Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick claims if Democrats win, it will be “because they stole it”

Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick repeated unsubstantiated claims in a Thursday interview that the only way Republicans can lose on Election Day is if Democrats cheat.

“The Democrats have just decided this election, Mark, we don’t have to pay attention to any laws. We’re gonna use COVID as an excuse to steal the election, and that’s what they’re trying to do everywhere,” Patrick, a Republican, said during a radio interview on “The Mark Davis Show.” “If the president loses Pennsylvania or North Carolina, Mark, or Florida, they’ll lose it because they stole it.”

A spokesman for his office clarified after the interview that Patrick was referring to “reports of ballot irregularities” and “other potential fraud” being seen in Pennsylvania and other battleground states. There have been no credible reports of widespread fraud or irregularities in Pennsylvania. President Donald Trump’s campaign seized on an announcement by federal authorities that they were investigating why nine military ballots were found in a trash can there, but no arrests have been made and no evidence has been made public that any fraud was involved.

Voter fraud in absentee voting, as with any type of voting, is rare. Many states, including many run by Republicans, have expanded mail-in voting options during the pandemic.

The comment from one of Texas’ top Republican leaders echoes unproven accusations from national party leaders, most notably Trump, that the Democratic Party is sidestepping election rules. Trump made these claims for months during his rallies, accusing Democrats of “rigging” the election and referring to mail-in voting as a “scam.”

State Democrats fired back, calling Patrick’s rhetoric dangerous.

“The Lieutenant Governor’s comments are irresponsible, dangerous and untethered to reality. We are seeing record-high voter turnout across Texas and the country. It’s telling, although not surprising, that Dan Patrick sees people voting as a problem,” said Grand Prairie Rep. Chris Turner, chair of the Texas House Democratic Caucus, in an email.

As of Wednesday, more than 8.6 million Texans — about half of registered voters — had cast their ballots. Officials said the high turnout this election is being driven by a combination of voter enthusiasm, the additional week allowed for early voting due to the pandemic and surges in votes by mail.

For the first time in decades, the Lone Star state is considered a national battleground.

Overall, RealClearPolitics’ polling average hovers at a 3.2-point advantage for Trump. The president leads the former vice president 50%-45% in Texas, according to the latest University of Texas/Texas Tribune Poll.

“We’re creating a movement, we’re going to beat them and Dan Patrick knows that and he’s trying to set up excuses for when we are victorious,” said Abhi Rahman, the Texas Democratic Party spokesperson.

But Texas GOP Chairman Allen West has dismissed the notion that Texas is at risk of flipping.

“What a bunch of psychological operations (PSYOPS) drivel!” West tweeted, referring to a poll that had Biden ahead of Trump in Texas by 3 percentage points.

“The left is in panic mode and are putting out questionable polls to discourage Republican turnout in Texas,” he tweeted.

During the radio interview, Patrick predicted some Texans will take to the streets to protest election results, depending on who wins.

“If he wins or whenever it’s announced, or if he’s ahead on that day, I’m afraid our cities are gonna burn in America,” Patrick said. “Texans, we’re law and order people. We’ll follow the law, and for those who don’t, we’ll be ready to take them on.”

Earlier this week the Texas Army National Guard said up to 1,000 troops could be dispatched to five major cities — Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth, Austin and San Antonio — ahead of Tuesday’s election.

Gov. Greg Abbott last activated the National Guard in late May following a series of protests that emerged across the state in response to the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police.

Disclosure: The University of Texas at Austin has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here. The Texas Tribune is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.

Celebrities spent millions so Florida felons could vote

The multimillion-dollar effort by Michael Bloomberg, LeBron James and other celebrities to pay off lingering court fines and fees for Florida felons could make almost 13,000 of them eligible to vote in Tuesday’s election, an analysis by the Tampa Bay Times/Miami Herald and ProPublica found.

Although the modest increase in eligible felons falls far short of expectations, it could be large enough to make a difference in a key state where polls indicate that the presidential contest is once again a toss-up.

Among four of the state’s largest counties — Hillsborough, Pinellas, Palm Beach and Polk — about 32%, or 1,518, of the 4,700 felons who had their fines and fees paid by the nonprofit Florida Rights Restoration Coalition are registered to vote in the upcoming election, according to the Times/Herald/ProPublica review.

Across the state, where the coalition used contributions from celebrities and other donors to pay about $27 million in fines and fees for about 40,000 felons, that pattern could translate to about 12,800 eligible voters if the proportion is consistent and they don’t owe other court debts.

The newly eligible voters in the four counties likely skew toward the Democratic presidential candidate, former Vice President Joe Biden. In those counties, at least 80% of felons whose fines and fees were paid are nonwhite — including 74% who are Black. About 68% are registered Democrats, the review found.

A spokeswoman for Bloomberg did not respond to emailed requests for comment. James’ organization, More Than a Vote, also did not respond to emailed requests.

The uptick in felons who are now eligible to vote appears to slightly blunt a Republican effort to minimize their turnout. After a ballot initiative granted voting rights to felons, the Republican-led Legislature imposed a requirement that they first pay their fines and fees — a restriction that some critics viewed as voter suppression.

Whether the voters helped by the coalition will actually make it to the polls, however, is unclear. Many still don’t know their court debts have been paid off, and the coalition does not require, or even ask, whether the people whose fees they pay are registered to vote.

“We want communities to get better by having more voices heard, and the quicker people are able to be reintegrated into the community, the better,” said Neil Volz, deputy director of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition. “If people choose to engage in that moment or not, that’s on them.”

Volz said that the organization has been bombarded by calls from felons seeking payment, and that it has trouble keeping up with the volume. It is continuing to notify people that their fines and fees were paid.

“We are trying to reach out to as many people as we can,” Volz said. “If somebody’s in the queue, we’re going to keep doing our best to make contact with them.”

