I couldn’t quite follow all of that but…
The last thing the socialists are concerned with is “lives”. Socialism is about centralizing power and at any expense. They quite readily eat their own.
Well power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. That cliché has become self serving by now.
But here is another take on mud slinging, and nothing surprises there either, here, except the depth of the swamp from which voters can fish out something tangible.and rational.
"Stay Updated on Developing Stories
How low will Donald Trump go?
(CNN)With just 16 days(!) until the 2020 election, it will be here before you know it. Every Sunday, I outline the 5 BIG storylines you need to know to understand the upcoming week on the campaign trail. And they’re ranked – so the No. 1 story is the most important of the coming week.
- Deal or no deal?:
By Tuesday, according to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, we should know whether Congress and the White House will find a way to make a deal before the election on a coronavirus stimulus package.
“While there was some encouraging news, much work remains,” Pelosi said in a letter sent to her colleagues on Sunday afternoon. “I am optimistic that we can reach agreement before the election. To that end, we are writing language as we negotiate the priorities, so that we are fully prepared to move forward once we reach agreement.”
The nut of the issue appears to be the size of the bill – particularly as it relates to funding for testing (and other Covid-19-related issues) for minority communities.
The White House offered a $1.8 trillion bill last week which Pelosi quickly rejected. (Some Democratic Party leaders – including 2020 presidential candidate Andrew Yang – have suggested Pelosi needs to cut a deal for the good of the country.)
And while she seems open to the idea of a deal generally, other parts of Pelosi’s letter are, um, less encouraging.
“The White House had assured Democrats that they would accept our language on testing with a ‘light touch,’” she wrote. “Unfortunately, as the committees of jurisdiction review the White House’s language provision-by-provision, it has become clear that these changes are not a light touch but instead, a deep dive.”
The clock is ticking. 48 hours and counting.
- A down-ballot disaster:
Yes, President Donald Trump looks like he is going to lose the presidential race to former Vice President Joe Biden. But it now increasingly looks like his unpopularity with the electorate could also cost his party the Senate and drive them even further into the House minority.
Inside Elections, a non-partisan handicapping tip sheet run by Nathan Gonzales, a CNN contributor, revised its seat projections in the Senate and the House in Democrats’ favor.
Gonzales is now predicting a four- to six-seat Democratic gain in the Senate, which, if it comes to pass, means that Democrats will win the Senate majority whether Biden wins the White House or not.
On the House side, Gonzales now says Democrats are likely to gain between 10 and 20 seats, which could well double their current majority. (Republicans need a net gain of 17 seats to win the House majority, which is, well, not happening.)
If Inside Elections is right, Democrats would have full control over Washington that they haven’t enjoyed since the first two years of Barack Obama’s first term.
What that would mean is, effectively, an undoing of the last four years of Trump’s presidency – whether on health care, the environment, the tax code or the overall regulatory process in the nation’s capital.
Side note: Keep an eye WAY down-ballot on the battle for state legislative control. This will be the last election before the country redraws its state legislative and House district lines in the wake of the 2020 Census. Which party controls the majority controls the line-drawing software in many of these states.
- 22 million (and counting):
More than 22 million people – across 45 states and the District of Columbia – have already voted, whether by mail or in person.
That’s roughly half of the total number of early votes – 46 million – cast in the 2016 election. And we are still more than two weeks from the actual Election Day!
Some of the swing state vote total comparisons tell the story of the booming early vote in 2020.
In Florida, almost 2.3 million votes have been cast in this election, roughly double the number of ballots cast at this point in 2016. In Michigan, the vote total is near 1.3 million, nearly three times as large as 2016.
And it’s just not large turnout that’s the story. Democrats are dominating the early vote in the 27 states who reported ballots cast by party affiliation. To date, 5.4 million registered Democrats have voted early while 2.5 million registered Republicans have done so.
(NOTE: This voting information comes from by Catalist, a data company that provides data, analytics and other services to Democrats, academics and non-profit issue advocacy organizations.)
To be clear: Party registration – and early vote numbers – aren’t determinative of outcomes. (My friend Harry Enten explains why here). But what we know is that early vote turnout is very likely to shatter every past record – and that Biden is very likely to have a considerable lead when Election Day dawns.
- The last debate:
It’s been three weeks since Trump and Biden first shared a debate stage. And that first debate was an unmitigated disaster for the President as his bullying, interrupting and white-hot rhetoric triggered a decidedly negative reaction in the electorate.
Trump’s refusal to participate in a virtual second debate now means that Thursday night’s head-to-head in Nashville, Tennessee, is Trump’s last chance to alter in some way the operating dynamic of the race.
