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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 7, 2024

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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.

Aren’t you the poster who spent two years denying inflation was happening?

More effort than this, please.

I don't think so. I've argued in the past that Republicans think the economy is far worse than it actually is, that real (i.e. inflation-adjusted) wages are up, etc. but I've never denied inflation was actually happening.

I've argued in the past that Republicans think the economy is far worse than it actually is

This isn't the sort of thing that people are likely to be "wrong" about, because their evaluation of the economy is based on metrics that impact them directly.

Lunch at Five Guys costs me $30 right now, so for me, the economy is bad. There's no argument you can present to me on this forum right now that will make my burger stop costing $30. Job numbers, real wages, exact rate of inflation and etc, are all irrelevant, because my burger still costs $30. So instead of trying to verbally convince me that the economy isn't actually that bad, why don't we instead come up with a plan of action to make my burger not cost $30 anymore? Is there anyone in November running on a platform of making burgers not cost as much? Because I'll vote for that guy.

So instead of trying to verbally convince me that the economy isn't actually that bad, why don't we instead come up with a plan of action to make my burger not cost $30 anymore? Is there anyone in November running on a platform of making burgers not cost as much? Because I'll vote for that guy.

Well, I wasn't planning on getting involved in politics, but if that's what you're concerned about, I have a plan that all but guarantees to get the cost of that hamburger down: First, we'll raise interest rates up to Volcker-era levels. If this managed to get inflation down by double digits, with inflation currently sitting at 2.5%, it should be enough to get double-digit deflation. Next, I'm going to raise taxes on practically everyone. Current middle class brackets are in the 21%–24% bracket, let's get them into the 25%-30% range they were at before the Reagan tax cuts. Next, we'll get rid of all tariffs. There's no reason for Five Guys to be forced to pay extra if they can get cheaper beef from Brazil. Finally, end all immigration restrictions. Farmers, food processing plants, and restaurants shouldn't have to pay anyone $15/hr when there are plenty of people who would work for the minimum wage and be glad to get it. Now, there's a decent chance that you might not have a job after my plan takes effect, rendering the cost of restaurant food a moot point, but that would do it.

This line of thought is actually highly atypical. Even in 2022/2023 iirc a majority of Americans rated their own economic circumstances as good/improving, they just thought the country as a whole wasn't.

This isn't the sort of thing that people are likely to be "wrong" about, because their evaluation of the economy is based on metrics that impact them directly.

That makes sense. Unfortunately, it's demonstrably false. Polls ask both "how are you doing economically?" and "how's the economy doing in general?" (but, erm, worded better by people who know how to ask poll questions). While the former doesn't exactly track the stock market minute-by-minute, the latter is consistently (at least in the past several years) strongly affected by partisanship. I totally believe that people's feelings about their own economic situation is difficult to judge from top-level economic statistics, especially ones biased towards measuring how well the economy is working for rich people, but people's assessment of the economy of a whole is strongly influenced by their political leanings over any observation of the facts.

Also, to be clear, this isn't a "Republicans are lying" claim. Both sides are heavily influenced by partisanship here. Look at the first graph in the first link I gave above: at Biden's inauguration the answer to "is the economy getting better?" flipped from around 50% of Republicans/10% of Democrats to around 10% of Republicans/50% of Democrats. That chart seems more useful for determining who is president than anything else.

If such a candidate existed you wouldn't vote for him anyway. At least I don't think so, because I don't think communists are well-received here.

Paul Volcker wasn't a communist, and it doesn't take communism to keep prices stable instead of wildly inflating.

But no, nobody is running on that platform, because it would require cutting off the gravy train. The Dollar Endgame is coming, eventually, and when it arrives it will be in a rush.

You didn't ask for a candidate to "keep prices stable." You asked for a candidate to actively bring the price of products down. That's a much bigger ask, and much closer to the realm of price controls.

No, it's firmly in the realm of deflation.

You

The guy you just replied to wasn't me.

I'm not a strict market libertarian, I think that if there are reasonable interventions we can make in the economy then we should do that. I agree that direct price controls are a bad idea, but to suggest that there are no actions whatsoever that can be undertaken to reduce inflation doesn't strike me as plausible.

Fair. My fault for not checking. But to but you and @KMC , the original comment did say to actively reduce prices. If this quick source is correct the last time we had deflation was 1954. And generally speaking, deflation means the economy is in a very bad condition.

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I would add that the problem is the government data is controlled by the people who benefit from positive data. It isn’t totally fake but there are fudge factors and it isn’t entirely clear if they are 1) being fudged and 2) if so the size of the fudging.

For example food inflation was in the mid twenties over the Biden admin. Industry group calculated it around 35%. Maybe the industry group is wrong or maybe the government is wrong. But the industry group seemingly fits my experience a bit more.

He is the poster who when it was pointed out to him the job numbers were fake didn’t believe it.

Is there anything the government could feasibly do to nudge Republicans towards accepting the results of the election in the event that Trump loses?

Wait for Donald Trump to die.

Until then anything is pissing into the wind.

Trump has achieved a bizarre leverage over the Republican party, where even people who he has abused, insulted, and degraded still only offer milquetoast criticism against him. Trump controls enough of the Republican base that no Republican can go against him, and he isn't going to change his tune.

There's no negotiation here. Winning doesn't fix it. Losing doesn't fix it. Implementing supposed ballot security measures won't fix it.

Georgia was the epicenter of voter fraud theories. Georgia has voter ID laws. Georgia was run, in 2020, by a Republican Governor, and a Republican majority of 26 in the House. If a Republican administration, working with a Republican Governor, in a state long controlled by Republicans, can't root out the appearance of corruption using the techniques people are asking for to combat corruption, it's hopeless. Either the FEMA deep state is so powerful that it's unbeatable anyway, or nothing will ever convince people that Trump lost.

I think that a lot of people are under the impression that "wait until everything goes back to normal" is a viable strategy for dealing with whatever their pet problem happens to be.

I think the fundamental problem with that is confusing the symptom for the cause. It's certainly possible that Trump is uniquely causal of this voter ID thing. But I wouldn't bet on it going away after he dies. And I think the basic skepticism of election integrity (on the right, but also on the left from time to time) predates his POTUS run.

I don't think things are going "back to normal," if there ever was such a thing.

@Shrike

It's certainly possible that Trump is uniquely causal of this voter ID thing.

@TequilaMockingbird

If the establishment wants people to trust the process they really need to shut up about subverting the process to defeat Trump, and they really need to stop opposing things like requiring id to vote.

You both cite Voter ID, along with many other commenters in this thread.

Voter ID has been a fight in American politics since I can remember, and I'm sure it was around before that. Georgia passed Voter ID in 2005. Did Trump accept the result of the election in Georgia?

Arizona has had voter ID from 2019. Did Trump accept the result in Arizona?

Wisconsin's Voter ID law took effect in 2011 (aside: I love the website name Wiscontext). Did Trump accept the result in Wisconsin?

Michigan requires photo ID. Did Trump accept the results in Michigan?

It's pretty obvious that "pass a voter ID law" isn't going to fix things. And we can play various forms of "true voter ID has never been tried" with things like National ID cards showing citizenship or an American version of the Hukou system to register where everyone lives, but there's no actual push to implement that, and those kinds of government registries that allow for more direct Federal control over people's lives have been considered a Bad Thing by Republicans at all levels for generations. Given the repeated failures to implement RealID, we're probably not going to see a successful implementation of National ID any time soon.

Voter ID : Election Integrity as Police Body Cams : Black Lives Matter. It's a reasonable sounding procedural change that will ultimately change nothing.

But even if we agree on Voter ID, normally the conversation moves on to mail in ballots. The venerable @Rov_Scam has done the Yeoman's work and extensively outlined how mail-in ballot changes were passed, in many cases by Republicans to benefit Republican constituencies like the rural elderly and the self-employed. The only state to implement mail-in balloting by executive action in 2020 to go for Biden was New Hampshire. Which...actually I don't know of any Trump efforts to overturn the result in New Hampshire. If it happened I don't think it got a lot of press? I'll note that personally, I do not vote by mail, and I dislike vote by mail systems in general, because I don't trust myself to successfully fill out paperwork and my handwriting is atrocious, it is worth taking a few hours off during the day to make sure my ballot is counted. I'm also pretty sure that the most powerful constituency in American politics is Nursing Home Aides, who even leaving aside actually filling out ballots for their charges, can simply decide to "lose" the mail in ballots for residents whose politics they know to be antithetical to their own. I'm surprised neither side has promised massive pay increases for them yet.

Then the argument shifts to more subtle/secret Democrat manipulation schemes, but as we saw above there's not much pattern to R control of state government or D control of state government in terms of accusations of voter fraud.