Michael Simmons, 45, of Riverview near Tampa, is so determined to vote that he paid all of his court debts that he was aware of. He made multiple trips to the Hillsborough County clerk’s office to pay nearly $1,800 in fees on four traffic-related cases, receipts show.

Until a reporter called him the week before the election, however, he didn’t realize that he still owed the county $1,140 for two felonies, a probation violation and driving with a revoked license. The Florida Rights Restoration Coalition paid those fees in August.

“I knew nothing about it,” he said.

He voted early, a week before the election.

Paying off debts

Just two years ago, it seemed that Florida’s voter rolls might expand significantly after Floridians approved a landmark ballot initiative known as Amendment 4 that restored voting rights to felons.

But Republican lawmakers and Gov. Ron DeSantis took a hard-line view on Amendment 4. The 2019 Legislature mandated that felons complete “all terms” of their sentences before registering to vote, including paying the hundreds or thousands of dollars in court fees and fines handed down with nearly every felony conviction in the state. Payment of restitution is also required.

Seventeen felons sued the state and the governor over the law. A federal judge initially overturned the restrictions — allowing most felons with unpaid court costs to vote — but that decision was overridden by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit in September. The plaintiffs have until January to decide whether to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The legislation likely tamped down registration by felons. If they owe fines and fees, they won’t be stopped from voting Tuesday, but they could face criminal charges if they do. It’s estimated that between 50,000 and 70,000 felons have registered to vote since Amendment 4 went into effect in early 2019. The rate was lower than anticipated by advocates, who had predicted the measure would restore voting rights to as many as 1.4 million Floridians, with perhaps 10% to 20% completing the voter registration process.

The fundraising efforts kicked in soon after the restrictions were imposed. Millions of dollars poured in to help felons, thanks to a network of small-dollar donations from average Floridians and large checks from celebrities including the basketball icons James and Michael Jordan and the singer Ariana Grande. Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor, also helped raise $16 million by calling other donors.

In addition to paying off fines and fees of people who contacted the coalition, the group asked county clerks to provide names of people with outstanding debts below a certain threshold. In Hillsborough County, it originally asked for names of people who owed the court $1,000 or less, and then raised the ceiling to $2,600 as more contributions flowed in. In one case, the person was deceased, but the rights coalition unknowingly paid the fees, records show. Several appear to have moved out of state.

The state’s Republican leaders tried to quash the payments. In September, state Attorney General Ashley Moody, at DeSantis’ request, asked state police and the FBI to investigate if the plan was an illegal inducement to vote after The Washington Post reported that Bloomberg wanted to help pay off fines and fees so felons could vote against President Donald Trump. After Moody called for an investigation, the coalition received threats from white supremacists.

State police last week said Moody’s referral is a “preliminary inquiry” and has not been elevated to an investigation. The FBI’s Tampa field office said it does not confirm or deny investigations.

Moody’s spokeswoman said the attorney general “makes referrals of potential violations of law” to law enforcement agencies, including emails sent to Floridians last week threatening to “come after” them if they don’t vote for Trump. Federal officials later blamed Iran for sending the emails.

Tempered expectations

To determine how many newly eligible felons are registered to vote, the Times/Herald/ProPublica requested data from the state’s 10 largest counties for a list of people whose fines and fees had been paid by the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition.

The four counties provided enough detailed information on defendants to match them against the voter registration rolls. The other counties either didn’t provide the information or didn’t provide enough details on whose fines and fees were paid to determine voter status.

The latest analysis found that 12% of those whose court debts were paid had registered to vote since Amendment 4 took effect. That’s a 50% higher registration rate than the 8% of felons overall who were believed eligible under the new law.

It’s unclear why the data shows that most of the newly eligible felons registered to vote before the ballot initiative took effect. Some of them may have been among the 150,000 felons granted voting rights by former Gov. Charlie Crist. Alternatively, others may have enrolled to vote before their felony conviction, been removed from the rolls and then registered again, but state records still list them under the initial date of registration.

The findings underscore the difficulty of getting felons engaged in the political process.

“It’s not as simple as paying off your financial obligations,” said Dan Smith, a University of Florida political science professor who has been studying the issue. “These individuals still have to go through the process to register.”

Desmond Meade, the coalition’s president whose voting rights were restored under Amendment 4, said the program has had other benefits, such as helping felons restore their driver’s licenses. Nearly 2 million Floridians have suspended licenses for failing to pay court fees and fines.

The donations also helped lift the courts’ sagging post-pandemic budgets, Meade said. He singled out Brevard County, where Clerk of Courts Scott Ellis had appealed to the county commission for additional funds to keep the office afloat.

“We were able to go to Brevard County and hand them a check for $551,000,” Meade said. “All of Florida taxpayers are benefiting from our efforts.”

Brevard officials have not yet provided the debt payoff information requested by the Times/Herald/ProPublica, but Ellis called the coalition’s program “fantastic.”

“There’s no doubt that that amount of money helps all clerks,” he said.

Looking ahead

Simmons said he followed the coalition’s efforts to persuade Floridians to vote for Amendment 4 and to raise money to help people pay off their court debts.

He said he registered to vote on Jan. 8, 2019, the day Amendment 4 took effect, and has voted three times since having his rights restored, believing he had paid off all his fines and fees. He said he is grateful for the coalition’s help.

“What the Rights Restoration Coalition has done for people, whether they know it or not, is a great thing,” he said. “I almost feel bad, because I didn’t need it, and I got it. But someone who needs it, I hope they appreciate it.”

One Tampa woman, who asked not to be identified, said she reached out to the coalition about paying off her debts but didn’t hear back.

She laughed when told by a reporter that records show a $645 court debt was paid by the coalition on Oct. 12. She was unaware of the payment but said she still won’t vote, even though she’s registered, because she owes an additional $106,000 in fines relating to a prior drug trafficking conviction.