It’s not totally clear how Trump will do that, although my best guess is that he will spend a lot of time talking about Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, and his time spent on a board of a Ukrainian natural gas company.
Those attacks, however, have to date been of limited appeal outside of Trump’s most loyal followers. Those voters aren’t Trump’s problem. It’s the loosely affiliated Republican and independents that the President needs a message for.
If the past few days is any indication, Trump doesn’t have that message. What he has been pitching in his whirlwind series of campaign stops since his recovery from Covid-19 is just more of the same base-stroking.
One other thing to keep in mind: Biden has said he would not participate in this final debate unless Trump tests negative for coronavirus.
“He just had Covid,” Lara Trump, the wife of Eric Trump, told CNN’s Jake Tapper of the President on Sunday. “He has now been cleared of Covid, which means he took a negative test, I’m sure he’ll take another one before the debate.”
- How low can Trump go?:
The most dangerous animal is a wounded and trapped one. That goes for humans, too – specifically the President of the United States.
Trump finds himself, with just over two weeks before the election, down in national and swing-state polling, being heavily out-raised and outspent by the Biden campaign and seeing signs everywhere of Republicans starting to jockey for what the party will look like when/if he loses.
Trump’s tweets – and campaign rally speeches – over the past few days suggest that he a) knows he is losing b) has no idea how to turn it around (see item No. 2) and c) is going to try to burn down, well, everything on his perceived way out the door.
That reality makes Trump even more dangerous to Biden – and the country – than he has shown himself to be over the past almost four years. Trump will say and do absolutely anything between now and November 3 – motivated roughly equally by a desire to win and a passion to make things as bad and ugly and awful as possible for Biden in the event he wins.
Trump has already taken to trumpeting potentially hacked materials tied to the Bidens. He has repeatedly questioned Biden’s mental health and acuity. He has encouraged the QAnon movement. He has suggested that the Navy Seal Team 6 killed an Osama bin Laden body double.
And that’s just in the last few weeks! How much lower can Trump go than that, you ask? I am not even sure what “lower” looks like but I am absolutely certain there is no bottom for this President. Never has been.
© 2020 Cable News Network. A Warner Media Company. All Rights Reserved.
Did you listen to the Veritas recording of Jeff Zucker of CNN telling his reporters to focus ONLY on Mr Trump? Bloomberg did the same.
"I’m worried that if President Trump loses — as looks likely — that he’s going to take the Senate down with him,” Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse said of the GOP’s campaign odds in a conference call with constituents.Anna Moneymaker
Oct. 19, 2020, 9:45 AM EDT
WASHINGTON — Republican senators are increasingly voicing fears that President Donald Trump could lose the election, and some are openly fretting that he’ll turn the party’s candidates into electoral roadkill, distancing themselves from him to an unusual extent.
A weekend of agonizing from Republicans did not yield any perceivable course correction from Trump as he continued his inflammatory rhetoric on the campaign trail and directed some of his fire right back at anxious GOP senators on Twitter.
Pointed warnings of electoral defeat have come in recent days from Sens. Ben Sasse of Nebraska, Ted Cruz of Texas and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. All are former Trump critics turned allies who reliably vote with the president.
“I’m worried that if President Trump loses — as looks likely — that he’s going to take the Senate down with him,” Sasse said in a conference call with constituents last week, according to a recording first reported on Thursday by the Washington Examiner. “I’m now looking at the possibility of a Republican bloodbath in the Senate.”
The elevated fears come as Democrat Joe Biden leads Trump by more than 9 points in the NBC News national polling average, and as some forecasters say Democrats are likely to secure control of Congress. The grim GOP outlook follows Trump’s widely criticized debate showing, hospitalization for Covid and a failure to secure an economic stimulus package.
“I hope that they’re having a moment of moral clarity. I think they’re realizing that the Trump show is almost over,” said Olivia Troye, a former homeland security adviser to Vice President Mike Pence who served on the White House coronavirus task force. “They have ridden the Trump wave long enough. But I think it’s no longer helpful to do that for them.”
Troye, a longtime Republican, says she plans to vote for Biden and Democrats down the ballot this fall. “There needs to be a significant change,” she said, and insisted that Sasse represents the misgivings of many party elites who are afraid to speak up.
At the Supreme Court hearing last Thursday for Judge Amy Coney Barrett, Graham, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and a Trump golfing partner who is in a close re-election battle himself, told Democrats, “Y’all have a good chance of winning the White House.”
Cruz, a Trump rival in 2016 and now a staunch ally, said recently on CNBC that if Americans are angry and depressed, “we could lose the White House and both houses of Congress," and the 2020 election “could be a bloodbath of Watergate proportions.”