But to return to our list of states above, let's zoom in on two: Georgia and Arizona both had R Governors and R State Houses. There was, obviously, an R in the White House for four years before the election. Both states had voter ID laws implemented before the election. Both states went for Biden, and despite extensive efforts neither state's results were ultimately overturned. Given that outcome, why should we expect implementing Voter ID laws nationally to lead to Trump and friends accepting another election loss, should it occur?

I really don't think there was anything in my post that suggests that adopting voter ID laws will Make The Problem Go Away, but I do agree(?) with you that my use of voter ID was imprecise at best. (I'd say the pause in the election count was worse for Election Integrity Vibes than the state of voter ID laws – most people don't care to grok the nuances of voter ID law but they are impatient to know who won the election.)

Fair. I didn't think you considered voter ID a complete solution either, I just focused on it to dig into one point.

Fixing perceptions/actualities of vote counting unfairness in blue machine run cities is either a coup-complete problem or near enough that it makes no difference. It requires probably allowing/forcing city government to annex suburbs such that the political unit becomes significantly more ethnically and politically balanced, but idk if that is remotely politically or practically possible. Any procedural changes short of that will still leave too much room for unaccountable actors to exercise influence on the process. Certainly it is not achievable by anyone by November.

At the end of the day it's very hard, in my mind, to square the anonymous ballot with election security, since the only way to be 100% certain that someone voted for a person in an environment where fraud is possible is to ask them.

I'm sure smart people can come up with a system using cryptography that preserves anonymity and ~guarantees secure elections, but most people won't be able to verify the security of the system themselves, so it's not actually helpful.

A slightly lower-IQ (and easier to understand) solution might just be to make all voting in-person and have a video feed that keeps a running headcount, and tally the voter headcount with the votes at the end of the day, or something like that. (I actually imagine similar measures are already used, though, but I've never looked into it.)

But at the end of the day I think the problem is more vibes-related. This is detached from whether or not the vibes are onto something or not – you can have a situation where lots of voter fraud doesn't cause a legitimacy crisis because it's not suspected in a high-trust environment, and you can have a system where there's a crisis of legitimacy because people suspect that elections are being rigged even if their security is airtight.

I'm not sure there's a way to fix a vibes problem quickly. I suspect the only way out of that is through.

I think it’s possible. If you have a barcode on an object that allows you to track it across a network, and you don’t necessarily have To know what the contents are. UPS can track millions of packages from warehouse to multiple locations to your front door by scanning the barcode on the box and uploading that to a server. Blockchain can be tracked without needing to know what the “package” contains or represents. This isn’t a ned to invent new technology. We could do things like this now with pretty muc( off the shelf technology. Scan the barcode on every ballot on paper at the point it’s cast. Scan every time the ballots move. If you see ballots arrive that cannot be traced to a precinct, then you’re likely seeing fake ballots.

Yep, that definitely makes sense to me. I think the point of failure there is "Okay, how do we prevent someone from backdooring the entire system and just filling in fake data?" And while I suspect there are answers to that, I'm not sure they are answers everyone will buy in a low-trust environment.

This doesn't mean interventions like this aren't worth doing, though. Perhaps that's precisely what's needed to end Voter Fraud Discourse, I don't know. I just expect that simply rolling some fancy whiz-bang foolproof and fast voter counter Rube Goldberg machine won't by itself be enough to Save Democracy – you'll need to prove that it works, and that might take many election cycles.

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Arizona has had voter ID from 2019. Did Trump accept the result in Arizona?

This is a very poor choice of example given the widely reported issues in Maricopa county and the obvious conflict of interest invovled in the person in nominal charge of the count also being a candidate.

How does voter ID work in connection with mail in ballots

You'd have to ask the Republican majorities in PA and GA that passed laws allowing for extensive mail in voting while also advocating voter ID laws.

It'll always be something.

Usually you write the ID number somewhere on the ballot, ie. Putting your driver's license number on the inside of the outer ballot.

Wait for Donald Trump to die.

Wait? This is perhaps the worst answer one could give.

The fundemental problem facing the chattering class, deep-state, and democratic party partisans is that Trump doesn't "control" the Republican base as much as he represents them (he may not be a particularly good representative, but that is beside the point). If you kill Trump there is a good chance somone else will just take his place.

If the establishment wants people to trust the process they really need to shut up about subverting the process to defeat Trump, and they really need to stop opposing things like requiring id to vote. TLDR a super-majority of Americans approve of requiring some sort of proof of citizenship to vote in federal elections and yet these are sorts of fight the DoJ is choosing to fight.

The fundemental problem facing the chattering class, deep-state, and democratic party partisans is that Trump doesn't "control" the Republican base as much as he represents them (he may not be a particularly good representative, but that is beside the point). If you kill Trump there is a good chance somone else will just take his place.

They believe there is no one as effective at that, by orders of magnitude, as Trump himself. So once Trump leaves the scene, his base will go back to having formless and directionless anger which will not translate to votes for anyone, or perhaps (in the case of white union workers) can be lured back to the Democrats. Without Trump's base, the old-school Republicans are a distinct minority party and we get one-party rule.

They believe there is no one as effective at that, by orders of magnitude, as Trump himself. So once Trump leaves the scene, his base will go back to having formless and directionless anger

The better argument, which I've made before at length, is that no other major political figure actually resembles Trump at a detailed level in their politics. Which is remarkable when you consider the degree of his takeover of the GOP and the eight years of dominance he's exercised over party politics. Every single potential heir to MAGA has clear major policy, procedural, and stylistic differences to Trump.

If Biden choked on an almond the Dems would get Kamala, if she laughed until she burst a blood vessel in her brain they would nominate Mayor Pete or Big Gretch or Gavin Newsom, and in that whole process virtually nothing would change policy wise. If Trump simply decided he wanted to golf more and spend time with Barron, policy in the GOP would fundamentally change under his successor.

So once Trump leaves the scene, his base will go back to having formless and directionless anger which will not translate to votes for anyone

I remember establishment Democrats and various "independents" saying the same thing about Ted Cruz and the Tea Party back in 2010/12 and now we have Trump.

As many have pointed out over the last 8 years, Trump is a symptom not the cause, and forgive me if i find your claim that if we ignore the problem it will go away unconvincing.

That doesn't seem to conflict with what he said. The anger from the base has been there in various forms for years. What Trump managed to do was convert that anger into support for him specifically, and for that support to reach a level where Trump can force others to toe the line.

The point isn't that anger will go away, just that it won't converge in a single direction. DeSantis for instance seemed poised to play himself as Trump 2.0, and that didn't work out for him.

DeSantis is in the same boat as Abbott he's got more pull as a governor of an important state than he would as a candidate and has nothing to gain from running as "Trump Lite" while the original is still on the menu.

At 45 years old, DeSantis can afford to wait a few years for Trump to retire.

It may be worthwhile to point out that the Republicans were a minority party for the whole postwar period (often about half the size of the Democratic Party) but elected only two term Presidents (depending on how you want to count Nixon) until HW while the Democrats never had a President get reflected anywhere between Truman and Clinton. Republicans were seen as something of the same, stable party for a long time, even by registered Democrats (there's a reason the Republicans got 'evil' out of the 'evil party and stupid party' dichotomy). Plenty of Democrats wanted to vote for Eisenhower, Nixon, and Reagan over their opponents.

The problem I've always had here, particularly looking down at some of the below comments, is the way that there seem to be several concentric circles of mottes on this question, none of which actually correspond to what Trump or some of his partisans claimed.

Thus, for instance, sometimes there's an argument that US election security could be significantly improved. I wholly agree with this. There are many ways that US elections could be made more secure, transparent, and responsible.

We also sometimes see the argument that the institutional landscape, particularly re: media, academia and 'experts', civil servants and bureaucrats, etc., is so thoroughly slanted as to systematically misrepresent the positions of right-wing or Republican figures. No election held on such biased terrain can be considered fair. The entire institutional ecosystem is soft-rigged against the GOP, regardless of whether there was any direct voter fraud. This is an argument that I have a lot of time for - if one faction has a huge advantage in political communication, and its credibility is laundered by all the major epistemic institutions of its society, then it's hardly a free and fair contest of ideas.

However, these were not the actual arguments made by Trump and allies, nor were they the arguments voiced on January 6. Those arguments were much more clearly motivated and false. I'm thinking of arguments like 2000 Mules. It may be true that US elections aren't run well, and that the media landscape is biased to an extent that calls into question democratic legitimacy, but neither of those make D'Souza's specific claims true, or even plausible. Likewise with other claims.

Often I run into defenses like "take Trump seriously but not literally", or "Trump lies like a used car salesman, Democrats lie like lawyers", and to an extent I think the points those defenses are making are valid - Trump's communicative style relies heavily on deliberate exaggeration, but the audience is 'in' on that exaggeration to an extent; and there are more subtle and effective ways to lie that don't involve stating identifiable untruths.

