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A new fault line
Simple question: will the question of a “stolen election” by nefarious means – D malfeasance on the local level, top-down fraud efforts, Dominion manipulation, all of the above – divide the conservative side in the year to come? I get the feeling sometimes that if you’re not on board with the idea that Donald Trump actually won, full stop, you’re a cuck-shill Tapper-fluffer (cruise ship icon) RINO eager to buff your cocktail-party credentials.
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There is the mid-level option, that the Democrats cheated in a number of places, but that while it may have made a difference in some places (PA and GA seeming to be the most likely) it might not have changed the outcome in some other states…
…which would still justify significant probes into the allegations, since the cheating would still be cheating, even if Biden didn’t need it to win a state like Wisconsin, and where even if it didn’t affect the final outcome of the election, having those violations slapped down in court is still important. That’s especially true with the alleged Fulton County violations in Georgia, since that race really isn’t over due to the Senate runoffs, and control of the Senate and the Democrats’ ability to have total control in Washington hinges on the results of those races (and where the GOP probably needs to win both races to avoid some potential Jim Jeffords/Arlen Specter re-run this coming February or March if the Senate was a 51-49 split).
James,
It is possible that Biden actually won after the fraud is removed. The only way to be sure is a detailed, exacting, thorough, and transparent investigation. If we don’t get some certainty, this election is going to nuke the trust in elections generally, which is a bad thing. It does not matter who wins – the voter fraud needs to be dealt with even if it would not have necessarily changed the election result, since it is a serious crime. You can see the result of ignoring criminal activity as you drive in to work.
The people who are currently attracting heat are the ones advocating for concession immediately, along with “if you don’t embrace my vision of the Republican party you are a pitiable loser” It also generates rage when someone claims to be on our side despite voting for Biden and cheering a Biden presidency.
I think you are pretty safe, unless you decide to designate a post asking for Ricochet members to accept Biden-Harris as our Lord and Savior as the Post of the Week.
I don’t know that my predictive abilities are especially strong but I’d guess not. Or, to be more precise, I don’t think the particular stance itself will be determinative. Methinks unnecessary ‘tude has been the culprit all along!
An irony that I’ve been stewing on recently is that postmodern thought has made it all the way to the right ( ever notice how everyone uses the word “narrative” nowadays)? And yet, despite its bloated syllabication 😉 it’s made it so people who’ve been gradually drifting apart, so much so that common ground is demonstrably in the past, are able to move on comfortably and refrain from unnecessary conversation. The good news – sticking with
myyour geological analogy – is that the topography seems like it’ll take the form Mexico, where Baja kinda does it’s thing.Anyway, there’s my stream of conscious take.
@jameslileks, I have no doubt you’re asking this in good faith. But you sure asked this question tendentiously. I would say the majority of Republicans supporting Trump’s election challenges believe that the Democrats, months ago, litigated for new voting rules for this election that were bound to create confusion. We warned them of this, and also said that some of these rules were being imposed unconstitutionally. We suspected they did this on purpose to advantage themselves; they replied that we wanted to suppress votes.
Well, now we have confusion and a not insignificant number of claims of fraud. So far, the president is acting within his rights with his challenges.
If there are Republicans urging me to walk away from these voting irregularities now, before the challenges have been heard officially, and simply accept defeat, then yes, I have a problem with that. I won’t hate them, but I will think they are weak, and will have to accept that our side will lose—elections, cultural fights, access to the best jobs, access to free speech, etc.—more often than not.
If these Republicans think it’s the gentlemanly thing to do, giving up without a real contest, they’re wrong. The honorable thing is to compete with all one’s strength and insist on fair play now, to discourage cheating in the future.
Will this cause a rift in the party? I don’t know, but I won’t be the one calling for the splitting of the party. I’ll simply carry on as well as I can and adjust my expectations from my “teammates.”
Same old fault line as before really. It’s just a question of how many will be willing to step over it rather than riding the side they’re on down to the abyss.
I really can’t read conservatives any more. I’m sure some will continue to claim that Biden is illegitimate for the next four plus years. How many I don’t know. If it’s a lot that’s a problem for the GOP. If it’s more than a lot that’s a problem for the country.
No.