The remarks also represent a jockeying for position in an anticipated post-Trump world, when the party will have to chart a new path. As others in the GOP cozy up to far-right conspiracy movements like QAnon, Sasse suggested in his remarks that he wants to excise some of the party’s Trumpian elements.
Sasse unloaded on Trump, saying that he “kisses dictators’ butts,” mistreats women, “mocks evangelicals behind closed doors” and has “flirted with white supremacists.” He said that Trump’s family “has treated the presidency like a business opportunity,” and that Trump refused to take the coronavirus seriously for “months” and instead “treated it like a news cycle PR crisis rather than a multi-year public health challenge.”
Liam Donovan, a lobbyist and former Republican operative, said the remarks “strike me less as panic and more as resignation setting in.”
“Even then only Sasse has been critical of the president. Cruz is essentially pre-spinning the loss and laying the blame with Democrats,” he said. “Both suggest the writing is on the wall, but otherwise very different tacks.”
Trump lashed back Saturday in a series of tweets, saying that Sasse has returned to his “stupid and obnoxious ways” after being “nice” to him in recent years and earning his endorsement, which helped Sasse win renomination to his Senate seat in May.
“Little Ben is a liability to the Republican Party, and an embarrassment to the Great State of Nebraska,” Trump wrote. “Other than that, he’s just a wonderful guy!”
Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., who trails his Democratic opponent Cal Cunningham in a competitive race, is openly contemplating Trump’s defeat and orienting his messaging around it.
“The best check on a Biden presidency is for Republicans to have a majority in the Senate. And I do think ‘checks and balances’ does resonate with North Carolina voters,” he told Politico.
Garland Tucker, a retired Raleigh financier who briefly challenged Tillis in the Republican primary before ending his bid early and endorsing him, told NBC News that there is “apprehension” in the party that Trump could lose.
“Any conservative and any Republican fears that could be the case,” he said. But several days ago, he predicted “a very close election” that could tighten if Trump “has a successful next three weeks.”
Tucker said he remained optimistic that Trump would win but added that Republican candidates are in trouble if he doesn’t. “The weaker President Trump is at the top of the ticket, the more likely it is that we lose the Senate majority,” he said. “The two are pretty inextricably combined.”
The fears were compounded on Friday when Trump tore into Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, a 24-year GOP incumbent fighting for her political life, for opposing Barrett’s Supreme Court nomination this close to an election. “Well, she didn’t support Healthcare or my opening up 5000 square miles of Ocean to Maine, so why should this be any different,” he tweeted. “Not worth the work!”
To some GOP operatives, the tweet was a slapdash rant that further jeopardized a potentially pivotal Senate seat, as Collins has no path if Trump supporters don’t vote for her. But to Trump allies, his reaction was understandable given that Collins was not willing to support Barrett.
“It’s disappointing that Collins wouldn’t back Barrett, or feels she can’t,” Tucker said. “And I’m sure he’s frustrated.”
Just got back. I did not. Encapsulate the point being made obsrvr, .if You would.
Veritas is an organization formed to attempt to verify what is really going on. They use infiltrators to spy on inner meetings. In a meeting at CNN during the Russian Hoax coup, they mobile-phone recorded Mr Zucker telling all of the reporters to drop any other research and only research Mr Trump. Some of the reporters quietly complained. Mr Bloomberg did the same later concerning the Ukraine Hoax coup.
It was a short recording but certainly revealing.
It certainly feels like, both parties are complicit into opposing cyberspying)and using unilateral involvement of one side( the Chinese), as a counterdefense against the Russian involvement on the other.
This makes sense, since the Russian / Chinese antipathy goes back many decades, and their international cover has progressed unto the US political process.
The internal/external debate has become interpermeable, with Russian/American interests coinciding with Chinese/American interests, revealing all kinds if covert activities.
What this implies, is, a very involved egaletorian/corporate mix, deductively signifying a proto-dialectical secondary concern with outworn labeling (capitalist/socialust)
That such representations can not be understood except within a reified conceptual matrix, defies the inherent logic of popular understanding.
The veiled reality appears to circle around a changing internationalism, and the issue is not that argued in terms of identifiable personal, national interests, but on the pain and tribulation involved in reaching the goals inherent in the NWO.
Therefore all the rest of it is merely dressing for various parts in a high stakes political playbook.
The reason d’etre is an avoidance of a huge cataclysmic conflict, no body desires.
"Decision on subpoena for Trump tax returns now in hands of Supreme Court
Analyst reveals who poses biggest legal threat to Trump if he loses election 04:28
(CNN)With just over two weeks until the presidential election, a decision on whether to further delay handing over President Donald Trump’s financial records to New York prosecutors now rests with the Supreme Court after Trump’s attorneys argued for a stay of the “unprecedented” document request.