“I’m not sure what paying $645 will do, honestly,” she said.

This article is part of Electionland, ProPublica’s collaborative reporting project covering problems that prevent eligible voters from casting their ballots during the 2020 elections. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

This article is co-published with the Tampa Bay Times and the Miami Herald, which share a state capital bureau in Tallahassee.

What this election’s really about

At this point, we ought to be agreeing that the outcome of this election may change the occupant in the White House—no small thing. But it’s not going to immediately fix what’s ailing the country:

The national economy, and our very health, education and welfare, rocked by a pandemic.

It should be a truism that our consumer-spending economy can’t be stable unless we address the ravages of the coronavirus. That’s a connection Donald Trump can’t seem to make. We can’t reliably have consumers seeking services or employees or a more certain business future without making our workplaces and gathering spots as safe as possible.

So said officials at the Fed, the financial markets and endless numbers of voters this week.

We should have passed some version of those national stimulus plans that are stuck on the shoals of political partisanship. With some certainty of income in place, small businesses can afford the temporary shuttering and limitations that public contagion will require.

And maybe, just maybe, we could trust state health officials and governors to open more or limit more depending on the contagion.

Of course, all this logical talk is exactly at the center of the election dispute. Trump just wants magic. Joe Biden just wants science to rule. And many voters, apparently on either side, just want the headache to stop.

Getting the Job Done

Here’s a simple plea: Knowing there are complications here, let’s get an agreement that the country wants neither total lockdown nor total wide-open contagion pits. Let’s pony up the dough to build in protections that help us over the hump. This is exactly the kind of work that should have been under way since last January and February when we learned about this beast.

There are plenty of good reasons for making the election central, but it’s not going to fix the problem we have to address. We need some certainty, and that comes with information-based hard work and a good chunk of fix-it money.

That’s what the “stimulus” bill being batted around in Washington is supposed to provide.

But there is always a political reason it isn’t moving yet. The Senate Republican caucus probably gets the gold star for worst performance on this, but somehow there is enough blame to share.

Worse, there are reports that we never even got the money that was passed in the spring fully distributed through all the federal bureaucracy.

Apparently, we’re spending our money on immediate food, health, rent and construction. We paid out all the aid on unemployment bonuses and small business loans that allowed for rent payments and payroll promises, but not for the continuing start and stop of small businesses.

Paying the Price

There are consequences, of course, starting with renewed concern about available hospital beds and protective gear and personnel, and extending to school programs in disarray, closed restaurants and bars, a service industry in free-fall.

Amidst all the bluster, the government is being twisted away from actually solving problems to making it look as if problems are being addressed—without doing the work.

An NBC News report this week detailed how a New Hampshire company, the only major American manufacturer of protective gloves, lagged in getting federal money through the stimulus program—with the result being American manufacture of the needed gloves won’t really get going until next summer.

The slow response by the Trump administration amid a mounting shortage of medical gloves is setting off a scramble for protective gear again as coronavirus cases and hospitalizations are exploding.

So, we’re buying gloves from China in an overheated market, paying more than double the normal price for goods that could have been produced in this country—the expressed goal of the same administration.

What’s true in this case can be read more broadly as a failure to connect the appropriate dots for the restoration of safe jobs or safe consumerism. That, in turn, means that we’re looking at very different views of an economic recovery, with administration officials scrambling to make everything look as politically advantageous as possible.

So, instead of using their time most efficiently to distribute food boxes, non-profit agencies are reporting that they are spending hours removing a self-serving Trump letter from federally supplied food packages out of fear that they will run afoul of laws prohibiting them from outwardly political activity.

What should be the prime issue in this election is sheer incompetence.

Bernie Sanders slams Trump’s plans to falsely declare victory on Election Night

In the wake of fresh reporting indicating that President Donald Trump is planning to prematurely claim victory if he has a lead Tuesday night and reject as illegitimate ballots counted after November 3, Sen. Bernie Sanders late Sunday characterized the news as “no surprise” given the president’s repeated nods toward such a ploy and urged the public to be prepared for the false declaration.

“That has been his strategy for months, and nobody should fall for it,” said the Vermont senator, who has been sounding the alarm about this potential “nightmare scenario” in interviews, speeches, and on the campaign trail. “It’s why he is demonizing mail-in ballots and sabotaging the Postal Service.”

Axios reported Sunday that in the weeks leading up to Tuesday’s election, Trump “has privately talked through this scenario in some detail… describing plans to walk up to a podium on Election Night and declare he has won.”

“Trump’s team is preparing to falsely claim that mail-in ballots counted after November 3—a legitimate count expected to favor Democrats—are evidence of election fraud,” according to Axios. “Many prognosticators say that on election night, Trump will likely appear ahead in Pennsylvania—though the state’s final outcome could change substantially as mail-in ballots are counted over the following days.”

While strategizing with his advisers behind the scenes, Trump has also been publicly laying the groundwork for the Election Night plan for months with his lie-filled attacks on the legitimacy of mail-in ballots and other state efforts to expand voting access amid the coronavirus pandemic, which has killed more than 230,000 Americans on the president’s watch.

Trump’s efforts to sow doubt about the election results, as well as his refusal to committo a peaceful transition of power, have sparked warnings that the president is emboldening the most dangerous elements of his base, increasing the likelihood of mass chaos on November 3 and the days that follow.

“As I have warned many times, Trump is very likely to declare himself the winner at a moment when a large portion Republican-leaning, in-person votes have been counted, but before a vast number of Democratic mail-in ballots are counted,” Sanders said Sunday. “Then he will continue his lies about voter fraud in an attempt to suppress enough votes to win. We will not allow that to happen. Every vote must and will be counted.”