This will all be sorted out one way or another by mid-December or mid-January. There might be some new insults to be hurled – ‘defeatist’ vs ‘tin-foiler’ or whatever – but those will just be rhetorical flourishes for other divisions (globalists vs nationalists; social warriors vs big-tenters; GOPe vs Trumpians; etc).
My optimistic take on this is that by April 2021, a few months after Trump has left the White House and Joe Biden has moved in, most conservatives will view the election of 2020 the way they view the elections of 2008 and 2012. The Republican lost and the Democrat won.
Is it possible that John McCain was robbed in 2008? Is it possible that Mitt Romney was robbed in 2012? How about Gerald Ford in 1976? Maybe Bill Clinton stole the 1992 election and George HW Bush would have been reelected if not for voter fraud.
This isn’t to say that any of those elections were 100 percent free of fraud/mistakes. It’s just that no one was saying in 1979 that Gerald Ford actually won the election of 1976.
My pessimistic take is that, yes, to acknowledge that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election and that all of Trump’s legal challenges to the election were mostly dismissed by various state and local judges, will result in getting your radio talk show or cable TV show cancelled. You will be exiled to The Bulwark or The Dispatch, a fate worse than hell, and that will be the end of you.
I hope we realize that Donald Trump rubbed lots of voters the wrong way and this explains why Republican candidates for down ballot offices performed so well in the election last week while Trump lost to Biden. Many voters decided to vote a straight Republican ticket while either skipping the presidential contest or actually voting for Biden. The smart way to respond to this isn’t to claim voter fraud but to nominate a different Republican in 2024.
Conservatives tend to see the world as it really is, not the way we would like it to be, unlike the Left. So, my hope is that we will sober up soon and get on with the next political battle.
Jim,
Some people on Ricochet have said that if Trump’s election attorneys lose their battles in state and federal court, they will accept that Trump actually did lose to Biden. Others have said that if Trump’s election attorneys lose their post-election legal battles, they will conclude that state and local judges are a bunch of David French weenies.
Another variable is competence of the handling of mail-in ballots. I have designed large mailroom processing systems for a very large healthcare provider. If these systems are not properly managed/designed, you have problems with any malice
One explanation for Trump’s claims of voter fraud is that Trump is a sore loser. In other words, there really isn’t any merit to these claims of voter fraud and this explains why Trump’s attorneys have, thus far had so little success in state court.
If people had a bit less of an investment in the outcome of this presidential race, perhaps more similar to the investment I have in the outcome of a tennis match between Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal, they might be able to see that Trump’s complaints of voter fraud have less to do with actual voter fraud and more to do with Trump’s refusal to admit, to himself and his fan base, that he lost to slow Joe Biden.
As Kevin Williamson has written, Donald Trump does not want to admit that he lost to a man who he claimed was one part mob boss and one part eggplant.
This explanation has been given too little consideration.
It’s the censorship and de-platforming of people who question the narrative that concerns me. If anti-Trump conservatives ignore that, and downplay the need to transparently and thoroughly examine the fairness of the process, that is a problem. Watching Fox News last week was like watching a hostage video. They are afraid of something.
Another explanation is there actually was fraud.
While I cannot claim to know how Trump loses, having never golfed with the man, I can guarantee there was fraud.
The only question is, how much fraud?
From @oldbathos great post “Election Fraud 101”
Rule #1: Once a ballot gets into the box, it looks like all other ballots, it carries the same strong presumption of validity no matter how it got there.
“The upshot of Rule #1 is that you invariably have to catch the fraud before that ballot hits the box.”
The GOP election professionals failed miserably to prevent the Dems from exercising Rule 1. The “sending everyone a Mail-In ballot” never made any sense – virus or not. There is ALREADY a procedure in place for voters who can’t or won’t be able to appear to vote in person. The well established absentee ballot process – where voters who can’t or won’t be able to appear in person request an absentee ballot – should have been utilized. It is a much more secure process than the approach utilized. So why did Dems subvert the existing process? Why does anyone do anything? They think it benefits them. So, the time to secure the validity of the election was BEFORE the ballots were mailed. Last – ditch … before the ballots were opened and separated from the identifying information on the envelopes. Now? It’s almost impossible to tell the sheep from the goats. Unless GOP lawyers can point to enough clearly fraudulent physical ballots to overturn election results in a State, this thing is over. Everything alleged might be true. But at this point, there is no way to tell which ballots are the bad ones. Example – Dead people voted? Yes. You even know all their names and addresses? Yep. OK, suppose a judge agrees to let you throw out those ballots … which ones are they? After the ballots have been opened and separated from the envelopes, they are anonymous. There is no way to tell. So even if you can prove your case – there’s no remedy except to take a Mulligan and have a do-over election. And no judge is going to order that without the GOP being able to directly point to enough clearly fraudulent voters/ballots to possibly overturn the election in a State.