The brief is the final filing by the two sides before the court can decide whether to again push off enforcement of a subpoena by the Manhattan district attorney’s office for years of Trump’s financial records, including tax returns, from his longtime accountant, Mazars USA.
“Once the records are produced, the status quo can never be restored,” Trump’s attorneys wrote, asking the court to again block enforcement of a subpoena that has been tied up in litigation for more than a year.
“The District Attorney’s boilerplate reasons for why the grand jury needs these records immediately thus do not outweigh the irreparable harm that the President will suffer absent interim relief,” Trump’s lawyers wrote.
Trump’s campaigning stoops to new lows as Covid cases spike
Trump’s lawyers have argued that the subpoena, which seeks eight years of financial records, is overbroad and was issued in bad faith, claims that were rejected by the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals. The appellate court ruled earlier this month that “there is nothing to suggest that these are anything but run-of-the-mill documents typically relevant to a grand jury investigation into possible financial or corporate misconduct.”
Cable News
"“Decision on subpoena for Trump tax returns now in hands of Supreme Court”
Well, that is why , the rush to replace Ginsburg!
“Russia continues to spread coronavirus conspiracies
Along with China and Iran, Russia is ramping up efforts to spread conspiracy theories and disinformation about the coronavirus pandemic in the U.S., according to an internal U.S. intelligence bulletin obtained by ABC News – a development that critics say reflects another example of Trump and the Russians parroting similar talking points.”
Wonder why, and even if it is a talking point. If it is, then something underlies it, like intelligence of international security issues.
This aura of an inflating bubble is becoming apparent, there is no way to downplay this, if the timeline is taken back to the very beginning of this administration: 2016.
The big bet of what happens after the election is the newest bubble to be either blown out, or imploded out of proportion. The energy either explodes , or. Implodes with a very strong whoosh.
A quiet after an exploding storm, or an unearthly phony peace followed by a blowout . There are no Grey colors on an impending possible horizon, the landscape feels torn apart violently
Nietzche wrote of a morally significant optical allusion: 'Beyond Good and Evil.
It was allusive as it became illusive.
That moralisn has become frozen into the rock bottom of political reality, this race is way beyond the foundations of party line, I am convinced that much more a political showcase, to fill in the cracks that a failing democracy has come to exhibit: it is the rush to popularize the antidote to optics of imagery that brings ‘meaning’ down to the people with their grasp on the digital computer.
Politics is as determinate as the complex drivulets which flow from the ice of winter’s of philosophical despair.
It really is no surprise that both parties assail each other of mismanagement .
There is no surprises, no expectations of surprise , since there has never been a mandate, at least in the 2016 election, no .new deals , its the same old search for an America which is really not really ’ there’.
So sit back with your popcorn , watch the commercials in-between, and pretend to be outraged.!
"The current president, Mr. Obama said, “hasn’t shown any interest in doing the work or helping anybody but himself and his friends or treating the presidency as anything more than a reality show that can give him the attention that he craves”
Really?
"Barbara Streisand:
After Jared Kushner said that New Yorkers deserve to suffer extensive deaths and sickness of coronavirus because the governor did not beg Trump sufficiently for help, it is laughable that he wants to sue for having his words plastered across Times Square."
Seeing Trump deliver in Arizona, in a very solid but Hitleresque delivery, one couldn’t but be amazed how far the USA have devolved from the days of Thomas Paine, while thinking about how je will neremembered by posterity.
Hos diatribe against Bozos and the Washington Post, added jealousy to his vitriolic fear of post election prosecution of he looses.
But, if he is right, then surely. D as Capital can be thrown into eternal oblivion.
Well, deservedly.!?!
The guy wants to win bad, but needn’t sound like a guy selling snake soil out of a traveling stage coach.
<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>><<<<<<<<<<><><><><>>>>>
It is reverting toward a possible Trump win:
"
POLITICO
2020 ELECTIONS
Trump’s chances hinge on a polling screw-up way worse than 2016
You have to squint to see how Biden’s lead won’t hold up on Election Day.
President Donald Trump gives a campaign speech outside of Raymond James Stadium on Oct. 29, 2020, in Tampa, Fla. | Octavio Jones/Getty Image
10/30/2020 04:30 AM EDT
President Donald Trump still has a path to a second term. But it would take a polling debacle that would make 2016 look like a banner year.
According to a series of battleground state polls conducted and released in the week following the last Trump-Biden debate, the president’s chances of winning a second term now require winning states where he still trails with only days to go until voting concludes.