But at some point, I think, that eventually turns into "I believe Trump's lies communicate a larger truth" and from there into "what Trump says is false, but I support him because I associate those falsehoods with something else that might be true" and from there to "I ignore what Trump actually says and substitute something else, and I support that something else". At some point you're just too far away from the candidate himself or his campaign.

The entire institutional ecosystem is soft-rigged against the GOP, regardless of whether there was any direct voter fraud. This is an argument that I have a lot of time for - if one faction has a huge advantage in political communication, and its credibility is laundered by all the major epistemic institutions of its society, then it's hardly a free and fair contest of ideas. …However, these were not the actual arguments made by Trump and allies, nor were they the arguments voiced on January 6.

This seems like some sort of reverse-motte-and-Bailey on your part. Some crazies yell extreme theories, therefore the moderate theories are not worth considering?

At some point you're just too far away from the candidate himself or his campaign.

It also seems like an effort of sophistry to avoid the question of “how to get Republicans to accept the election results” by playing around with definitions until the people with legitimate reasons to distrust the election don’t count as Republicans any more, ergo dusts hands job done.

This seems like some sort of reverse-motte-and-Bailey on your part. Some crazies yell extreme theories, therefore the moderate theories are not worth considering?

On the contrary, I just said:

We also sometimes see the argument that the institutional landscape, particularly re: media, academia and 'experts', civil servants and bureaucrats, etc., is so thoroughly slanted as to systematically misrepresent the positions of right-wing or Republican figures. No election held on such biased terrain can be considered fair. The entire institutional ecosystem is soft-rigged against the GOP, regardless of whether there was any direct voter fraud. This is an argument that I have a lot of time for - if one faction has a huge advantage in political communication, and its credibility is laundered by all the major epistemic institutions of its society, then it's hardly a free and fair contest of ideas.

I said myself that I agree with the mottes! I just sometimes feel like the mottes, and my agreement therewith, are used to try to justify baileys that I find much more doubtful.

But isn’t the problem “the IC was willing to lie to try to influence the election for one candidate and if they were willing to break that norm why would they simply stop there instead of changing votes.”

And for that I don’t have a convincing argument that THAT would be a bridge too far. Now that’s not proof they did something but when they know by and large they won’t be caught because of institutional advantages — why not cheat?

Further it seems the latest in Georgia shows that the dominion machines are far from safe (I don’t understand why we need machines instead of simply paper ballots).

If those other issues were dealt I would bet enormous sums of money that support for stolen election claims would deflate slowly like a balloon over the course of several years.

Opposition to very commonplace and common sense election security measures is legitimate dry tinder for ever wilder rungs of supposition. And every day it’s not implemented the plausible deniability of the worst, least charitable takes about trumps enemies shrinks until we are at the point we are currently at, where the conspiracies start to seem more plausible even by people like myself who are naturally skeptic and repulsed by woo and snake oil salesmen.

If those other issues were dealt I would bet enormous sums of money that support for stolen election claims would deflate slowly like a balloon over the course of several years.

I agree entirely.

Unfortunately I think the terrain at the moment is such that, because any questions about those issues are right/Trump-coded, those on the left will reflexively oppose any of those reforms, because any movement towards the right is seen as presumptively Trumpist, and you can't negotiate with insurrectionists, and so on. Extreme polarisation has made it harder to solve the causes of polarisation.

And all this does is push people further to the extremes and strengthen the con men.

I think if the reins of any election audit were handed over to Trump himself, with the final report requiring his sign-off, this would convince all but the most hardcore of Republican partisans/conspiracy theorists that a Trump loss in the election was the correct result. I don't know if such a thing would be unconstitutional, though; if it isn't, then Congress should be able to pass whatever laws necessary to allow such an audit to happen.

That just puts the cart before the horse. Trump has every incentive not to be fair or unbiased, not only because he could keep some small hope of actually overturning the result, but also to muddy the waters and retain his clout within the Republican party ("I'm not a loser, I'm a victim!")

Election skepticism wouldn't be anywhere near as much of a problem if Trump wasn't being a sore loser in the first place.

That just puts the cart before the horse. Trump has every incentive not to be fair or unbiased, not only because he could keep some small hope of actually overturning the result, but also to muddy the waters and retain his clout within the Republican party ("I'm not a loser, I'm a victim!")

Right, and that's exactly why if Trump himself were to say that he lost fair and square, that would convince the vast majority of Republicans, I believe. Very few people outside of him and others vetted by him have the credibility to certify a Trump loss as legitimate, and I don't really see a way for Democrats or other elements of the government to gain that kind of credibility in a short enough time frame to matter.

As you can see from the below responses, there is no reaction that people who will accept other than their admittance they're trying to steal it, despite no actual evidence of widespread fraud or anything close to it. Or I guess, letting every nut be with zero evidence, but lots of claims equal to actual evidence because they agree with the nut that it was bad Joe Biden is President.

The good news is, as seen in the 2022 midterms, is the median voter in purple states find these argument completely "weird" and are happy to vote against people in the important governmental positions so them having any sort of power that may effect the Presidential election.

Yes, 30-35% of the country will continue to be reactionaries who want the clock to be turned back, whether it's 2004 or 1904, but that's always been true. It's slightly worse that as opposed to past periods, they're all in the same party, but this is not a historical shift. Conservatives have basically thought every win since Clinton, and by some measures, JFK, was basically illegitimate, it just used to be the purview of talk show hosts and dog whistling as opposed to open statements.

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FWIW, as a non-american the widespread resistance to basic vote protection has always struck me as deeply archaic and backwards. Being on the left doesn't automatically make you progressive, hell, even calling yourself "progressive" does not make you so. If, for example, voter ID is hard to get for poor people, make it easier. Don't refuse to improve the security of your election to the standards of a modern western society just because it's moderately difficult. Others have managed to do it, so can you!

At least from my vantage point, the american voting system seems easy to cheat in the first place and then hard to prove cheating after-the-fact by its fundamental design. That republicans only cry wolf when it suits them is true, but also at least they seem to have some basic interest in improving the standards. Democrats seem to be so deeply unsure about their real appeal that they fight tooth and nail against any attempt to make the system more reliable.

Edit: See marisuno's answer for what a serious election looks like. As long as american elections don't look like that, I can understand anyone yelling fraud; The onus ought to be on the system to prove its reliability, not the other way around.

I don’t see the desire to know that the system is fair as “reactionary”. It’s actually quite telling that we actually don’t have a reasonable way to detect fraud or secure the system. Add in a highly unusual election where millions are voting by drop box, introducing more opportunities for fraud, and yeah people might be a bit suspicious. I think the issues should addressed simply because until the state can demonstrate that it’s taking the problem seriously, eventually all elections will be contested simply because it cannot be demonstrated that the system has been secured.

At this point it seems like the idea that elections are rigged is functionally unfalsifiable.

It's unfalsifiable because the evidence that would prove or disprove election fraud was illegally destroyed. Ballot chains of custody were destroyed across several swing states. You can recount the ballots as many times as you want but you can't prove where any of those ballots came from. This is after several swing states simultaneously stopped counting on Election Day only to return massive pro-Biden dumps at 6am a few hours later.

It redirects the conversation from analyzing the defeat ("how could we do better"), which will inevitably shine a light on Trump's shortfalls

This will sound unbearably demented to most posters here, and I'm aware of that, and fine with this, because I mean it earnestly: all talk of Trump's "shortfalls" is nonsense. Trump is obviously one of the greatest Americans to ever live. He spurred the renaissance of New York, mastered reality TV, turned his fathers modest real estate portfolio into a multi-billion dollar company synonymous with wealth as one of the most famous people to ever exist, then ran for president as a private citizen despite major opposition from both parties and won. He casually reinvents the language every time he speaks. He tried to do a denuclearization deal with Russia and China, we were literally on the cusp of world peace, and we couldn't get there because of the Russia hoax. Fundamentally we aren't good enough for Donald Trump. We were all sitting around debating the doom of Western Civilization and pro-woke and anti-woke and he's the only guy to stand up and say, we have all these factories lying around, we should turn them on, we should make Detroit wealthy again, we should make San Francisco a paradise again, we should Make America Great Again, and going further than that we should Make America Greater Than Ever Before. He just did it casually, because he wanted to help his country, when he was full of success and worldly things. (Multibillionaire, supermodel wife, luxury real estate empire, grandchildren and kids.) And we sit around debating things like his tone and his shortfalls because, I guess, people have told so many lies about him that we cynically believe some of them have to be true.