Speaking to reporters Sunday evening, Trump dismissed Axios‘ reporting as “false” before launching into an attack on states that plan to continue counting legally submitted ballots after Election Day—a practice that, contrary to the president’s repeated claims to the contrary, is completely normal.

President Trump: "I think it's terrible that we can't know the results of an election the night of the election." pic.twitter.com/YTAlDRjNzE

— The Hill (@thehill) November 1, 2020

As the New York Times noted Sunday, “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.”

With Trump reportedly planning to claim victory if he pulls ahead of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden in early vote counts, news outlets and social media platforms are facing pressure to combat potential Election Night disinformation by the incumbent, who has repeatedly lied that the only way he can lose is if the race is “rigged” against him.

“The press has a crucial role if/when this happens: it’s not partisan to condemn this behavior,” tweeted Washington Post contributor Brian Klaas. “Nobody should equivocate about it. It’s imperative that Americans unite against this authoritarian strategy.”

As Common Dreams reported last week, a coalition of progressive advocacy groups is planning nearly 400 rallies across the nation to protest any effort by Trump to falsely claim victory or refuse to accept the election results.

“We think the likelihood of activation is high,” the coalition said.

Why there’s so much legal uncertainty about resolving a disputed presidential election

As I’ve Zoom-traveled the country speaking about legal issues involving the election, I have found myself, as well as audiences, bewildered and frustrated by one underlying question: Why is there so much legal uncertainty about so many critical questions concerning the rules for resolving a disputed presidential election?

If ever a need existed for clear legal rules established in advance, before we know whose ox will be (Al) Gored, that situation is it.

Let me provide just one critical example. The Constitution does not create rules or an institutional structure for resolving a modern, disputed presidential election. It provides a fail-safe mechanism for only one situation, which has not happened since 1824: If no candidate gets the necessary majority of votes in the Electoral College, then the House picks the president from the top three Electoral College candidates.

But that’s not the path the most disputed presidential elections have taken since 1824. Nor is it the likely path if this year brings us to that dark place.

And the way the country’s legal system is structured, we can’t get clear answers in advance to some critical legal questions, unless things actually get complicated enough to bring the courts into the picture.

The threat of a contested election

When the U.S. confronted the most intensely disputed presidential election in our history, the post-Civil War 1876 election, the country and Congress discovered we had no rules or institutional structure in place for addressing the form of conflict which that election raised.

Here’s what happened: Four states sent two or more competing slates of electors to the Electoral College, each claiming to represent the valid vote of their states. When Congress performed its constitutionally assigned power to count these votes, that meant Congress had to determine which slate to treat as valid. The issue was which candidate had won a majority of these electoral votes, not that no candidate had failed to garner a majority.

Congress decided on the spot to create an ad hoc, 15-member commission, with five Supreme Court justices, and agreed to be bound by its judgment unless both chambers, controlled by different parties, rejected it. Four months later, a compromise resulted in the election of Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, not the winner of the popular vote, Democrat Samuel Tilden.

In the wake of this barely averted disaster, Congress realized the country needed something better than an ad hoc arrangement. Resolving a disputed election for chief executive is one of the potentially most explosive situations any democracy can face; democracies have come apart in these situations.

After a decade of deliberations, Congress bequeathed the Electoral Count Act in 1887, designed to provide the framework, which still governs today, for how Congress should deal with a state that certifies two or more slates of electors.

Unanswered questions

Yet for all that deliberation — or maybe because of it — the Electoral Count Act is still riddled with major legal uncertainties. So are other federal statutes that govern the election.

Here is just one example. Federal law, the Presidential Election Day Act, makes Election Day the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November.

But the law then says that if a state “has failed to make a choice,” the legislature can step in and decide how the state’s electors should be appointed — which includes the legislature appointing electors itself. But it’s not clear what “failed” means. And the law doesn’t provide any definition.

The question of when an election has “failed” thus takes on paramount importance. A natural disaster that completely prevents a state from conducting its presidential election would be the classic example.

But what if — more relevant this year, perhaps — a state cannot quickly enough to determine who has won the vote? That means reaching a final resolution, including any litigation that could affect the outcome, by the time the Electoral College must vote on Dec. 18. Can a legislature assert the election has “failed,” step in and directly appoint the electors itself? Yet the act contains no definition or examples of a “failed” election.

That is a rather large question to leave up in the air.

Send in the judges?

Now the courts enter the picture — or more accurately, this is where you might expect the courts to enter the picture. But they don’t.

If the courts had given a definitive interpretation of what it means for an election to have “failed,” there would be a settled meaning of this term and other unresolved ones, in this law and others, in advance of the election.

The Supreme Court has also never interpreted the Electoral Count Act. Nor will there be any ruling on what a “failed” election means before the moment when Americans actually face potentially explosive political conflicts over exactly that issue.

The reason is that our federal courts, unlike those in some states and other constitutional democracies, will not address any legal issue unless it arises in the middle of what’s termed an actual “case or controversy.” Though this principle rests on a thin historical foundation, it is as deeply embedded in American legal doctrine as any principle.

In legal terms, the federal courts will not issue advisory opinions. That means federal courts will refuse to answer any question in the abstract about the legal meaning of a statute, including whether the statute is even constitutional, no matter how important it might be to have clear guidance on what those laws mean.

This principle is conventionally described as a way of limiting the role of federal courts in American democracy. Courts will resolve disputes over the meaning of law only when they absolutely must enter the fray. The “case or controversy” constraint is also linked to proper respect for the separation of powers.

No shelter in the storm

But as this election and many other contexts illustrate, this doctrine can also be dangerous for the country, as well as the courts themselves. The last time Americans want to discover the proper meaning of laws like the Electoral Count or Presidential Election Day acts is precisely in the midst of an actual controversy over who will become president.

At that moment, the courts are no longer operating behind a veil of ignorance, which would mean they were blind to any knowledge of who would benefit. They will be aware of which candidate is more likely to benefit from a ruling one way or the other.

