The-Ave.US

This article contains news and liberal commentary.

Unless the polls are wildly wrong, Biden will win the popular vote, possibly by a huge margin. But that doesn’t determine who gets to be president.

Trump is a wildly unpopular president, and the GOP is an unpopular minority party, but Republicans have become expert at gaming the election system to defeat the majority of voters. Their tactics include voter roll purging, caging, vote suppression, voter intimidation, making voting as difficult as possible, not counting legitimate votes, and even messing with mail delivery to thwart absentee voters. In this election, we’ve even seen them go to court to obtain the “right” to send men with guns to polling places to threaten voters.

I don’t get very excited about the polls showing Biden with a double-digit lead nationally, for a couple reasons. One, polls showing Biden with a roughly 51% to 42% lead over Trump leaves a significant number of votes — in this case 7% of them — unaccounted for. You probably can safely assume 1% to 2% of them will vote for third-party candidates. Most of the others, I suspect, are so-called “shy Trumpers,” i.e., people who pretend to be undecided but are actually Trump supporters. So the race very likely is closer than the polls show.

Second, there’s a strong possibility the election won’t be decided by voters. Trump and the GOP are pushing hard on multiple fronts to disenfranchise the voters. There are several ways to do this, and they’ll try them all: (1) By cutting off vote counting before all the ballots are counted, (2) by having rightwing judges throw out the election results, and (3) by having gerrymandered legislatures override the voters in choosing electoral slates. (In Wisconsin, for example, Democratic Assembly candidates got 54% of the total votes in 2018, but Republicans ended up with two-thirds of the Assembly seats.)

Let’s be clear about something: Republicans want to establish a Republican dictatorship in this country that citizen-voters can’t remove from office. Many people see the 2020 election as a referendum on our future form of government: A choice between democracy or dictatorship.

That’s why the huge turnout; that’s why people who don’t normally bother to vote are waiting in long lines for hours to vote; that’s why millions of Americans are genuinely frightened by what Republicans are up to. They believe — rightly — that Biden and the Democrats need to win a crushing victory, not just a narrow majority, to save our democracy and preserve our freedom to choose our leaders and vote out a government we don’t like. (And it’s clear that a majority of us don’t like this government.) That’s also why Trump’s attacks on Biden aren’t working; the issues that worry a majority of Americans are far bigger than anything that might be wrong with Biden.

It’s a given that Trump will lose the popular vote. In this article (read it here), Vox analyzes how difficult it will be for him to legitimately win the electoral vote:

“First, he needs about a 3-point polling error or a late switch of votes in his favor in most swing states. Going off FiveThirtyEight’s polling averages, that would be enough to push Arizona, Florida, North Carolina, Georgia, and Iowa — states Biden narrowly leads — into Trump’s column. But that on its own wouldn’t provide Trump enough electoral votes. Trump also needs to win a big state or multiple smaller contests where Biden has a larger lead. His best prospect for that appears to be Pennsylvania, where Biden is up by a little over 5 percentage points in FiveThirtyEight’s average. There’s little indication that this is a particularly likely scenario. Experts who picked up on signs that Trump could win in 2016 are generally not seeing the same signs this time around. But it is a scenario that can’t entirely be ruled out until the votes are counted.”

In other words, a legitimate Trump electoral vote victory is improbable, but possible, especially if the polls are way off or there’s a big cohort of “shy Trumper” voters out there. But Trump’s best chance of re-election is an illegitimate one:

“But he may also have something else up his sleeve …. Trump has heavily implied that he hopes to declare victory on election night — and then, if slower counts of mail ballots tip the key states toward Biden, he will attempt to disparage those mail votes as fraudulent or illegitimate. If Trump goes down this path, he will be trying to erase millions of legitimately cast mail votes in an attempt to effectively steal the election from Biden.

“You might be comforted by the idea that state election officials are too professional to let this happen. But the president is technically named by the Electoral College — and those electors themselves can be named by state legislatures, which in several key states are controlled by Republicans. So if Trump tried to declare victory based on phony accusations about mail votes, would GOP legislatures go along with it? We can’t say for sure, and … [i]f the legislatures did this, would the courts allow it? We also can’t say for sure, but two Trump-appointed Supreme Court justices — Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh — made clear this week that they believe state legislatures indeed have preeminent power over how elections in their state work.”

This is the nightmare scenario that Democrats worry about. I have no doubt that Republicans are sufficiently anti-democratic, unethical, and power-hungry to do it. But it might not be easy to pull off:

“There’s a catch for Trump, though. Due to the differing ways states carry out their vote counts, the scenario that has been called a ‘red mirage’ — a seeming Republican lead on election night that gradually vanishes as more Democratic mail votes are slowly counted — is only likely to occur in … Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, all of which have Republican legislatures. (The mail vote count will be slow in all three because GOP legislators refused to let ballot processing start earlier.) [In] other swing states, we might actually get a ‘blue mirage’ — where lots of the mail vote is counted quickly but then the in-person count subsequently improves Republicans’ totals. This is likely to occur … in Florida. And … Florida, North Carolina, Arizona, Iowa, and Georgia are expected to conduct their counts relatively quickly. So if Trump were to want to pursue this ugly strategy, it could only really work if Biden falls short in all those states on election night and the race comes down to Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan again.”

There’s another scenario the Vox article doesn’t mention, but which I think about, and I’m sure many Democratic leaders do, too: That Biden wins, and Democrats control Congress, and all the Republican machinations in the world can’t overturn those results, but Republican judges — especially those on the Supreme Court — don’t let them govern. That is, conservative judicial activism negates the election results.

In that case, the Democrats will have no choice but to either pack the Supreme Court or strip away its powers to overturn legislation and executive actions.

In any case, if the Democrats win control of the government in 2020, one of the very first things they must do in 2021 is enact a strong federal voting rights law to preserve democracy and prevent one-party, minority-party, rule in perpetuity. They’re likely to get only one chance to do that.

Return to The-Ave.US Home Page