Trump is unfathomably based for not dropping the 2020 election. Anyone else would have let themselves be bullied out of it. Anyone else would have quietly dropped the issue and made a nice conciliatory speech and walked away beat. But Washington DC is governed by a fundamentally sick culture where the wealth of the greatest country in the world is spent making the world a worser place. There is immense pressure within the system, all the time, to pillage everything for the wealth of the people running it, bomb some more countries for the defense contracts, ruin the world for the price it cost to ruin, then pay the experts to sell their misconceptions as the smartest ideas on earth. It takes immense pressure to not cave and do something good. Most presidents only do it a few times. Trump did it over and over and over again, more than anybody, even up to the point of this most important thing. They stole the election from him and he refused to concede it, even as they accused him of destroying democracy.

That's why he's going to win too, and why he won in 2016 (and 2020 alike). It's the quality from that first Republican debate in 2016, when Trump stood on stage and was the only candidate to say he wouldn't pledge to endorse the Republican nom.

Trump is the only candidate. He's the only one actually willing to stand up and fight. We all forgot what it even looked like to fight, we were all living in a world of sitting around waiting for Caesar and collapse and depression and loss, waiting and watching and coping. He makes it look easy! "Moderating" wouldn't help. All his "shortfalls" are his best qualities and why he is in fact The Best and will win at all. While we were sitting around passively debating the death of America he was imagining making America Greater Than Ever Before. You just come down the escalator, and you fight, and you win, and it's easy. And then you win some more.

You just come down the escalator, and you fight, and you win, and it's easy. And then you win some more.

Except for, when, you know, you lose. And then you fight to argue that you didn't lose, and you lose that fight too.

Losing big is a part of winning big. Tom Brady lost at the Superbowl quite a few times, does that make him a loser? I think it's small-souled to look at a streak of big wins and cynically posture about failures and risk. Trump lost and then he kept fighting, which is the most important quality, which is that nice TV cliche that everybody talks about and no one really believes. His bankruptcies (large) set the stage for even greater success. That's the price of the game. But you just come down the escalator and fight and win and it's easy. And then you win some more. That's the attitude it takes to to imagine making America Greater Than Ever Before. It's the progressive forward-minded happy warrior (joy) that can imagine not just winning but winning more than anyone has ever thought possible. It's a big boast, it's uncouth and earnest and ridiculous. And it's the only way to really believe in the future, to unabashedly manifest a new golden age.

Tom Brady lost at the Superbowl quite a few times, does that make him a loser?

Losing leads to winning when you use it as an opportunity to learn and grow.

Trump did that with his bankruptcies. He repositioned his businesses. He learned that Trump the brand was valuable, and leveraged that by going into simple businesses and using his name to increase the margin on them.

He didn't continue in a series of endless lawsuits against his creditors, claiming that the casinos were in fact entirely solvent and making tons of money.

I appreciate your point, but I continue to believe that Trump and Republicans as a whole would have done better to take the attitude typical of a team that loses a game on a bad call or an unlucky injury: we lost, but it doesn't reflect on us as a team, we're going to come back and win. Much as it pains me to give this example, the 49ers in 2022 lost to the Eagles in the NFCCG on terrible luck. Brock Purdy suffered a freak elbow injury on a sack in the first quarter, and their backup QB suffered a concussion a few plays later. Left with no quarterbacks, the 49ers were doomed. And the Niners maintained, to themselves and publicly, that while they lost the game they were the better team. And they came back in 2023 on a mission, demolished the Eagles in the regular season, and ran hot all the way to the Super Bowl. Which they lost to the Chiefs, but what are you gonna do?

If Republicans had collectively taken the attitude that the various rule changes had delivered a Biden presidency, but not a fully legitimate Biden presidency, and that in recognition of this Biden should limit his programs to change the country, and if he didn't then Republicans in Congress had a mandate to prevent him from doing so. That's a sophisticated, effective argument that would appeal to moderates. The alternative has lead to significant losses of winnable Senate and Gubernatorial races, that are likely to hobble the effectiveness of a second Trump term.

That's a sophisticated, effective argument that would appeal to moderates.

They cheated! This kind of "sophisticated" klaptrap is a losing argument, because it's not earnest, it's not real. You can't honestly believe that they cheated (that's declasse, that's gauche), it's naive to really believe something so simple, so let's make up this complicated elaboration so that there's ironic distance to keep us all healthy and detached. They didn't cheat, they just changed the rules in unaccountable and unprecedent ways that felt like cheating, but technically I'm not calling it cheating because I don't want to cast aspersions about the process, which I'm casting aspersions about, but in a "sophisticated" way (insert crying seethejak under a happy mask).

If they stole the election from Trump, and Trump didn't say they cheated, but made some "sophisticated" complicated argument full of triangulationg, people would be pissed! They would have lost all faith in Trump. He wouldn't have just lost a few "winnable Senate and Gubernatorial races," he would have been exiled from the party. The GOP would have learned that Trump has no teeth, and they would have felt happy screwing him out of a third nomination.

Meanwhile Trump has learned the lessons from 2020 -- there are huge Republican orgs now dedicated to training poll watchers and lawyers undoing the rule changes and votes. Trump actually knows a thing or two about this.

in my opinion trump should keep fighting about election fraud if he's correct, and not if he's wrong. the election fraud discourse over the past few years has both been, as far as i can tell, objectively very wrong, it's a classic example of a "conspiracy theory". IMO "conspiracy theory" is a very poor name, and what people really mean with that word isn't that something's a theory about a grand conspiracy, but a pattern of poor reasoning that leads certain types of people to wild, dramatic, and false conclusions. the election fraud isn't a "conspiracy theory" because it'd require a bunch of democrats to conspire to rig the election - that could totally happen! - it's a "conspiracy theory" because the reasoning people use to support it is of the kind people use to claim JFK vaccine CIA aliens.

we have all these factories lying around, we should turn them on,

the reason we have a lot of service workers, and not a lot of factory workers, is that the production of cheap consumer goods has gotten really efficient, and people (including you) would rather pay money for good service at a restaurant, or enjoyable content delivered via the internet, than for more cheap consumer goods. infinity percent tariffs on cars would not revitalize detroit!

we have all these factories lying around, we should turn them on, we should make Detroit wealthy again, we should make San Francisco a paradise again, we should Make America Great Again, and going further than that we should Make America Greater Than Ever Before. He just did it casually, because he wanted to help his country, when he was full of success and worldly things.

In what sense did he actually achieve - or even try to achieve - any of this?

There was minimal change in the trajectory of the manufacturing sector under Trump - there was a period of reasonable growth about the same as periods of growth under Obama in length and magnitude, stagnating in early 2019 before Covid made the numbers meaningless - and even after Covid corrections Biden also had a similar period of growth - slightly shorter but slightly faster - before stagnating similarly to Trump. What policy of Trump's was even supposed to achieve this? Tariffs is the only obvious candidate, but they came only in fits and starts and provoked a wide range of retaliatory tariffs. It doesn't matter though because clearly it didn't affect much either way.

If the answer to all this is that he wanted to achieve more but was thwarted by Congress/the Judiciary/Democrats/Republicans/the Deep State, then sorry but that's politics, maybe he isn't very good at it. Everyone agrees when Freddie De Boer says this to the left, but it's equally true for the right.

Shifting the vibes is by far the most important economic contributor. Talking about lower taxes and then not lowering them will likely bring in far more revenue than talking about raising taxes and then not raising them.

Trump is obviously one of the greatest Americans to ever live.

Come on! He's clearly one of the greatest of the WORLD if not the greatest.

He casually reinvents the language every time he speaks.

Soon we will all be talking trumps english

He's clearly one of the greatest of the WORLD

Right, but Americans are already the greatest in the world, it goes without saying.

Your logic is sound

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.

Do you seriously expect me to believe that the candidate that I hate could be successful? How is that possible when I hate him so much?

Please don’t put words in other posters’ mouths.

You may argue that they are taking something for granted, but you shouldn’t assert it.

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:

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.

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.

Existing mechanisms like poll watchers haven’t caught such fraud.

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.

More comments

Voter turnout was up significantly in 2020 compared to any presidential election since at least 1992. This was true in every state, with most states seeing around a 6 point bump. It didn't even seem to matter if the state was competitive or not in the presidential election; Hawaii, which usually sees a turnout in the 30s or low 40s, jumped from around 38 percent turnout to around 52 percent turnout. Texas, the new loser, saw turnout increase from 43.4% to 51.3%. California and Montana both saw ten point increases. For whatever reason, Americans, regardless of political disposition, were more inclined to vote in 2020 than they were in previous years. If this, in and of itself, is evidence of fraud in swing states, then it's evidence of fraud in every state, including ones controlled by Republicans that voted for Trump in larger margins than in 2016.