Worse than that, even if the courts decide that question in exactly the same way they would behind that veil, the half of the country whose candidate loses will almost certainly perceive the courts as having acted for the purpose of favoring that candidate. That is almost inevitable, as I said at the time of Bush v. Gore.

One major purpose of a well-constructed legal regime is to provide a clear framework in advance for resolving contentious issues. Being in conflict about the very content of those rules, at the same time we are trying to apply them to resolve those issues, is sure to make these conflicts all the more divisive.

The country does not want to be debating how long the term of office for a president ought to be at the same time it is choosing a president, which is why the Constitution specifies the four-year term.

But to settle the meaning of many rules on the books, judicial interpretation is required. Yet that is exactly what the “case or controversy” requirement precludes — until we are in the midst of that controversy.

This is why audiences I talk to are frustrated at discovering that legal experts offer conflicting views, or give “on the one hand, on the other hand” answers to questions about exactly how a disputed election might arise and be resolved. In the name of limiting their own power, the federal courts leave us at sea until the boat is nearly capsizing.

Richard Pildes, Professor of Constitutional Law, New York University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

Trump snaps the tether: He calls for end to vote count, threatens appeal to the Supreme Court

None of us have seen a year like 2020 — and now it has finally snapped the tether that seemed to hold it to the realm of reality. After a relatively calm Election Day, leading into a nail-biter evening that left the result very much in doubt, President Trump did exactly what many observers feared he might do, prematurely declaring victory over former vice president Joe Biden, even though millions of votes in several important states remain uncounted.

It was a rambling, incoherent and extraordinary speech even by Trump’s standards, delivered in an extraordinary setting — the East Room of the White House, rather than a campaign headquarters at a Washington hotel, as would be traditional for an incumbent president running for re-election. Whether it represents a genuine attempt to subvert democracy or was just an example of “Trump being Trump” and letting off some steam depends on one’s perspective. Vice President Mike Pence attempted to assert the latter interpretation, arriving on stage after Trump had concluded and making relatively normal remarks about “the integrity of the vote,” while of course praising Trump in fulsome terms and urging him to “make America great again, again.”

This all unfolded shortly after 2 a.m. Eastern time on Wednesday, when Trump appeared before cameras in the East Room of the White House and appeared to claim that unnamed conspirators, presumably including every major media publication and TV network, had somehow short-circuited his certain victory. He called for votes in the still-uncalled swing states across the country to go uncounted. Or at least maybe he did that — as usual with the president’s lies and bluster, it was difficult to say for sure. Finally, Trump threatened to go directly to the Supreme Court to stop any further ballots from being received and counted that could shift the outcome.

To be clear, there is no imaginable legal basis for doing so. The president has no specific authority to take a case directly to the Supreme Court, and in any case federal courts have little jurisdiction over how the various states handle elections.

“Frankly, we did win this election,” Trump declared to a room of maskless adoring fans, including Diamond & Silk, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and various Trump family members. He went on to undermine the legitimacy of the election, without offering anything even close to a coherent argument, as he has done for months.

“This is a fraud on the American public,” Trump said, with no explanation of what that fraud might entail

Minutes after Trump falsely claimed, “As far as I am concerned we already have won it” — meaning the entire presidential election — the Associated Press called Arizona for Biden, the first state in a long and tense election night to flip from Trump in 2016 to Biden in 2020. While the outcome is by no means decided, losing Arizona makes Trump’s path to victory exceptionally difficult

“We want all voting to stop,” Trump added, asserting that it was “clear” he had won close swing states like Georgia and North Carolina, which have not yet been called by any major media outlet. “They knew they couldn’t win,” Trump claimed — without identifying the “they” in question — “so they said, ‘Let’s go to court.'”

In the realm of reality, all voting has ended. It’s only a question of collecting and counting the votes, a process that differs widely from state to state and can sometimes take days or weeks. In this year of pandemic, that process is undeniably complicated, and millions of votes remain uncounted in key states like Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, which now appear certain to decide the presidential election. Trump’s attempt to claim there is something nefarious about the process flies in the face of election law, democratic norms and political history. One might be excused for asking what else is new.

Ironically, the president’s comments will almost certainly hurt his legal team’s chances in court — the path to potential re-election that Trump has long telegraphed he is banking on. Chris Christie, the former Republican governor of New Jersey who has been a frequent Trump confidant and adviser, said on ABC News that the president’s extraordinary White House speech was “a bad strategic decision. It is a bad political decision.”

That remains to be seen. Trump’s gambit is certainly a terrible idea and an overtly anti-democratic power play that sent immediate shockwaves through the media and political classes, as inured to Trump’s delusional theatrics as they have become. With the loss of Arizona and millions of Democratic-trending mail-in votes yet to be counted in major states, it appears probable that Trump is headed for a narrow electoral defeat — albeit a great deal narrower than most Democrats expected. Given that context, perhaps Trump’s vicious election-night surprise is no surprise at all. It’s the last and most desperate ploy of a man with no respect for the democratic process and no willingness to accept the verdict of the voters.

Mark Kelly unseats Martha McSally in Arizona, flipping John McCain’s former Senate seat blue

Mark Kelly has unseated Republican Sen. Martha McSally in Arizona, marking the first time in modern history that the state has sent two Democratic senators to Washington.

Kelly, a retired astronaut and the husband to former Rep. Gaby Giffords, D-Ariz., ran as a pragmatic liberal. Often posting double-digit margins, he held a wide lead over McSally throughout the year. At one point in early September, Kelly led by 17 points in a Fox News poll.

McSally, never popular in the state, struggled to shake her affiliation with President Trump, at times appearing visibly flustered by the association as Election Day approached. In October, she dodged a debate question about her support for the president, after which Trump belittled her at a rally.

