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A massive electoral fraud scandal in Puerto Rico has been revealed in Propublica today.
The TL;DR is that a gang was sneaking drugs into a prison, and exchanging those drugs with addicts in return for votes for the governor (Puerto Rico being one of the few places that lets current jailed felons vote). Federal investigators were planning an indictment against the gang, prison guards involved, and the prisoners who took the deal before orders from above in the upper echelons of government shut it down.
But there's a twist you might not expect, the votes were for the Republican governor and the higher ups who shut it down was the Trump admin. This might be the biggest this you style story yet. Trump is constantly claiming about stolen elections and voter fraud, and yet little evidence has ever shown up. We finally found a massive scheme, and it was a MAGA related plan. There is no direct connection with this plot to Trump or the governor, but the gang leaders did have some personal connections to the governor.
The scheme probably wasn't enough to secure the election (at least not with the inmates alone) as the numbers aren't, but it was closer than you might guess. Thus even with a relatively massive scandal, it probably didn't have a direct impact then but it's interesting how the investigation was spiked.
Erick Erickson (conservative radio host/podcaster) posted something interesting earlier that seems applicable here.
Perhaps Trump's focus on electoral fraud is not motivated by being against fraud, but instead just because he lost in 2020 and can't accept that hit to his ego, the shattering mythology of his victimhood, and that's why they won't push this Puerto Rico case further?
Mostly because the only evidence leftists will ever accept is these bizarre reverse style "gotcha!" stories where they can be safe horny for election integrity. As soon as I read the words "there's a twist you might not expect" I can predict it's Republicans who will be doing the fraud, because that's the only context in which it is ever permissible to admit that election fraud ever happens. As long as we simultaneously arrive at the correct conclusion that, well, it can't have mattered anyways.
It's interesting, right? Criminal conspiracy to buy votes that, apparently, can only ever have maxed out at 5,000 votes in an election where the margin is way above that. You know it's futile, I know it's futile, but apparently the gangs organizing it didn't know it was futile? Weird that everyone involved thought this was worth doing when some back of the napkin math "proves" it can never have been worth doing. Why did they do it then? Well, they must have been irrational somehow, thankfully we don't have to examine our priors about whether election fraud is real or not.
Note that this isn't even an argument against the SAVE act, this is just an argument that Erick Erickson is wise and his enemies are silly, while he sits in the corner watching. It might not even be true: this Wapo op-ed argues that the SAVE Act would turn Nevada and New Mexico into solid red states just by changing the voter pool. It doesn't even require us to believe in election fraud; The GOP simply chooses to play by rules that cause them to lose when they have a popular mandate and the power to change the rules. That's at least the decision Erick Erickson would make, as he looks down on me from his superior moral pedestal while pressing the "Keep Losing" button over and over again.
Conservatives and conservative aligned people control the biggest media in the country! If there's a major story of Dem favored election fraud, even if the left wanted to cover it up it'd be on Fox News and CBS, very mainstream outlets. It wouldn't be censored on X.
If you have the largest and most viewed messaging apparatus and you can't get them to communicate a story then either you're idiots who fail at using the tools provided or it's so false that even your own partisans won't put their name to it.
The point is just to tip the scales in their favor. The gang leaders have connections to the governor and stood to benefit from her winning, thus they used the power they had to tilt things more in her favor.
Yes, Erickson is generally much smarter than the grifters. He is a more principled conservative with strong Christian values, instead of appealing to populist victimhood fantasies.
Clearly and visibly not true, given that the GOP can not get the congressional votes to make it happen. If they had the mandate they would have done it. They don't have the votes.
And given how the midterms are looking, doesn't seem like "popular" applies as well anymore. Maybe if the Trump admin bothered to appeal to what the American people wanted instead of starting a war, driving up prices, harassing legal immigrant workers, and stalling business investment with tariffs, they could have kept the good faith that voters had going into 2025. No, instead they did all that, made independent and swing voters upset to the point some even admit regret and decided it must be because they, the most powerful people in the world, are just poor victims instead.
Maybe when voters say they want a good economy with low prices, you should do that instead of making everything more expensive and scarce. And maybe when they turn on you for it, it's your fault for not listening. That is how we went from the Senate being basically unwinnable for Dems to now being favored towards them.
We are ten years into the Trump era now, which was inaugurated in 2015 with a primary waged on dissatisfaction with the GOP establishment. That the base has been dissatisfied with Republican leadership is one of the central facts of American politics. It's why we have Trump. It's why half a dozen Indiana state senators got primaried yesterday after they refused to redistrict. It's why Erick Erickson got pushed out of mainstream Republican politics. It's why the Republican Party was happy to dump Trump throughout the 2020 election crisis. It's also a very simple explanation for why the Republican party is unable to pass Voter ID even though a supermajority of the American public consistently polls in favor of it. I don't know what else to add here. I think you are misunderstanding one of the basic facts of American politics and are now trying to invent alternate explanations for things trivially understood in my worldview.
Erick Erickson is an extremely stupid man filling out the D Tier of conservative talking head punditry whose big claim to fame is saying stupid things on the radio while having a funny name. One day he calls Trump a fascist and says he'll never vote for him, the next day he's endorsing him for President, one day he's calling Supreme Court Justices "goat fuckers" and debating whether Michelle will cut off Barack's penis, the next day he's policing Trump's tone. No consistent principles. Erick Erickson is not smarter than the grifters, he is a grifter. Please, please spare me this delusional fat imbecile's self-serving fantasies about his high-minded Christian principles. (It must be nice to be principled when you can make a lot of money advertising how principled you are. I'm pretty sure Jesus says not to do this somewhere. Maybe Erick Erickson can spend some time contemplating the Christian principle of fasting and lose some weight?)
I consider this argument won because instead of confronting head-on anything I said you have pivoted to a non-sequitur about Republicans' prospects in the midterms. Although I don't see why Republicans would lose the midterms when we apparently have the power to commit election fraud without being punished. Seems simple. Republicans nationalize the Puerto Rico model and Democrats can't do anything about it because they don't know how to commit election fraud.
Maybe I'm getting too snarky. But I don't really understand why I'm being treated as the stupid one when your position seems to be that Republicans are too moral for politics.
Perhaps part of it is that married women who changed their name want to vote too.
One of the actual basic facts of American politics is that voters views will change. Trump had a moment of popularity, absolutely. He lost it by destroying everyone's wallets and starting wars. That there is a base who will always suck him off is irrelevant if you can't get the moderates and swing voters to stay on board.
This is the exact same mistake that Biden did. He won 2020 and they took it as a mandate to do everything they wanted, instead of trying to aim for the moderate centrist voters who decide elections.
Win the argument in your mind if you want, you clearly aren't winning the swing voters and moderates right now so you'll need something to claim as victory.
Holy strawman batman. A small time election fraud with inmates (massive relative to the basically nonexistent amounts of election fraud that otherwise occurs) is not something they can widen.
Biden did not do this. His admin was full of radicals who believed in arc of history triumphalist nonsense thought themselves to have a mandate to do whatever current progressive doctrine wanted, sure, but they believed this regardless of election results and also this wasn't sleepy Joe himself, it was staffers.
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