The only metric of "voter turnout" is "votes cast," so ballot harvesting generating 10 million fraudulent votes is the same as 10 million extra people actually standing in line to vote, as far as turnout is concerned. Pointing to 2020's high "turnout" isn't evidence of legitimacy.

I mentioned arguments to the contrary being perfunctory, and we see a lot of this in this thread. Note that "well, Biden may not have been popular, but maybe they just hated Trump so much?" and then the argument stops right there. People publicly called Reagan the antiChrist, I watched prime-time network movies about how totally-not-Reagan was going to get us all killed; I watched every celebrity in the world shit all over GWB, also insisting he's going to get us all killed. Arguing that Trump was so uniquely hated that he drove record-shattering numbers of voters against him (while also driving record-shattering numbers of votes for him), and furthermore accomplished this feat with virtually no help from the Biden camp, who did precious little campaigning to build his own support, again requires me to ignore everything history has taught us of how elections actually work, of what motivates voters to vote. We have to have selective amnesia to think "well, maybe they just hated Trump that much" carries water.

I wouldn't say it's evidence of fraud in and of itself, but it is suspicious. And I have trouble with the legitimacy of mail in voting in general since it's much easier to coerce or buy votes with it, especially if the conditions are as relaxed as they were that time.

Easier mail-in voting + COVID meaning there was literally nothing to do except get sucked into politics.

If you think this needs explaining, then why do you not think that Trump's 74,223,975 total votes need explaining as well? You can weave the same sort of just-so story of how that outcome is implausible, with the same sort of emotional incredulity - how did an incumbent candidate who achieved so little of what he had promised to do and stumbled from scandal to scandal manage to attract some 10 million more voters than the first time around, and also blaze past Obama's record? Unless you are contending that the forces of election manipulation also conjured up millions (but fewer) fake votes for Trump for good reason, you are just left claiming a convenient cutoff point where your candidate's unprecedented increase in support is still low enough to be normal but his opponent's is high enough to be evidence of foul play.

Do not presume. I do think the higher turnout on both sides is suspicious.

It speaks to me of a complete free for all where all the normal rules and safeguards were thrown away because of Covid and where the legitimacy of the outcome is impossible to verify.

Had Trump won we may not be having this conversation because the topic would be something else, but it would still be suspicious.

Does this also apply to Trump? His 74M votes in 2020 is the second most any presidential candidate has ever received. Also beating Obama at his peak.

I think so. I find it hard to believe Trump is more popular than peak Obama either.

I dismissed a terrible line of logic. I didn't comment on the other points. This place is for rational discussion, and the argument that a poster thinks a candidate is bad therefore it is impossible that they attracted votes is just not at the standard of the motte.

Even Clinton beat Trump in the popular vote. Why would it remotely be a surprise that a far less divisive candidate attracts more votes, after a mediocre term for Trump that had the misfortune to end with a pandemic?

Clinton got 65,844,610 votes, less than Obama's 69,498,516 and much less than Biden's 81,284,000.

Why would it remotely be a surprise that a far less divisive candidate attracts more votes

In your view, is 2008 Obama more divisive than 2020 Biden? And if so explain how.

Trump went from 63 million votes to 72 million votes. How do you explain an average first term producing that amount of extra votes, unless there was a general increase in voting turnout for 2020?

Why the increase though?

Who knows? But any explanation needs to account for why both candidates saw a massive increase in their vote numbers. Biden wasn't the only candidate who got more votes than Obama ever did.

I'm 5'8", well into middle-age, and not anywhere near my physical prime.

Were I to show up under center for any NFL team this Sunday, and then proceed to put on a record-breaking performance, putting up numbers the likes of which legendary passers like Marino or Rogers in their prime could only dream of, nobody's going to wait for the "smoking gun" of wire transfers to every team owner, emails from Goodell directly to officiating crews, etc., before proclaiming that the game was obviously rigged.

I expect any Biden supporters could create a list of negatives about Trump just as large as your Biden list.

And indeed, a huge swathe of Democrats did proclaim everything was rigged when Trump beat Hilary. A subject that was much mocked by posters on the right of the spectrum.

who had to have the rest of the party candidates drop out

I never understand this line. Is the idea that all of the moderate candidates were just going to keep splitting the vote right up until the convention, and then just, idk, let Bernie have it on a plurality or something? The dynamics of primaries demand that candidates drop out to endorse similarly positioned frontrunners. Do you think it's just a coincidence the 2016 and 2008 Democratic primaries also become two-horse races?

and couldn't manage to get anyone to show up when he did'

'Enthusiasm' is overrated. For every Obama or Trump there is a Starmer or Scholz who coasts by on the incompetence or divisiveness of their opponent - that is definitely not unique to Biden. Similarly;

secretly such a charismatic candidate that he shattered voting results

The obvious explanation is negative polarisation - maybe Biden didn't drive huge turnout himself, but it's very plausible to Trump did both for and against him.

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.

This is just nonsense. The water main 'bursting' happened a 6 a.m. on the morning of election day, disrupting things for a few hours, way before any shift towards Biden was beginning to be observed. There was no big tranche for Biden co-incident with the water problem. The whole kicking out observers thing I have only ever seen reported third-hand by people like Giuliani - the Chief Investigator of the SOS's offices has testified that this never occurred, no doubt you don't trust her but I'm curious what in particular convinces you this did happen.

I'm curious what in particular convinces you this did happen.

For me it was the talking head that came on the news at ~11PM Pacific on November 6 saying that a water main had broken and counting would be suspended in Georgia for the night -- my memory on this is quite solid as I had a bet on the go for the Georgia results, and Trump was looking good at the time.

Certainly it's possible that the talking head was mistaken, and this has definitely been said by the 'most secure election evah' people -- but then they would say that, wouldn't they?

Even if I grant that this were the case, it seems likely that the Republican observers were told the same thing and went home -- which would have been fine if the officials had not started counting again a couple hours later -- which they very definitely did.

The whole kicking out observers thing I have only ever seen reported third-hand by people like Giuliani

This one there is no ambiguity -- it was in Philadelphia IIRC and there was all sorts of video at the time. Even observers who weren't kicked out were made to stand behind a rope like 20 feet away from the counting 'because covid'. If you don't believe this one you are positing some sort of conspiracy yourself.

The water main story radicalized me. The media stated it was debunked merely because a government election official said shortly thereafter it wasn’t true. Didn’t offer evidence. Just ipse dixit. And that was apparently enough despite numerous real time accounts that differed. Of all people, Mollie Hemingway had an excellent take down of it.

For me it was the talking head that came on the news at ~11PM Pacific on November 6 saying that a water main had broken and counting would be suspended in Georgia for the night -- my memory on this is quite solid as I had a bet on the go for the Georgia results, and Trump was looking good at the time.

The talking heads (and social media) were reporting on the water main yes. Then the next day people started pointing out that no one called for any plumber for this, it turned into "there was a toilet overflowing". Giuliani got hold of the video of the arena when this happens, at that time, a couple of poll workers corral everyone to the door and have them leave, talk on the phone, then pull a batch of ballots that had been kept under a table earlier in the day and run those in the counting machines with no supervision from any poll watchers. The SoS said that there was a state observer present, but by his timeline he was only there one hour after the counting started.

The Federalist has a pretty good breakdown of what happened in Georgia.

I don't really care what the official excuses are after, when you create that big an appearance of impropriety, you have to go way above and beyond to clear it after. I've had the training to work elections in Canada and the whole thing was extremely clearly made to avoid every appearance of impropriety; No ballot box was ever to be opened without the observers present, you did not let it out of sight until the counting was done, no one was to be left alone with the ballots, you weren't to touch the ballots without being sure the other parties' observers' see exactly everything you were doing.

Ultimately, the most compelling evidence against is that the people who investigated this and claimed there was nothing weird or fraudulent, the Governor and Secretary of State, are Republicans, but that's flimsy considering how many Republican politicians would have gladly defected on Trump if they thought they could get away with it (if they thought they would be giving the killing blow to Trump's political career), just so they could get back to business-as-usual.

Whenever I hear people say that lawsuits couldn't find proof of fraud, the problem is that finding proof of fraud is almost impossible. But there is a lot of proof that the local election officials made deliberate efforts in multiple states to make sure that it would be impossible to catch fraud; which is as damning as finding the actual fraud and the public realizes that. If someone is seen going into a room holding a knife, methodically turns off the security cameras on their way in and then the next day someone else is found stabbed in that room, people know what likely happened. But that does not reach the point at which a judge feels comfortable overturning official results.

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.

It seems to me that if each claim in that extensive list has an advocate diving deep into it, yet still convinced, that’s meta-evidence that more than one scheme might have been used. Instead of a single silver Biden bullet, perhaps it makes sense to look for a spray of silver shotgun pellets.