The coronavirus pandemic hit Arizona particularly hard. While McSally tried to tout her work on emergency relief packages, voters continued to hang her star next to Trump’s.

As a result, McSally never sustained gains among suburban voters. This was especially true in the key Phoenix suburbs of Maricopa County, where local polls once showed her down 20 points after anti-Trump conservative super PAC the Lincoln Project ran attack ads this spring.

That county had been a Republican stronghold until 2018, when moderate Democrat Kyrsten Sinema beat McSally there among GOP voters. Despite the loss, McSally still became a U.S. senator after Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican, appointed her to replace GOP Sen. Jon Kyl. The outgoing legislator had earlier been appointed to fill the seat left open by the late Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., upon his death in 2018.

McSally is the only senator in U.S. history to lose her election bid but still score a Senate seat.

McSally had a difficult time trying to distinguish herself from Kelly, who ran a campaign aimed at furthering Sinema’s inroads with moderate Republicans turned off by Trump’s incivility. Kelly embraced pragmatic versions of liberal platforms, such as a public healthcare option and climate change legislation geared at jumpstarting the renewable energy industry.

Both candidates were veteran military pilots. McSally was the first woman combat pilot, and Kelly was a heavily decorated naval aviator deployed to the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm. NASA later recruited Kelly and his twin brother, and Kelly flew a number of space shuttle flights before retiring from both NASA and the Navy in 2011.

That same year, a gunman targeted Giffords, Kelly’s wife, in a mass shooting assassination attempt at a constituent event outside of a grocery store. Giffords, who was shot in the head, sustained severe brain damage, and Kelly, a former firearms owner, became a vocal advocate for stronger gun regulations. The couple launched a gun-control advocacy group together in 2013.

At the same time, Kelly, the son of two police officers, bridged the gap between stronger gun laws and support for Second Amendment rights while evading GOP broadsides amid the Trump-led “law and order” attacks on Black Lives Matter protesters over the summer.

“Our rights and traditions are so important. [The] Second Amendment is so important,” he said during an Oct. 7 debate. “But we can never let a bunch of kids in [their] classroom, you know, get killed and think there’s nothing we can do about it.”

The Copper State’s demographics have shifted with the introduction of younger voters who tend to favor Democrats, as well as an influx of Latinx voters, securing the state’s status as a toss-up.

Sinema, who upset McSally in 2018’s special election, took over the seat formerly held by Republican Sen. Jeff Flake, a staunch conservative who at times criticized Trump and endorsed Biden’s candidacy. Until Sinema, Republicans alone had represented the Copper State in the Senate since 1995.

A Democratic presidential candidate has not won Arizona since former President Bill Clinton carried the state in 1996.

Republican Steve Daines holds off Democratic Gov. Steve Bullock in Montana Senate race

Incumbent Sen. Steve Daines, R-Montana, won his re-election race against Democratic Gov. Steve Bullock, according to the Associated Press.

Daines led Bullock 53-47 with about 79% of the vote in, according to the AP.

The result is a setback to Democrats hoping to regain a majority in the Senate. Though the state leans heavily Republican, Democrats had hoped Bullock’s popularity as governor would give them both of the state’s Senate seats after Sen. Jon Tester, D-Montana, won his re-election race in 2018. Most recent polls showed a very close race in the weeks leading up to the election even as President Donald Trump consistently led Democratic nominee Joe Biden in the state. The AP reported Trump winning the state’s three electoral votes, 55-43.

Recent polls showed that Bullock, whose popularity was buoyed by his early response to the coronavirus pandemic, was the most popular statewide elected official in Montana with an approval rating of 60%. Bullock has drawn praise for his work to expand Medicaid, protect public lands and ban dark money from undisclosed donors in state elections.

He briefly ran for the Democratic presidential nomination as a moderate and a “pro-choice, pro-union, populist Democrat that won three elections in a red state, not by compromising our values but by getting stuff done.”

Democrats outspent Republicans about $82 million to $63 million on ads leading up to the election, according to ABC News.

Daines is a longtime state GOP leader with deep political and business ties to Rep. Greg Gianforte, R-Montana, who is expected to win his race to succeed Bullock as governor. He previously served for two years as Montana’s lone member of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Daines has promoted his support for Trump on the campaign trail, but the president was largely absent from the race — unlike in 2018, when he tried to help unseat Tester — because he was busy playing catch-up to Biden in key swing states. Instead, Daines campaigned in the final weeks with Vice President Mike Pence, Donald Trump Jr., Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley.

Daines, who serves on the Senate Finance and Appropriations Committees, was a big supporter of the Trump tax cuts and immigration policies. A former business executive who lived in China for years, Daines echoed the president’s rhetoric on Beijing, first seeking to promote better relations with the country during Trump’s trade talks before becoming a fierce China critic after the president blamed the country for the coronavirus pandemic.

Bullock slammed Daines during their debates for stalling on a second round of federal coronavirus relief funds and criticized him for supporting Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, arguing that her ascent to the court could lead to the repeal of the Affordable Care Act amid the pandemic.

Daines disputed that the court would repeal the law and vowed to protect people with pre-existing conditions by backing a plan authored by Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., that experts warn includes loopholes that allow companies to drop coverage of “certain expensive diseases.” Despite Republican opposition to Bullock’s executive order expanding mail voting in the state, Daines said he supported the expansion.

Daines repeatedly tried to tie Bullock to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., as the governor attempted to paint himself as a political independent.

Daines closed out the campaign with a rally featuring Trump Jr. and musician Ted Nugent over the weekend, where the president’s eldest son praised the senator as a “warrior” while decrying Republicans-in-name-only who “go to D.C. and roll over and die each and every time.”

Trump Jr. spent most of his time praising his father before noting Daines’ and Gianforte’s financial wealth.

“He [Trump] doesn’t need the job like Steve doesn’t need the job, and like Greg doesn’t need the job, but he’s doing it because of the same reasons as them, because they understand how to get things done — it’s worth fighting for in our country,” he said.

