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No, I think it likely a result of his longstanding poor character and reputation coupled with a failure to accomplish most of what he promised his voters once in office.
I am yet to be convinced the other side don’t do the same thing themselves.
You are unconvinced that there is no effort by a majority of the ruling class to strongly discourage support for Blue candidates, encourage support for Red candidates, and establish favorable conditions on the ground for blue candidates in terms of impactful process mechanisms? That the security services illegally spy on Blue candidates, or pushing or suppressing rape accusations against blue and red candidates as partisan inclination requires? Or encouraging and selectively prosecuting widespread political violence? Can you give some examples of equivalent illegitimacy?
And again, I emphasize that I'm not claiming any of this is even illegal, much less prosecutable. I'm asking you your assessment of the sum total of the political game: Do you think the other side is well-advised to play a game that operates, in aggregate, in the way we observe?
Would it be fair to say that you consider "legitimacy" as the output of a process? If so, to the extent that this process can be observed or understood, what percentage of control would you say Blues have, roughly speaking?
No, that’s not what I’m trying to say. I’m saying that I think the specific, actual ‘rigging’ as alleged in eg Georgia and which has been a feature of American machine politics forever is likely a bipartisan thing.
I think it's very unlikely that there's evidence of vote tampering in the 2020 presidential election sufficient to secure a criminal conviction in an unbiased court. I've seen many such claims of such evidence here, and my assessment is that the large majority have been disproven to my satisfaction, such that my prior is that such claims are some combination of mistaken or dishonest, or, at best, unfalsifiable. @ymeskhout's extended campaign of posts on the subject was, I think, a masterclass on how to reasonably and responsibly address what amounted to a distributed Gish Gallop. He changed my mind on a number of specific claims, and so my mind changed on the aggregate as well. The result, near as I can tell, is that as regards the narrow claim of formal election fraud, my position is indistinguishable from his and yours.
Having conceded the above, it seems to me that you are at least implicitly arguing that since no evidence of formal electoral fraud has been found, and since most arguments of such have been disproven, you think the 2020 election should be considered legitimate.
On the other hand, it could be that you agree that the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election was at least questionable, even without evidence of formal election fraud, and those who claim that the election was rigged are at least arguably right about the result, if wrong about the mechanism.
@ymeskhout, I actually meant to ask you something approximating this way back in the day and never got around to it, so same question to you, if you don't mind.
It's quite affirming to see that a beat I haphazardly stumbled into generate this kind of positive feedback, so thank you for that.
I echo what @2rafa said, whether or not the 2020 election should be considered legitimate depends on the standards used. Some people unironically denounce any election where their preferred candidate does not win as illegitimate. But walking away from that extreme position, I would use prior elections as the baseline. I did affirmatively claim before that the 2020 election is one of the most secure slash "legitimate" we've ever had. That's not because I think it was conducted in a special way, but rather because it was by far the most scrutinized election we've ever had.
Prior election didn't get anywhere near as much attention, so I think agnosticism about their legitimacy would be more warranted given the relative lack of scrutiny they endured. For 2020 hold the position that there wasn't anything materially different that would warrant extra suspicion. I understand that lots of people would point to the various "covid rule changes" as reasons to be suspicious but for that to be true all three of these factors need to be established:
I've seen attempts to justify individual aspects of the above, but I haven't come across coherent explanations that address all three. After lots of opportunity, fair to say the absence of evidence is evidence of absence.
(this is written under my first covid fog so please excuse any potential incoherence)
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I’m unsure what ‘legitimate’ should mean. I’d say it should be considered about as legitimate as the average presidential election in US history. However legitimate you think that is, I suppose.
"legitimate", as I understand it, means that one should accept the outcome, and expect others generally to accept the outcome.
I think that the ruling class strongly discouraging support for Red candidates and encouraging support for Blue candidates, establishing favorable conditions on the ground for Blue Candidates through the selective manipulation of impactful process mechanisms, selectively harassing Red candidates via the state security apparatus, encouraging widespread political violence against Reds and their proxies while engaging in equally-widespread selective enforcement against such violence, as well as a variety of similar actions, constitute illegitimate actions within a democratic system.
I do not think you can give examples sufficient to demonstrate that such conditions existed in previous presidential elections, at least not at any time in the previous half-century or so, and certainly not in a bipartisan manner.
I think such actions undermine the legitimacy of democratic mechanisms. Further, I think in our present case, the legitimacy of such mechanisms has in fact been undermined. I think you would find it difficult to argue otherwise, which is why you restrict yourself to the narrowest possible approach to a specific form of the general question. Would that be a fair assessment?
These are all ... soft. "Encouraging", "favorable conditions", "harassing" - these are all things that have happened, to greater or lesser extents in the past.
I think there are more suggestive examples in the past. A president who appears to have committed voter fraud to become senator. Or Bush v Gore, where SCOTUS may have directly decided an election on controversial procedural grounds.
And if we can go further back, there's the compromise of 1877.
All of those undermine democratic mechanisms more!
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