As for neutral sources on the validity of the claims, the moment any reputable news source even hints that they think a single Trump-positive election fraud claim has enough merit to consider possibly investigating, their editor will forever be branded a MAGA Republican in the bag for Trump. This is how political tribes work, and how they capture without explicit conspiracy: likemindedness, singularity of purpose.

I thought about this some more, and I think another sticking point is that this is an iterative game, and people know it is an iterated game. So, if you want them to be able to concede when they're wrong, there has to be done easy to do so that doesn't undermine their future ability to raise the same issue. I think a lot of people would probably grant that at least there is no solid evidence of widespread fraud in 2020, if they didn't also sense that this would be used against them, either immediately to demand more concessions, or in the future to demand acceptance of actual wrongdoing. It's a clear case of arguments as soldiers, and nobody is going to agree to unilateral disarmament. This explains both why people resist being moved from their public position but also why they seem to weigh it as a low priority.

Well, they could start by legitimately doing election security. Eliminate mail ins. Eliminate anonymous drop boxes. Require photo ID for voting at at least TSA/FAA verification requirements. Purge voter rolls of noncitizens annually. Also the deceased and no longer residing in at the address. Count the votes in a single night in Democratic areas like almost all Republican areas are capable of doing. Sunlight the registration process so people feel that they are doing something a random person that stole their mail could not do.

Purge voter rolls of noncitizens annually

Huh? Who are the noncitizens on voter rolls? I've never heard this particular claim.

I know of there being problems with this in at least AZ, NV, OR, & FL (Desantis fixed it there, as he seems to do with every problem).

I mean not actively voting against measures that explicitly disallow non-citizens from voting while simultaneously spending millions to fly migrants to swing states would be a start.

There's already a law against non-citizens voting. I'd also vote against a law if one was offered that said, "let's make murder really illegal."

Glad to have your vote sir.

Is there anything the government could feasibly do to nudge Republicans towards accepting the results of the election in the event that Trump loses?

Serious question: is there anything the government could feasibly do now, to nudge Democrats towards accepting the result of the election in the event that Kamala loses?

Because my answer to your question is "Well, it could stop rigging elections."

Someone will inevitably cry, "But there's no clear and undisputable evidence of widespread or coordinated voter fraud sufficient to have changed the outcome of 2020!"

Sure, let's grant that. But let's also observe that setting up elections to come out the way you want them (i.e. rigging, in the most boring metaphorical sense) can be done in numerous legal and quasi-legal ways. In fact most attempts to "rig" elections are conducted in entirely legitimate ways, and people don't object because if everyone is free to do what they can to influence the outcome of the election, well, that's just democracy!

However there are at least two important institutions in our culture which we broadly expect to refrain from influencing elections. One is the government itself, including government actors like FBI agents and military personnel. Another is "the Press," that amorphous blob of journalists and corporations that purports to contribute to the political process by ensuring the dissemination of facts.

These two institutions have all but entirely abandoned the pretense of political impartiality. The recent example of 60 Minutes doctoring an interview in Kamala's favor can serve as just one instance of persistent and repeated behavior from the press. Disparities in the Justice Department's treatment of, say, 2020 DC rioters versus 2016 DC rioters can serve as just one example of persistent and repeated behavior from the government. The bureaucracy and the press are dominated by Democrats, such that a prospiracy to thumb the scales for Democratic candidates is basically inevitable.

One of my biggest problems with Donald Trump is that he often says false things that are directionally correct, which takes attention away from real problems to focus on fake ones. But one reason he might do this is simply that the truth is complicated and most people haven't got the attention span for it. I have not taken the time to make a lengthy linked catalog of ways which the government and the press abused their putative impartiality in part because most examples are, in isolation, small and easily dismissed. I'm not interested in getting dragged into a back-and-forth over the real significance of, say, dismissing Biden's violation of federal law due to his being an "elderly man with a poor memory." We used to impeach (or try to impeach) executives who used government power to hamper (or try to hamper) their political opponents. But not anymore! It's just that I notice the direction of these things, and the small examples pile up quickly.

(Well, don't worry. The FISA court ordered numerous corrective actions, which I'm sure will be followed meticulously any time they do not interfere with Democratic victories at the polls. What more do you want? Surely an impeachment would be far too much of a hassle.)

When Trump was first elected President, one common meme was for people to say and post, "NOT MY PRESIDENT." Hillary Clinton called Trump an "illegitimate President." Would you say that Democrats "accepted the results of the election" in that case? Because my read is that they very much did not, indeed still have not. Why didn't they accept the outcome of that election? What could the government have done, to nudge them toward greater acceptance?

Because if you can't answer that question, or you think it's a meaningfully different question, then I don't think anyone is in a position to give you a satisfying answer to your question, either.

When Trump was first elected President, one common meme was for people to say and post, "NOT MY PRESIDENT." Hillary Clinton called Trump an "illegitimate President." Would you say that Democrats "accepted the results of the election" in that case? Because my read is that they very much did not, indeed still have not. Why didn't they accept the outcome of that election? What could the government have done, to nudge them toward greater acceptance?

There’s a fundamental difference between being bitter about an election result and actually thinking the result was actually illegitimate. I will of course grant you that occasionally the language can appear superficially similar, but the difference is real and very important. Democrats absolutely accepted the result of the election. The process was not in question, and this was telling in the actual actions taken: they thought Russia meddled a bit too much and so the solution is policy to stop it happening again.

Hell, even after 2000, Democrats still by and large accepted the result despite some very potent arguments that they had been robbed by some uncontrollable aspect of the administrative state (broadly). Sure, you had a decent chunk of individuals who continued or even still continue to believe the election result was rigged or undemocratic or whatever, but this didn’t translate to the political class, and it didn’t lead to a fundamental dispute of elections more broadly, and in the actions, Florida got its shit together and fixed a lot of the issues for subsequent elections.

The immediate reaction of Trump and his allies was not merely bitterness but action that should be disturbing to all. They tried both literally and rhetorically to do an end run around the actual election and legal processes to corruptly (mens rea according to the evidence we’ve seen) subvert the actual election, irrespective of fact.

Do you see the difference? “Let’s fix it” is of a fundamentally different character than “let’s change it”. The former recognizes that setbacks happen in politics — even unfair ones! And it recognizes that there will be other chances and that the system is more important than ego. But the second, oh boy, it’s shortsighted and selfish and threatens the whole thing. It’s kind of like a marital fight. There is a line between some things you might say to your spouse in anger, and some things which should literally never be said, because they can’t be taken back and might threaten the entire marriage. With the assumption that the marriage is a good one - here, the assumption that the system of democratic elections is a good one.

It’s not at all clear what kind of system Trump would put in its place, which is PLENTY worrying in and of itself, but I have a very hard time imagining it being better than our current one, and I likewise have I think very good reasons to believe that even if you think for example that the Justice Department needs reform and fairness, Trump is probably one of the worst people to actually do so. That Trump’s personal motivations largely aligned with the country’s in his first term wasn’t an accident but was at least in some sense lucky - but I’m not convinced this can be taken for granted in a second term to the same degree.

You put it much more eloquently than I could, and I might be yoinking your answer to reply to some others downthread.

  • -13

I don't see the difference. It feels like salami-slicing to me. You could say this about Bernie Sanders. 'Anyone who disagrees with the integrity of the process is a rebel and an anarchist' is a just-so explanation. 'It's different when we do it' is partisan hypocrisy.

Actions speak louder than words is the test. It’s disappointing but within the realm of expectations for losers to be whiny, sad but occasional for a low-status politician to actually flail around in denial for a bit, but something else entirely when the top takes actions that are demonstrably motivated by impure motives and backed by hot air.

Look. If you ask Trump — and many have! — how exactly he lost, he refuses to answer. Even if you hold up someone like Stacey Abrams, who infamously refused to concede the Georgia governor race, if you asked her whyshe will fucking tell you! It’s absolutely incredible that Trump will not do the same.

But Trump doesn’t really believe the “hard” version of the stolen election hypothesis (that machines were rigged, that the numbers were physically changed, that someone added +1000 to the other guy’s total and minused a thousand from his etc) and never has. He has gestured toward it on occasion, but he doesn’t believe it.

The proof is in his many recent interviews where he talks about 2020 and having ‘lost by a whisker’ or by a tiny bit or whatever. That’s not what people who believe they lost truly rigged elections say, they say they lost because the other guy hacked the voting machines or stuffed ballots or prevented his guys from voting.

I mean, that's arguably circumstantial evidence for @Ben___Garrison 's thesis that the 2020 stolen election narrative was a cynical ploy by an unscrupulous sore loser, because Trump was definitely saying the election was concretely stolen back then. He may not have believed it personally but it was useful for him to have followers who believed it. If nothing else, he needed to at least partially legitimize his attempt at a procedural coup - you can't concede that you lost and then try to subvert the outcome. And, as noted in OP, a stolen election narrative protects Trump's status in the party and in the eyes of his followers.