So we will never know for sure. Was it stolen? Probably. The only solution is to secure elections going forward and that starts IMMEDIATELY. IN GEORGIA. And it starts with securing voter registrations. And it definitely should go back to the pre-pandemic Absentee voting process with as much in-person voting as possible.
Its not a new fault line.
The same cucks, same fault line, new gaslighting.
James, I think there is a realignment on the conservative side that is occurring and is independent of where one stand regarding President Trump.
Right now, we have people who are avowed conservatives and have declared they wish to continue selling their wisdom in opposition to conservative politics. These people will be considered pariahs to the right. Deservedly so.
The punditry who spent the last 4-5 years mocking every policy (good or bad, people like Jonah) are probably on the decline. Those who called fairly (Shapiro, to name one) seem to be ascendant.
So I think it is more a social shuffling and the way one makes the divide uncrossable is to be either a sore loser or a poor winner depending on the outcome and the stand one took before the outcome was decided.
As in The Matrix, it comes down to individual choice.
The current systems in many states are asking for fraud. Insecure electronic systems machines, many thousands of registered voters who do not exist, at least locally. Not to mention the voter ID problem. All of these have existed for years, and it’s mostly the Party That Must Not be Named which created and protects the status quo.
That’s before you add in improperly designed mail-in voting systems.
Partisanship is institutionalized in the state and local agencies that administer voting. Would you be surprised to learn that this was the case in, for example, the Fulton and DeKalb County GA clerk’s offices? Those counties’ civil services in general? Atlanta’s?
And Federal: the Voting Rights division seems to have its #Resistance, and so does the USPS, for starters. The latter has major union protection.
I’m disputing the premise of the question in the OP (will the question of a “stolen election” by nefarious means – D malfeasance on the local level, top-down fraud efforts, Dominion manipulation, all of the above – divide the conservative side in the year to come?).
The divide already exists. Trump is not its cause. His challenges to the tallies shine a light on but did not create these problems. The problems are not limited to how we conduct elections.
If Trump fails in his vote challenges, the problems will not go away; even if he succeeds, it would take at least eight years of Trump plus a Trumpian successor administration plus state and local efforts to make a dent in that mess. Bipartisan efforts.
That in turn would require a different mass and social media establishment than the one we have.
Parler exists, but seems to be having teething problems (that’s if it’s not already compromised; there are early signs that this is the case.) To play a role it would have to eat into Twitter’s market share in a big way. It’s a start, though.
On the other side of the ledger, Fox has just demonstrated that Robert Conquest’s second and third laws* apply to it.
____________________
Both could be true.
The problem now is that, even if the election was stolen (and for the record, I don’t believe it was), unless someone can provide evidence so incontrovertible* that even a majority of Democrats will believe it, the consequences of reversing the current result for the future of the United States would be worse than a Biden Administration. I honestly believe it would lead to a hot civil war. The Dem voters will never accept a second Trump term, and a significant portion of Republican voters wouldn’t either.
*Video of a guy with a white cat and monocle describing in detail exactly how his plan went down might suffice.
Do you have any evidence of wrong-rubbing?
The ignored flip side to your statement includes the voters that Trump rubbed the right way. The same voters who’ve seen the most recent Republican candidates get smeared, and take it, like the nice guys they are, so much so that they abase themselves in front of the voters who had hoped they would change the destructive, long-term course our politics and debt are set on.
But OK. The “smart” way would have gotten us a Rubio or a Cruz against Biden, and it’s all conjecture from there. The only good news is that Republicans have a deep bench and some great potential candidates next time around. But I wouldn’t call it “smart” to just nominate someone different. It barely rises to “clever”.
This has been my rough take on the whole thing. Once the ballot is out of the envelope, it’s game over. The only thing remaining is if it’s only got Biden marked at the top, and there’s a bag of 50,000 of them. Those I’d toss. But once they’re out, if there’s no datestamp, etc, they’re just a ballot.