In most of the core swing states, Joe Biden has maintained a stable — though not overwhelming — lead over Trump in polls over the past few months, continuing into the final week of the election. Some of the state polling averages have tightened slightly since the last debate, though Biden remains consistently ahead. In three live-interview polls of Florida all released on Thursday, Biden led Trump by between 3 and 5 points.
In some of the potentially decisive states, like Pennsylvania, the polls would have to be wrong to a significant greater — greater than the errors in 2016 — for Trump to win. The latest polling averages show Biden with a 5-point lead.
It’s not impossible, but you have to squint to see how Biden’s lead won’t hold up on Election Day. Even signs that were more apparent four years ago — whether in real-time or in retrospect — are more ambiguous this year.
In 2016, the larger-than-usual share of voters who said, even in the late stages of the campaign, that they were undecided or preferred a third-party candidate was a flashing warning light that Hillary Clinton’s lead was not secure. Clinton was not well-liked, even if she was running against a historically disliked opponent. And Trump was garnering momentum in the closing two weeks of the race.
None of those is happening this year: There are generally fewer undecideds in the polls. Biden is viewed favorably by a narrow majority of voters in the country. And surveys conducted since the debate last week have not showed as large of an uptick for Trump.
“The thought that maybe things would tighten in the last week doesn’t appear to be happening,” said Lee Miringoff, the director of the Marist College Institute of Public Opinion, which released a poll with NBC News on Thursday showing Biden ahead by 4 points in Florida. “I think, if anything, things are holding for Biden, or maybe even providing him an opportunity to go into some states” outside of the core battlefield.
But there are some red flags about the polls, even if it’s not clear how they would affect the outcome. More voters than in previous elections are refusing to tell pollsters for whom they’re voting — or have voted, in the case of the tens of millions of Americans who have already cast their ballots.
And in the closing days, that phenomenon is only increasing. Charles Franklin, who runs the Marquette Law School poll in Wisconsin, told National Review Online that his surveys show increasing numbers of respondents who refused to disclose their vote choice in his polls.
Similarly, Patrick Murray, the director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute, told POLITICO Thursday that the number of voters refusing to name their candidate “has ticked up.”
But both men said that won’t necessarily redound to Trump’s benefit. Franklin told National Review that in the Wisconsin poll he released Wednesday — Biden had a 5-point lead in the critical battleground state — that those who refused to disclose their vote preference were split evenly between those who had a favorable opinion of Biden, those who had a favorable opinion of Trump and those who had either favorable or unfavorable opinions of both men.
Murray has crunched the numbers in his survey, looking at those who refused to answer by measurements such as party registration and race. He found that it was “slightly biased toward Democrats. Meaning, a slight indicator of a ‘shy Biden’ vote, if anything. Rather than a ‘shy Trump’ vote, it seems like it could be more of a ‘shy Biden’ vote.”
Then there are Biden’s image ratings, which compare favorably with Trump’s — and Clinton’s in 2016. According to a RealClearPolitics average, Biden’s net-favorable rating is positive-6 points, meaning his average favorable rating is 6 points higher than his average unfavorable rating.
Trump’s net-favorability? Minus-13 points. In the 2016 exit poll, Clinton’s net-favorable rating was minus-12 points, while Trump’s was minus-22.
Of the six core battleground states — Arizona, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — the FiveThirtyEight polling average is closer now than it was a week ago in four of them, but has only slightly tightened in each of Arizona (0.7 points closer), Florida (1.6 points), North Carolina (0.9 points) and Pennsylvania (1.2 points closer). Biden still leads by at least 2 points in each state.
The polling average in Michigan is unchanged, and Biden’s lead has grown by nearly 2 points in Wisconsin — mostly thanks to an ABC News/Washington Post poll that shows Biden with a much larger lead than other surveys.
That some people overlooked the warning signs in 2016 wasn’t the only problem with the polls. The national polls were mostly accurate, but some state polls routinely understated Trump’s support four years ago. Pollsters say many of those issues have been addressed, and national outlets have commissioned far more expensive, high-quality surveys at the state level than in 2016.
While Trump hasn’t closed enough of the gap coming out of the final debate last week, another comeback Electoral College victory by the Republican president would be the latest black mark for the polling industry. And pollsters know they’re on the hot seat over the next five days and beyond, as the votes are counted.
“One thing you know about polling for elections is there is accountability,” said Miringoff, the Marist pollster.
“There’s always that, ‘Yeah, but 2016’ in the back of everybody’s minds. But I think this is a very different election. Trump is now the incumbent. It’s a referendum on him. He has not been able to make it a choice.”
4 days until the election:
Who’s going to win? |
Tracking battleground states |
Threats to the election
THE RACE FOR THE WHITE HOUSE
Why Trump needs to suppress the vote to win.