Democrats absolutely accepted the result of the election. The process was not in question, and this was telling in the actual actions taken: they thought Russia meddled a bit too much and so the solution is policy to stop it happening again.

Didn’t the action they take was to spy on the Trump campaign and then bog them down in investigations that ultimately concluded the Russians did not in fact meddle? Didn’t they directly try to impeach Trump over similar issues? Didn’t the mainstream Press crow about “russiagate” for years on end? Didn’t democratic aligned judges use lawfare to nullify a democratically elected presidents policies over and over and over again? Didn’t they delay vaccine study results until after the election, murdering thousands of Americans just because Orange Man Bad?

Sorry but it doesn’t seem like they accepted Trump as the president. Wasn’t there a a whole “resistance” thing too? I mean. Sure it was fake and lame as far as resistances go, but one could argue the bureaucracy went along with it.

  • Spying is an overblown talking point. They spied on like, one guy? Maybe a second, and neither of them big deals?

  • The campaign didn’t get meaningfully “bogged down” by any investigations, not anything special counsels don’t normally do

  • Russiagate actually did fade pretty quickly after the Mueller report in the news and from Democratic politicians

  • They tried to impeach him over something almost explicitly a quid pro quo - you could argue that some presidents get a pass for that kind of thing (Nixon sure as hell did it but that wasn’t what his impeached for) but it’s still, um, bad. And note that after the effort failed in Senate vote, they dropped it. You don’t see Kamala whining about it on the campaign trail

  • If you think that was abnormal lawfare you have not been paying attention to politics the last several decades

Scope and scale matter. My point stands.

  • -20

Spying is an overblown talking point. They spied on like, one guy? Maybe a second, and neither of them big deals?

Catching one instance of sleazy behavior from a large group over a period of time generally implies that there's more than one instance, but that that was the instance that was easiest or luckiest to catch.

Spying is an overblown talking point. They spied on like, one guy? Maybe a second, and neither of them big deals?

No.

The ruling party in 2016 used multiple intelligence agencies to target opposition campaign personnel, on the basis of unfounded allegations presented by the ruling party candidate whose role in its generation was hidden due to its disqualifying nature, and subsequently overturned citizen-protection measures designed to protect American citizens from just such intelligence abuses, which enabled illegal leaks what would inherently have been classified information, to fuel election-year and then multiple post-election year conspiracies intended to undermine the opposition campaign and target up to cabinet level officials, conspiracies which were publicly pushed by party-affiliated media and legitimized by the party's leading member of the Senate Intelligence community.

...while campaigning that Trump would be an authoritarian who would commit security state abuses, and thus organizing the #Resistance that dominated media coverage for years to come and would help organize riots in several major American cities, including the US capital.

Russiagate actually did fade pretty quickly after the Mueller report in the news and from Democratic politicians

The original Russiagate lasted nearly half of Trump's time in office, and its narrative themes were later re-used to justify the first Trump impeachment and which remains a regular theme in Democratic C-lane social media campaigns since.

They tried to impeach him over something almost explicitly a quid pro quo - you could argue that some presidents get a pass for that kind of thing (Nixon sure as hell did it but that wasn’t what his impeached for) but it’s still, um, bad.

One of the presidents in question being Biden, who publicly boasted in his success to squash the corruption investigation the subject of which was the basis for impeaching Trump, not including the many other credible quid pro quo of the Biden dynasty.

If you think that was abnormal lawfare you have not been paying attention to politics the last several decades

The Trump experience of lawfare was abnormal precisely because it surpassed what any candidate had received in the last several decades, and on multiple grounds were highly reminiscent of mid-Cold War abuses that spurred the US Intelligence Community reforms of the 1970s and 1980s that were ignored in the process of targeting the Trump campaign. The abnormality of it was the subject of multiple extensive discussions and even deliberate justification articles posted in major media outlets and a post-2020 victory lap on the degree of cooperation required to 'fortify' the following election.

Scope and scale matter. My point stands.

Scope and scale mattering is precisely why your point falls to a basic Russel conjugation critique.

'My favored party accepted the results reasonably and mostly peacefully despite legitimate reasons to believe they were unjustly denied their rightful victory, your party unreasonably refuses to accept the legitimacy of their defeat and threatens everything in ways that should be disturbing to all...'

Your point doesn’t stand in the least. You’ve marshalled zero evidence for your dismissal nor addressed most of my points

The campaign didn’t get meaningfully “bogged down” by any investigations, not anything special counsels don’t normally do

I meant the administration, and of course it did. The news covered the mueller investigation breathlessly nonstop, over an essential nothingburger. How do you think that affects an administration?

Russiagate actually did fade pretty quickly after the Mueller report in the news and from Democratic politicians

sure after about 3 years of nonstop coverage and rampant speculation (Steele dossier? Never even existed)

If you think that was abnormal lawfare you have not been paying attention to politics the last several decades

It’s true, the Dems have been terrible on that for decades, but it reached a zenith.

There’s a fundamental difference between being bitter about an election result and actually thinking the result was actually illegitimate. I will of course grant you that occasionally the language can appear superficially similar, but the difference is real and very important. Democrats absolutely accepted the result of the election.

They did not. When Hillary Clinton says Trump is an "illegitimate President," I just don't understand how you conclude that this is "superficially similar" language with a "real and very important difference." She wasn't alone. Is it your position that because she didn't say "literally illegitimate" or "actually illegitimate," we should assume she's just being rhetorical?

The process was not in question, and this was telling in the actual actions taken: they thought Russia meddled a bit too much and so the solution is policy to stop it happening again.

Russia is an easy target, of course, but listen to the examples of outright election denialism in that video. Much of it targets process, too. There are allegations of conspiracy. Trump is louder and coarser than most, but on substance he's not saying anything Democrats haven't been saying for years.

Hell, even after 2000, Democrats still by and large accepted the result despite some very potent arguments that they had been robbed by some uncontrollable aspect of the administrative state (broadly). Sure, you had a decent chunk of individuals who continued or even still continue to believe the election result was rigged or undemocratic or whatever, but this didn’t translate to the political class, and it didn’t lead to a fundamental dispute of elections more broadly...

To the contrary, I would say that it translated to the political class very well, in a variety of ways. But you're not entirely wrong: the Democrats have, I think, been better at translating their losses into action. They are doing everything they can to disassemble any part of the system that doesn't guarantee their victory and continued ideological dominance of the government and the press.

...and in the actions, Florida got its shit together and fixed a lot of the issues for subsequent elections.

I don't want to read too much into it, but I can't help but notice that after Florida decided to take elections seriously enough to avoid a repeat of 2000, it changed from "purple" to "reliably red."

The immediate reaction of Trump and his allies was not merely bitterness but action that should be disturbing to all. They tried both literally and rhetorically to do an end run around the actual election and legal processes to corruptly (mens rea according to the evidence we’ve seen) subvert the actual election, irrespective of fact.

And yet nothing they did is without recent precedent in Democratic opposition to election results. Democrats have refused to certify elections results. Democrats have rioted in DC. Democrats have tried to do an end run around the actual election and legal processes to corruptly subvert the actual election. None of this makes Trump's own misdeeds good, by the by; the point here is not "whataboutism." The point here is that I can't understand how anyone can pretend with a straight face that any of this hasn't been done before by the exact people now decrying it.

Do you see the difference? “Let’s fix it” is of a fundamentally different character than “let’s change it”.

No: you are treating Democratic attempts to ensure their own permanent victory as "fix" while treating parallel Republican attempted to ensure their own permanent victory as "change." There is no difference of character there, much less a fundamental one. Rather, this is simply "our noble soldiers versus your barbarous brigands" in electioneering parlance.

That Trump’s personal motivations largely aligned with the country’s in his first term wasn’t an accident but was at least in some sense lucky - but I’m not convinced this can be taken for granted in a second term to the same degree.

Are you suggesting that, if Donald Trump wins in November, you would reject the outcome of that election?

They did not. When Hillary Clinton says Trump is an "illegitimate President," I just don't understand how you conclude that this is "superficially similar" language with a "real and very important difference."

Because of other actions surrounding what they said? While I really don't like that Hillary said the election was "stolen" and that Trump was "illegitimate", I still think there's a big difference between her comments and what Trump did. Hillary conceded almost immediately after the 2016 results were in. To my knowledge, Trump still hasn't conceded for 2020. Hillary never made phone calls demanding governors and secretaries of state "find" enough votes for them to win. Trump did. Hillary never egged on her followers to go to the capitol to protest or disrupt the electoral count. Trump, obviously, did.

