specific complaints and you're literally just dismissing them out of hand with literally zero content. I think you've forgotten what this place is for.
Please commit to explain how Joe Biden, despite his faults, has been more popularly elected than even prime Obama.
What do you mean by "more popularly elected?" Biden's EC margin was lower than either of Obama's and Biden's popular vote margin was between Obama's margins (lower than 2008, higher than 2012). More generally the US popular vote has been trending Dem for a while now. The Republican presidential candidate has won the popular vote once (Bush 2004) in the last 30 years.
I am not talking about the relative margin.
Biden got 81,284,000 votes total, the most ever. Beating Obama's record 69,498,516.
I don't think population growth alone can account for that. And I'm not really seeing how one can justify it with enthusiasm.
How can one justify it with non-enthusiasm?
Take out a factor for population, and you’re still left with millions of excess votes. The number of citizens grew by around 7.5M, but there were over 17M more votes. That’s not the kind of gap that hides in a couple of stuffed mailboxes. It should be obvious, incontrovertible, a smoking gun.
But that’s not what we see. Existing mechanisms like poll watchers haven’t caught such fraud. Surprise audits by experts and partisans haven’t found anything close. States with wide variety in procedures and political incentives keep turning up the same lack of evidence.
Forget the Republicans. There’s a huge incentive for Democrat muckrakers to look for just one abuse in a red state. That kind of “gotcha” would be plastered all over social media. But we don’t see that, because there’s nothing to be found. Trump didn’t have to fake it to get 11M more votes.
If he managed that compared to his 2016 bid, surely Biden could manage it compared to Hillary Clinton. People stopped voting Green, stopped voting Libertarian, stopped sitting it out. It was just that polarizing.
While I am and have been generally skeptical for the strong version of the 2020 vote fraud argument:
McCrae Dowless was.
Exactly. That’s the best they could come up with.
I think of cases like these as the motte for election interference. If we can’t find equivalents for the 2020 election, which was more charged, more vulnerable, and more closely scrutinized, I think that suggests an extremely low rate of fraud.
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Funny you would say that, since one of the big 'smoking guns' was poll watchers in battleground states being effectively prevented from watching -- whether under the pretense of anti-covid measures, or counting continuing outside of their presence.
It’s not funny I’d say that. Poll watchers are doing an important job. If you’re talking about the Detroit or Fulton cases, I found them unconvincing.
Do you have more info on the COVID topic? I’m curious about the actual changes in policy. All I find with Google is scaremongering about amateur poll watchers.
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