How Trump could end his presidency with a wild transition.
Rick Scott opens his wallet for Trump in Florida.
Poll shows Joe Biden leading in Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia, and Florida."
© 2020 POLITICO LLC
{ } >> { } << { }
2020 ELECTION
Trump has signaled he won’t accept an election loss. Many of his voters agree.
Brandishing faulty or unsubstantiated claims of fraudulent ballots, the president has planted seeds of doubt about the race’s outcome if Biden wins. They appear to have taken root.
President Donald Trump has said "the only thing I worry about” is voter fraud. Many of his followers are echoing his claims.Brendan Smialowski / AFP - Getty Imag
Oct. 29, 2020, 3:33 PM EDT /
PHOENIX — President Donald Trump has refused to say he’d accept the results of the election in the event that he loses, and in the closing days of the race, some of his supporters have taken his faulty or unsubstantiated claims about voter fraud to heart.
At a packed outdoor rally in this battleground state Wednesday, Trump said the polls that show him trailing the Democratic nominee Joe Biden are “fake,” drawing boos from the crowd and raising their expectations of victory. He also said he feared voter fraud, which studies have repeatedly found to be extremely rare, and in most cases nonexistent.
“The biggest problem we have is if they cheat with the ballots. That’s my biggest problem,” he told supporters at the Phoenix Goodyear Airport this week. “That’s my only thing — that’s the only thing I worry about.”
Followers are echoing his claims.
If the president loses, “I think it will be complete voter fraud,” Tammy Byler, 54, an operations manager in Waddell, Arizona, said. “There’s so much voter fraud happening.”
Byler, who said she follows QAnon, a far-right conspiracy theory, expressed confidence that Trump would win the popular and the electoral vote. She said she doesn’t believe he could legitimately get fewer votes than his opponent. “Let’s look at the crowds,” she said. “Joe Biden barely gets any.”
The sprouting seeds of doubt point to a major challenge for Biden if he gets elected and seeks to unify the country. No major U.S. presidential candidate has ever refused to accept an election outcome. Rejecting its legitimacy based on faulty theories wouldn’t change the result — states certify results, and Trump lacks the authority to stop them — but it could further split a divided nation.
“It scares me to death,” said Biden supporter Jim Bower, 62, of Glendale, Arizona, that Trump might “drag this out” well past Election Day and try to delegitimize the result if he loses.
Biden has said he would accept the result even if Trump wins. Many of the Democrat’s supporters, like Bower, agree.
“If [Trump] wins, he wins,” Bower said, before joking that if that happens, “my wife and I are moving!”
Some Trump supporters echoed incorrect or evidence-free claims made by the president recently, such as that ballots are going out that omit just Trump’s name (not true, according to PolitiFact) or being sold (no evidence for this claim) or being dumped in a river (not accurate).
“I think that there would be foul play” if Biden is declared the winner, said Jamie Kobyluck, 58, of Phoenix, who said she has already cast her absentee vote for Trump.
“If you look at pictures of the different rallies — Biden’s and Trump’s — it’s such a discrepancy. How could he have that many voters?” she said.
Biden’s rallies have been sparse and heavily socially distanced as he seeks to avoid facilitating the spread of the coronavirus, which continues to claim lives and limit economic potential. Trump has taken a different approach, packing his supporters into small spaces at concert-like rallies like the one in the Phoenix area.
Biden leads by 8.2 points in the NBC News national polling average. He also leads in most swing states likely to decide the election, albeit narrowly in some. Forecasters widely agree that he is currently the favorite but don’t entirely discount Trump’s chances of an upset.
“I don’t believe the polls will be wrong. But I will accept the results of this election should the will of the voters be different than what we hope for,” Steven Slugocki, the chairman of the Maricopa County Democratic Party, said at Biden’s running mate Kamala Harris’ rally in Phoenix.
Some Trump backers say that life would go on if he loses.
“What choice do I have?” shrugged Jeana Caywood of Saratoga, New York, who hails from Arizona and attended Trump’s rally here Wednesday while visiting.
“It’s not gonna change anything. The election will be the election,” she said. “I’m not gonna walk around angry. Not worth it.”
© 2020 NBC UNIVERSAL
My take see if it works out:
“Biden apparently wins both the popular and electoral vote by a narrow margin.
Trump refuses to concede, citing what he and his lawyers claim is mass voter fraud.
The dispute goes all the way to the supreme court.
After some deliberation, the supreme court, now comprising 6 republicans and only 3 democrats, declares Trump the victor.
Nancy Pelosi, John Podesta and the other dems refuse to concede, claiming the supreme court and the republican party have been compromised, infiltrated and subverted by Russians.
