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Trump has lost a sufficient number of electoral votes to have lost the 2020 election.
There is no systemic fraud or grand conspiracy that explains this fact away. And it makes sense, because one candidate has fostered an out-of-control deadly pandemic to ravage the country and spark the greatest financial calamity since the Great Depression while the other… didn’t do those things. When conservative conspiracy-theorists wonder how so many people could have voted for Biden but not downballot Democrats — who had a terrible night — they’re answering their own question: because a sizeable chunk of Democrat-hating Republicans felt compelled to excise Trump from the White House. It’s just not that complicated.
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While Trump’s media enablers stoke unsubstantiated claims of fraud — claims so absurd that ERICK FRIGGING ERICKSON is debunking them — his attorneys are filing specious lawsuits and his administration is abusing legal requirements to make the president feel better. At first, most people just pointed at this buffoonery and laughed.
But the Democratic Party is lousy with pearl-clutching worrywarts. The Secretary of Defense has resigned! Bill Barr says the DOJ will look into voter fraud! Maybe the Supreme Court really will decide the election just like Trump says they will! Are we watching a coup?!?!?
No… and yes.
Elie Mystal can walk you through all the reasons that Trump is going to be moving out of the White House in January no matter what. He’s keeping these lawsuits going as much out of a need to raise money to settle campaign debt — 60 percent of contributions to “stop the count!” just go to paying pissed-off vendors — as any genuine belief that he really won. It’s always a grift and as the saying goes, “an OANN viewer and his money are soon parted.”
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While Trump will depart for Mar-a-Lago soon enough, the Republican Party itself is very much in long-run coup mode. Because these silly fraud arguments aren’t going to get them anywhere today because judges and the overwhelming weight of evidence will snuff those out. But for Republicans who spent years very expensively trying to prove voter fraud exists, stoking the idea that the election was “stolen” can serve as the next best thing. Creating an article of faith among the base can remove the need for elusive external evidence. It is now a circular argument: “election fraud exists because otherwise Trump would’ve won.” And, by forming such a circle, they’ll know that any new, restrictive voting laws have “improved” the sanctity of elections — as opposed to illegally suppressing democracy — if they produce results where Trumpists win.
Q.E.D.
The people who will be right there to assure them that they have the solution for this vague sense of fraud will be the Republican Party. They’ll propose more restrictive ID laws, require voters with “ethnic” names to re-register every election, close polling locations in known minority areas, and end early and mail-in voting entirely. And the places where they’ll ramp up these efforts first are Georgia and Texas.
The feeding frenzy is actually already underway in Georgia, where the two GOP Senate runoff candidates have attacked the Republican Secretary of State for administering an election where Democrats performed so well. Put another way, Loeffler and Perdue and miffed that the current Secretary failed to suppress the vote as much as his predecessor, current governor Brian Kemp. Despite the allegations of liberal partisans, Kemp didn’t “steal” his gubernatorial election in any overt way — but he did leverage the power of his old office to undermine faith in the process and to set up hurdles for the state’s increasingly Democratic electorate to clear. Those firewalls have been overcome and Republicans are mad. Unfortunately they have the unified government to redouble their efforts to suppress the will of the electorate to push Georgia voters down for a few more years.
Despite some Democratic hopes, Texas remains a Republican stronghold. But, like Georgia, it’s one that’s slipping. The governor already succeeded in applying the comically “fair” rule of having only one ballot dropbox per county regardless of whether of the county has 5 million residents or 1,700. With a slimming majority of voters in hand today, Texas Republicans will likely return to Austin to set up more onerous voting restrictions buoyed by the myth of widespread voter fraud.
So the moral of the story right now is that, no, Trump isn’t going to end up in the White House for four more years by flogging this fake voter fraud story. But that doesn’t mean people shouldn’t take this circus at the Four Seasons (Landscaping) deadly seriously. This is a slow motion assault on basic freedoms.
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.