Bullock, meanwhile, drew the support of the state’s largest newspaper, which cited his support for “prudent” fiscal policies while criticizing Daines for avoiding constituents and failing to stand up to Trump’s racist rhetoric.

“Bullock did a good job for Montana in his second term — and in the first,” said the Billings Gazette editorial board. “He has taken bold steps when boldness was called for… and he has kept his powder dry when restraint was called for. Indeed, Bullock has been both a warrior and a coalition-builder, an unusual resume feature in these times.”

Republican Sen. Joni Ernst defeats Theresa Greenfield in Iowa to hold Senate seat for second term

Republican Sen. Joni Ernst defeated Democratic rival Theresa Greenfield in Iowa’s hotly-contested Senate race, surviving her first challenge as an incumbent.

Though Ernst cruised to victory in 2014, she had never run for re-election. Over the course of the last year, Ernst watched her once-“safe” seat go the way of a number of her Republican colleagues as her Democratic challenger made inroads amid the Trump administration’s heavily-criticized response to the coronavirus pandemic.

In recent months, Greenfield nosed ahead in the polls, holding a modest but steady lead which only began to tighten heading into Election Day. Two prominent election forecasters, Fivethirtyeight and the Cook Political Report, rated the contest a “toss-up.” Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball pushed the race further in Greenfield’s favor, ranking it “lean Democratic” late last month.

Recent local polls, however, found a number of Hawkeye voters still undecided. In the end, those voters appear to have pulled toward Ernst, who won by a comfortable margin.

While both candidates grew up on Iowa farms, their political trajectories could not be more different. Greenfield went into urban planning and real estate, while Ernst turned to politics. The Republican’s rise was fueled in large part by the billionaire Koch brothers, who viewed her as an ally of their industrial and energy interests. Ernst has not failed in that regard, attacking the Green New Deal as a socialist encroachment which would “essentially ban animal agriculture and eliminate gas-powered cars.”

Though Greenfield steered her campaign towards Social Security and healthcare, she weighed in on the climate change debate as she argued for “urgent climate action” and pitched a plan to make Iowa the “first net-zero farm industry in the world.” The Democrat also used the recent floods which have devastated the state to advocate for investments to protect against rising waters in an ever-warming climate.

Greenfield, like Democratic challengers in Maine and South Carolina Senate races, also sought to paint Ernst as out of touch with the needs of her state.

“She’s had six years, and she’s forgotten Iowans,” Greenfield said in one debate. “She sold out Iowans for her big corporate donors.”

Ernst also saw her support flag among suburban voters in the state, a growing demographic which has at a national level soured on President Donald Trump’s leadership. Early on, she fell in line with his agenda, voting to repeal the Affordable Care Act, pass the Republican tax bill and confirm Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, even as pressure mounted from women voters in her state.

“Suburban women have said, ‘To hell with this’ and voted up and down the ticket for us,” a Democratic strategist told Vox last month. “We’ve also picked up some men outside of suburbia who wanted to see a federal check on Trump. I think that’s part of the trend we’re seeing in the Senate race.”

In the end, however, Ernst cleared that hurdle easily.

Trump also won the state this year. In 2016, he took 51% of the Iowa electorate, but he found himself fighting to stay above water in the polls in 2020 with approval ratings in the low- to mid-40s. Trump outperformed the polls, cruising to a nearly nine-point victory.

Democrat John Hickenlooper wins Senate race in Colorado

Former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper has defeated Republican Sen. Cory Gardner, according to the Associated Press. It’s the first Democratic pickup of this election. Democrats will need to gain three seats to win a Senate majority if Joe Biden is also elected president — and four seats if President Trump is re-elected. At this writing, Hickenlooper leads Gardner by 56% to 42%, with 69% of precincts reporting.

From the beginning, the Colorado Senate race seemed one of the most likely opportunities for a Democratic win. Gardner was elected in 2014 by less than 2 percent of the popular vote — less than 40,000 votes in all, in a strong midterm year for Republicans. Colorado overall has trended blue in recent years and has supported the Democratic nominee in every presidential election since 2008.

Hickenlooper ran as a moderate, and focused on issues like fighting the pandemic and creating better health care reform. He sought the Democratic presidential nomination in the 2020 cycle, although he dropped out of the national race in August 2019 and announced his Senate campaign later that month. In an interview on Monday, Hickenlooper talked about uniting the progressive wing of the Democratic Party epitomized by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., with the more moderate wing he represents.

“If you look at the large-scale goals, we all want to make sure that we have a health care system that covers everybody and that is affordable, that we don’t keep spending more and more money on our health care system,” Hickenlooper told Salon. “We all agree that climate change is an existential threat, and we’ve got to bring people together and address it aggressively. We all agree that the economy no longer favors middle-class people trying to improve their place in the world and has become too heavily tilted towards the largest corporations and the wealthiest individuals.”

He added, “These are all visions that are shared by the progressive wing and the more moderate wing of the Democratic Party. We just disagree on what the most effective tactics might be to achieve these goals.”

Hickenlooper also said that he would prioritize “addressing COVID-19 and rebuilding our public health infrastructure,” adding that “a pandemic is not a bad time to really focus on making sure everybody’s got health insurance. I think we’re going to have to pivot immediately and deal with the economy and the damage that’s been done by the negligence and the incompetence of the response that came out of the White House.”

For weeks prior to the election, polls showed Hickenlooper with a comfortable lead over Gardner, with a margin varying from eight to 14 points. Gardner repeatedly tried, and failed, to walk a fine line between pleasing supporters of President Trump without alienating moderates. Gardner sided with Trump on a number of controversial issues: Backing a repeal of the Affordable Care Act with no replacement legislation, voting to confirm Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett and supporting Trump when he appointed former fossil fuel to head the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Although Gardner distinguished himself from other Republicans on rare occasions — such as by admitting that man-made climate change is a scientific fact — he voted with Trump on nearly 90 percent of the issues that came before the Senate.