They hold their own inauguration, declaring Biden, or Pelosi to be the real president.
Washington, Oregon and California attempt to secede from the union and civil war ensues.”
sheen will we know:
"The New York Times
We Have Never Had Final Results on Election Day
President Trump has been trying to pre-emptively delegitimize ballots counted after Nov. 3. But states have always counted past election night.
Nov. 1, 2020, 8:00 a.m. ET
For weeks, President Trump and his allies have been laying groundwork to challenge the results of the election if he loses. Now, in the final days of the campaign, he has settled on a blatantly ahistorical closing argument: that the votes in a fair election should not be counted past election night.
“The Election should end on November 3rd., not weeks later!” he tweeted on Friday, two days after telling reporters in Nevada, “Hopefully, the few states remaining that want to take a lot of time after Nov. 3 to count ballots, that won’t be allowed by the various courts.”
“You would think you want to have the votes counted, tabulated, finished by the evening of Nov. 3,” he said at a campaign event a week earlier.
In reality, the scenario Mr. Trump is outlining — every vote in a modern election being “counted, tabulated, finished” by midnight — is not possible and never has been. No state ever reports final results on election night, and no state is legally expected to.
Americans are accustomed to knowing who won on election night because news organizations project winners based on partial counts, not because the counting is actually completed that quickly. These race calls mean Candidate A is far enough ahead that, given the number of outstanding ballots and the regions those ballots are coming from, Candidate B would realistically be unable to close the gap.
The difference this year is not the timing of final results — those will come, as always, by the certification deadlines each state has set, ranging from two days after the election in Delaware to more than a month after in California. The difference, rather, is when news organizations are likely to have enough information to make accurate projections.
If, as Mr. Trump suggested, courts were to force states to stop counting after Nov. 3, it would be an extraordinary subversion of the electoral process and would disenfranchise millions of voters who cast valid, on-time ballots.
“Everyone — including Joe Biden, the Democrat Party, the mainstream media and the American public — should want election results they can trust and for every valid ballot to count,” said Thea McDonald, a spokeswoman for Mr. Trump’s campaign. “President Trump and Republicans have long fought for these key principles of our democracy, and in many states won, in the fight against Democrats’ attempts to effectively delay Election Day.”
Ms. McDonald pointed to efforts in some states to accept ballots that are received late if they were postmarked by Election Day — or, in some cases, if the postmark is not clear — and said this was “exactly the kind of late ballot counting President Trump has been fighting to prevent.”
But Mr. Trump has explicitly criticized the counting and tabulating of votes past Election Day, something that will happen no matter when the ballot receipt deadline is. Ms. McDonald declined to explain or clarify those statements on the record.
Mail ballots tend to take longer to process than in-person votes, and millions more people are voting by mail this year than ever before because of the pandemic. Because the voters choosing to do this are disproportionately Democrats, neither in-person ballots nor mail ballots will be representative of the full vote count.
How Mail Votes Could Delay Election Results Counting votes by mail involves multiple steps, and in several critical swing states, that process doesn’t begin until Election Day or very close to it.
And because of the intense confusion around voting rules, more voters than usual may have to cast provisional ballots, meaning election officials will have to verify their eligibility before counting their votes.
In some states — like Colorado, which has been conducting elections by mail for years, or Florida, which allows officials to begin processing mail-in ballots before Election Day — it may still be possible to call winners on election night, depending on how close the races are.
But in many other states — including the all-important Pennsylvania, where some counties will not begin counting mail-in ballots until Nov. 4 because of limited resources — it could take several days to get an accurate picture.
If this happens, it will be evidence not of a conspiracy but of the electoral system working as it should, by counting every vote. And while much about this year’s election is abnormal, delayed results would not be. Even in the smoothest elections, we don’t necessarily get quick calls in close races.
On election night in 2018, it wasn’t clear who had won governor’s races in Florida, Georgia and Wisconsin; Senate races in Arizona and Florida; and a slew of House races in California, Georgia, New York, Texas and Utah. While there were recounts and legal disputes in a handful of these races, the uncertainty in most places had nothing to do with changing or challenging the counts — it just took time to finish counting.
If the tallies had been frozen at midnight, even many in-person votes would not have been counted. And the ballots tallied after Election Day did not uniformly benefit one party.
In Minnesota’s First Congressional District, for instance, they benefited the Republican candidate, Jim Hagedorn, who was ahead by fewer than 100 votes just after midnight but ended up winning by about 1,300 votes. In California’s 21st Congressional District, they benefited the Democratic candidate, T.J. Cox, who appeared to be losing on election night but ended up winning by about 850 votes.