To the contrary, I would say that it translated to the political class very well, in a variety of ways.

You linked an article where the Dems put forward abolishing the EC in favor of a direct popular vote (or some other system), but this doesn't seem germane to the argument that EverythingIsFine is making. There wasn't a broad rejection of election results by D leaders. The closest was probably Stacey Abrams refusing to concede in Georgia, but 1) she got a ton of pushback from this from her own party, and 2) even in this most extreme example, she didn't try to interfere directly like Trump did.

No: you are treating Democratic attempts to ensure their own permanent victory as "fix" while treating parallel Republican attempted to ensure their own permanent victory as "change."

What Trump did was fundamentally different from normal election reform, and thus his actions deserve to be seen differently. Dems saying we should abolish the EC (in future elections) or Rs saying we should require IDs to vote (in future elections) are very different proposals from Trump's "we need to overturn the votes from certain states (in an election that just happened).

  • -14

I am utterly unmoved by your repeated resort to "it's different when we do it," which is why I asked you the question I was interested in hearing an answer to. That you have written two responses to my downstream tangents while avoiding a direct answer to my direct question strengthens my impression that your original question was disingenuous and "boo outgroup" rather than sincere, as I had hoped.

Because ultimately if you're actually interested in the government (or anyone!) doing something to convince Republicans of the legitimacy of election outcomes, such that no one riots, or questions the legitimacy of the proceedings, or attempts arcane procedural shenanigans... that same "something" should presumably also prevent riots, or questions, or shenanigans, from Democrats.

If you can't think of a way to prevent Democrats from rioting in case of a Trump win in November, then why in God's name would you think it should be possible to prevent Republicans from doing so in case Kamala wins?

Yes, we do assume Hillary was being bitter, because action wise she didn’t do jack shit about it. For anyone paying attention, you might notice that not very many Democrats followed her rhetoric either.

You shouldn’t read into Florida’s subsequent results. 9/11 happened pushing a major Bush wave… and then Obama won it twice again. Being red is recent. This should set off warning bells in your brain about personal bias that you’d even mention Florida like that, and be so flagrantly and factually wrong.

There’s some merit to the general pattern of “Democrats break X tradition for allegedly noble reasons, Republicans then see it as fair game and break X+1 tradition harder and more effectively”. Absolutely. But there’s a level of equivalence here that is just absurd.

For example. Yes. Riots in DC. Not the same as literally occupying the seat of government. These two riots are not the same. Likewise. Faithless electors your own link is talking about, uh, celebrities advocating for doing so? The whole thing was pageantry anyways as it seemed to pretty much every legal scholar everywhere that individual electors can’t actually go rogue. Contrast the Pence convincing effort or the alternate slate effort which had a (still not crazy high but not zero) chance of creating a more real crisis. It’s insane to me that you refuse to see this. At some point we moved from random House reps doing protest votes to actual, organized attempts to submit alternate electoral slates based on a sum total of zero evidence and a “throw literal shit against the wall and see if anything sticks” approach to evidence. Not. The. Same! At least hanging Chads were, you know, real.

Now note that I’m really not reading too deeply into Trump’s every word either. When he said that we wouldn’t even need to have more elections if he won it was obvious he was simply exaggerating how effective he would be about fixing problems. But new evidence about his activities in the aftermath clearly show he is ultimately corrupt in motivation and self-serving in action.

And of course with all that said, why on earth would I have a problem with the system if Trump were to win? He can and probably will get a ton of votes, all legitimately. The voting system broadly works.

As an example unless you are a gutless loser like that Georgia governor candidate, even if some halfway shady shit happens in state elections (fights about voting on the margins of the rules, like induced turnout related stuff) the typical reaction has almost always been “well let’s try harder to win more state gov’t seats next time”.

  • -13

Yes, we do assume Hillary was being bitter, because action wise she didn’t do jack shit about it.

She talked about it, and that is one thing Trump also did. Is it your position that Trump's "fight like hell" comment is irrelevant and should not be raised?

Because sure: as far as I know, Hillary didn't have conversations with election officials about "finding" votes. She knew to only cheat with the aid of close confidantes, not party randos.

Being red is recent. This should set off warning bells in your brain about personal bias that you’d even mention Florida like that, and be so flagrantly and factually wrong.

I intended that to be a lighthearted throwaway comment, which I intended to signal through the "I don't want to read too much into this." Sorry that wasn't sufficiently clear, I should know better than to attempt humor around here. Though you will notice that there were no actual factual errors in my comment: it was after (i.e. later in time) the election process reforms that Florida became reliably red (for now!). That should set off warning bells in your brain about personal bias, that you'd have such a... strong reaction to factual claims, just because they happen to present a narrative you don't like.

For example. Yes. Riots in DC. Not the same as literally occupying the seat of government.

@Dean handled this one amply, I think. This is medieval thinking from you. They're not hiding the Darksaber in the podium, and besides, we have three co-equal branches of government. Democrats didn't hesitate to storm the Supreme Court building, to say nothing of state buildings. No, Democrats did not do exactly the same thing in exactly the same place as Republicans, but you seem committed to riding the "it's different when we do it" train to the very last stop. You are engaged in special pleading.

It’s insane to me that you refuse to see this.

Right back at you, though, seriously. I don't like Trump. I don't like rioting. I'm happy to condemn both. I don't think it's insane to be upset about riots, whether Republican or Democrat. I think it's insane to treat Republican excess as a national emergency, while winking and shrugging at a laundry list of Democratic excesses.

And of course with all that said, why on earth would I have a problem with the system if Trump were to win?

I didn't ask if you would have a problem with the system. I asked, "if Donald Trump wins in November, [would you] reject the outcome of that election?"

Because you said:

There is a line between some things you might say to your spouse in anger, and some things which should literally never be said, because they can’t be taken back and might threaten the entire marriage. With the assumption that the marriage is a good one - here, the assumption that the system of democratic elections is a good one.

It’s not at all clear what kind of system Trump would put in its place, which is PLENTY worrying in and of itself, but I have a very hard time imagining it being better than our current one, and I likewise have I think very good reasons to believe that even if you think for example that the Justice Department needs reform and fairness, Trump is probably one of the worst people to actually do so.

I read this as you genuinely worrying that Trump would bring about an end to democratic elections. This seems like an insane worry to me, but I can imagine believing this for real. And if you did believe this for real, wouldn't it be in your interest (and the interest of the nation) to do whatever you could to prevent Trump from taking office?

Because for a lot of people in 2016, and 2020, and 2024, that seems to be the thinking. Cheating in debates or stacking primaries may not be the literal same thing as calling election officials with pointed questions about unusual polling circumstances (a water main? really?)--but it comes from the same mental attitude, namely: winning this election is more important than any standards, norms, or traditions that might be in my way. I agree that Trump gives zero fucks for standards, norms, or traditions. But it would be nice if we could stop pretending (and insisting!) that Clinton, Biden, Harris, etc. are any different in this regard. They're just (usually) slicker and sneakier about it.

For example. Yes. Riots in DC. Not the same as literally occupying the seat of government. These two riots are not the same.

Of course not. One riot was politically favored for prosecution and led to among the largest prosecutions in American history, and the other riot was disfavored and was not, as well as many following riots of similar partisan vein. This difference in interest of prosecution of prosecutable riots being the critical difference in prosecution is the basis of the critique, not an argument that one is not a prosecutable offense.

January 6 is not prosecutable on grounds of 'literally occupying the seat of government.' It is prosecutable on grounds of intent to disrupt the government processes, the publicized prior intent to take actions, the recorded evidence of illegal actions taken, and the jurisdiction of where it occurred. There is no distinction in the lawfulness of the acts between whether the disruption occurs inside the Congressional building itself versus other government buildings, or other places in the capital. January 6 wasn't the first time in even the preceding year that violent, disruptive, and/or intimidating protests had forced a relocation of senior government officials in the capital.

The prosecutable equivalence between events of political violence that is intended to disrupt is that they are political violence intended to disrupt. 'But their political violence was categorically different!' is special pleading, particularly when the difference is not the degree of severity of prosecution, but whether to prosecute at all.

I don't want to read too much into it, but I can't help but notice that after Florida decided to take elections seriously enough to avoid a repeat of 2000, it changed from "purple" to "reliably red."

A bit of an admission against interest for me, but my prior is that FL has just had an unusually-competent run of GOP state leadership with JEB Bush (who, for all his neo-con wimpiness, appears to have been a good governor), Rick Scott, and Ron DeSantis. Also, it probably says something about the state of the FL Democratic party apparatus that their two most recent standard-bearers have been an ex-Republican (Charlie Crist) and a guy who almost got pinched for laundering his campaign funds and later got himself arrested in a hotel room with overdosing gay prostitutes and meth (Andrew Gillum).