We are at the point where saying fraud needs to be investigated makes one a sore loser.
I don’t know the future, but I am certain that the behavior of the media both social and classical has produced a rupture point in the Conservative movement that affords an opportunity and peril for the survival of Conservative opinion media. It will need to be rebuilt because its failures are manifestly obvious.
Too many have opposed the will of the majority of the Republican base expressed in 2016 for four years (that I reluctantly accepted in the voting booth on November 2016) and now are starting to sound like their position was justified by this election and it is now time for the “Adults” to return to control of the movement. You have to be a demented narcissist to believe that you will be rewarded for four years of treachery by either side of the ideological divide.
One point I will make about my personal inclination. I don’t trust any media outlet at this point.
Neo-Conservativism is dead. The Weekly Standard is obviously dead. National Review is near death. The Rampart and Bulwark sites have lost their raison d’etre with Trump’s departure, but they were never really alive anyway. This is true of the majority of people affiliated with these outlets.
Ricochet, Daily Wire and what ever enterprise the weeping man (Glenn Beck) run are points of departure for the new media.
I don’t know about Fox News because of I haven’t had the time to watch television for the last twenty years always finding it too slow and dull to use as a source of information, but I suspect they have committed a fatal blunder.
So, whatever the outcome, it is time to again take up the sword, unfurl the black flag and start slitting the throats of the Left’s policies. Thankfully, we have the most dimwitted and incompetent administration as a foe.
Yes. There are absolutists on both sides of the argument who won’t accept the idea that the voter fraud claims could be both a dessert topping and a furniture polish — i.e. Trump could have lost and Biden’s supporters could have cheated in key swing states. But even if A is true, that doesn’t mean you don’t investigate B and, if true, don’t attempt to punish the people who did cheat, in order to prevent future instances, including in the Georgia runoffs in January.
Pennsylvania is good evidence of this where Republican candidates for the US House of Representatives received about 100,000 more votes that their Democrat opponents while Trump trails Biden in Pennsylvania by about 53,000 votes.
Republicans also won the race in Pennsylvania for Treasurer and State Auditor. So, in Pennsylvania, many people were willing to vote Republican except in the presidential race.
In Maine, Trump lost to Biden by 10 points while Republican Susan Collins beat her Democrat opponent by 8 points.
In the 2nd congressional district of Nebraska, which awards 1 electoral vote to the winner, Trump lost to Biden while Republican candidate for US House defeated his Democrat opponent.
So, if you want to win, Dump The Trump.
You have read my mind.
Broken windows.
Broken elections. Both bad, and need to be addressed.
The Left has worked to destroy confidence in all institutions. Never Trump allied with the left to help with Russia Russia Russia. That was exposed. Where we are is that their is no trust and no benefit of the doubt.
The solution is to find ways to rebuild trust, not tell people they are crazy for not having trust.
So what idea are you on board with? Nothing-to-see-here, move along, if it can’t be definitely proven (and acceptable to the perpetrators) -despite every indication from multiple directions it was a blatant and shameless fraud – then we just, what, wait till next year?
You are a masterful wordsmith. But if you can’t see what’s going on in front of your very eyes, your clever descriptions and demeaning characterizations are meaningless.
Ahoy, indeed.🛳🛳🛳🛳
James, this is a question that you need to ask now, while President Trump team challenging the results? To quote @merumsal – “Will this cause a rift in the party? I don’t know, but I won’t be the one calling for the splitting of the party. I’ll simply carry on as well as I can and adjust my expectations from my “teammates.””
It isn’t surprising at all that Donald Trump is unwilling to admit that he lost to Joe Biden and has decided to use voter fraud as an excuse.
Remember in 2000 when Republicans held signs that said “Sore Loserman” (a poke at Gore Leiberman)?
Trump has become the Al Gore of the Republican party, leading his troops to defeat and not willing to admit it publicly.
Actually there are 2 parts to that question:
We absolutely need a solution for 1 no matter which side you are on. It may be enough if we quash universal mail-in balloting and that makes the fight on the election worth having. As for number 2 that is going to take longer to work out. I suspect the people who want a return to the old days of the Republican party are going to get kicked to the side. Whatever happened this election Trump was not repudiated. Hopefully, we can find a way to take the good parts of Trump’s, message, policy, and style and refine them so that we have a winning message in the future.