When we talk about delayed results, it is easy to think of a nightmare scenario like the 2000 presidential election in Florida: a race close enough to trigger a recount, in a tipping-point state, with clear ballot irregularities that can’t easily be resolved, ultimately decided not by the count but by the courts.
But most of the time, the circumstances are much more anodyne, and the results are finalized with no serious questions about their legitimacy.
Few people are likely to remember that it took two weeks to call Missouri for John McCain in 2008, because the election didn’t hinge on the outcome. When the state finally was called on Nov. 19, by a margin of about 0.1 percent, The New York Times reported simply, “The Missouri secretary of state’s office had been waiting for some jurisdictions to examine thousands of provisional ballots and certify and mail in their totals.”
In 2012, it took four days to call Florida for President Barack Obama — and again it was not particularly memorable, because he had already won re-election without the state. While there were plenty of recriminations about how long the counting took, the results themselves were not disputed.
Four years later, Michigan counted ballots for more than two weeks after the Nov. 8 election before delivering Mr. Trump one of his most cherished victories.
“The Great State of Michigan was just certified as a Trump WIN,” he tweeted after that, “giving all of our MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN supporters another victory — 306!”"
"Texas’ top court denies a G.O.P. push to throw out over 120,000 votes; a federal case is pending.
A drive-through voting site in Houston, which is offering them for the first time this year.Credit…Go Nakamura for The New York Times
The Texas Supreme Court denied an effort by Republicans to throw out more than 120,000 votes that had already been cast at drive-through locations in Harris County, leaving Republicans’ only remaining option at the federal level.
The ruling from the court came without comment.
The effort to get rid of the votes from largely Democratic Harris County now hinges on a nearly identical effort at the federal level, where a judge has called an election-eve hearing for Monday.
The lawsuit contends that the 10 drive-through voting sites in Houston, the nation’s fourth-largest city, are operating illegally and are arranged in locations that favor Democrats.
The system was put in place for the first time this year by Chris Hollins, the Harris County clerk, with unanimous approval by county commissioners, after being tested in a pilot program over the summer.
More than 127,000 voters have cast ballots at the sites and the number could grow to more than 135,000 through Election Day on Tuesday, said Susan Hays, a lawyer for Harris County. She said county officials planned to vigorously challenge the suit, which she described as an act of “voter suppression.”
“It’s nuts,” she said. “Votes should count.”
Democrats were hopeful on Sunday that the decision from the Texas Supreme Court, which leans conservative, would bode well for their battle at the federal level.
The case will be heard Monday morning by Judge Andrew S. Hanen of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas who was appointed by President George W. Bush.
In a motion on Friday asking to intervene in the case, Democrats said it threatened to “throw Texas’ election into chaos by invalidating the votes of more than 100,000 eligible Texas voters who cast their ballots” at the drive-through sites. The motion was filed by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the campaign of M.J. Hegar, who is running for the U.S. Senate."
"2020 ELECTION
Trump lashes out after FBI announces investigation of Biden bus incident
“In my opinion, these patriots did nothing wrong,” he said in a tweet about supporters who surrounded a Biden campaign bus in Texas.
Nov. 1, 2020, 9:45 PM EST
President Donald Trump lashed out at the FBI on Sunday after it said it was investigating reports that a caravan of his supporters harassed a bus belonging to Joe Biden’s campaign.
“In my opinion, these patriots did nothing wrong,” Trump said in a tweet. “Instead, the FBI & Justice should be investigating the terrorists, anarchists, and agitators of ANTIFA, who run around burning down our Democrat run cities and hurting our people!”
The president also referred to the incident during rallies earlier Sunday. Video of the incident, which occurred Friday, showed Trump supporters surrounding the Biden campaign bus with their vehicles in Texas. The video showed two cars colliding, and the Biden campaign said the pro-Trump trucks tried to run the bus off the road as it traveled from San Antonio to Austin.
“You see the way our people, they — you know they were protecting his bus yesterday,” Trump said while addressing supporters in Michigan. “Because they’re nice. So his bus — they had hundreds of cars, Trump, Trump, Trump and the American flag. You see Trump and the American flag. Do you ever notice when you see the other side — I don’t even see much of the other side.”
Biden responded later Sunday afternoon during an event in Pennsylvania, noting that the president had also tweeted praise for the supporters involved.
“Folks, that’s not who we are,” Biden said. “We are so much better than this. We’re so much better than this. It’s not who we are.”
Caravans and car parades — made popular by pandemic social distancing requirements — have become a regular feature of the campaign trail, one particularly embraced by Trump supporters, but in recent weeks they’ve run up against early voting and other campaign activities, prompting voters to call the police."
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