Gardner’s tendency to try to please both the pro-Trump and moderate camps was epitomized during his debate with Hickenlooper last month. When asked if he believed that Trump is a moral and ethical man, Gardner replied “yes” before adding, “I wish he would be more specific in his communications with the American people.” Previously, when Trump was caught making derogatory comments about women in a 2005 “Access Hollywood” tape released during the 2016 presidential election, Gardner said he would not vote for Trump and urged the candidate to step aside.

GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham defeats Jaime Harrison to win a fourth term representing South Carolina

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham has fended off Democratic challenger Jaime Harrison in the deep red state of South Carolina, the Associated Press projects.

The contest was among the most-watched races across the country this year, one which embodied some of the most salient issues of the campaign cycle: Trumpism, the national reckoning on race, the coronavirus pandemic and — in the final weeks — the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett.

The candidates ran the home stretch in a dead heat, with polls showing Harrison pulling even in the final months of the race. The underdog proved to be a fundraising juggernaut, smashing Senate contest records with a $57 million haul in the last full quarter of the campaign.

Graham, who had not previously faced a serious challenger in the conservative stronghold of South Carolina, complained about the amount of out-of-state money racked up by his rival. He eventually took to begging for campaign cash on Fox News and — at one point — the halls of the Senate in violation of ethics rules and federal law.

Harrison, who grew up poor but rose to become a senior staffer for the influential Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., and the first Black chairman of the South Carolina Democratic Party, steadily cut into Graham’s support throughout the year. The underdog held Graham to a tie in the final two months of the campaign, and election forecasters across the board shifted the race to a toss-up.

The newcomer proved himself a deft and patient politician with appeal to Democrats and Republicans alike. Harrison ran a disciplined campaign, which avoided litmus tests and third-rail issues. He pushed for a public healthcare option and routinely reminded voters about local issues like broadband access, which rarely make national news. He cast Graham as out of touch with South Carolinians and linked that preoccupation to a poor response to the coronavirus pandemic.

Harrison, himself, kept a low-profile until the final weeks. Republican operatives had for months marveled at Graham’s apparent reluctance to accept that his challenger, who told a story of growing up poor with a single mother and ascending to Yale, Georgetown Law and a top-flight Washington lobbying firm, posed a serious threat.

Of course, Graham, who as chair of the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee ushered Barrett through her warp-speed confirmation process, was able to count on a bedrock Republican base. The incumbent senator focused his appeal to voters on red-meat issues, such as law and order, fiscal responsibility and the federal bench. But as the pandemic surged, his fealty to Trump, including regular visits to the president’s properties, cost him among suburban voters and moderate Republicans, including key donors who flipped early to Harrison.

Harrison sought to highlight the split in Graham’s personal interests from those of South Carolina, bringing a metaphor onstage with him at the first debate — a plexiglass divider to separate himself from the incumbent, who had the week before participated in Barrett’s Rose Garden nomination ceremony, now thought to be a superspreader event.

Despite the outward display of loyalty to Trump, Graham still had to contend with voters who might choose to defect to Constitution Party candidate Bill Bledsoe, who ran to the incumbent’s right but dropped out too late to strike his name from the ballot. Harrison, stuffed to the gills with cash, ran a series of ads in the final weeks reminding Palmetto State conservatives that Bledsoe remained an ideological option.

While Harrison did not back down from issues of race and social justice, he chose not to run on them in the state which kicked off the Civil War. Had he won, the state would have become the first in U.S. history to send two Black senators to Capitol Hill at the same time: Harrison and incumbent Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C.

Former Auburn football coach Tommy Tuberville unseats Democratic Sen. Doug Jones in Alabama

Sen. Doug Jones, D-Ala., defied all odds when he became the first Democrat sent by Alabama to the U.S. Senate in 25 years.

Before Jones won the deep red state’s special election in 2017, former Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., had occupied the same seat for more than two decades. Sessions left the upper chamber after being confirmed as President Donald Trump’s first attorney general. He was unceremoniously fired less than two years later.

A diverse coalition of Alabama voters united behind Jones to defeat Roy Moore, a judge twice removed from the state’s Supreme Court. Moore’s campaign was upended by multiple allegations of sexual misconduct.

In the end, the same blue wave did not surge for a second time in 2020. As polls predicted, Jones fell short in his first re-election as an incumbent senator. Republicans flipped the blue seat, the Associated Press called on Tuesday night.

A historic loss was not enough to stop Moore from vying again for the Republican nomination for a re-match against Jones. He went down in flames, while Sessions headed to a run-off for his old seat against former Auburn University head football coach Tommy Tuberville in the party’s primary.

Though Sessions was the very first sitting U.S. senator to endorse Trump for president, the commander in chief did not return the favor after his former attorney general recused himself from former special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Trump backed Tuberville, another political outsider.

Loyalty, the trait which Trump values above all else, loomed large over the Republican primary. Tuberville claimed that Sessions had “quit on the president” when he recused himself in the Russia investigation. The former football coach invoked Trump’s pet slogans, such as “build the wall” and “drain the swamp,” along the campaign trail.

Jones is a former U.S. attorney who helped bring two former Klansmen to justice who killed four little girls when they bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham.

Tuberville is a former college football coach who never led Auburn to a national championship. Nick Saban, the current head coach of the University of Alabama’s football team, has six national championships over his career.

“Tommy Tuberville has never been ahead in the polls in November only to go on and disappoint the state of Alabama on a national scale before,” PFTCommenter told Salon on Election Day. “Don’t expect him to start now.”

Mitch McConnell beats Amy McGrath to win seventh Senate term for Kentucky

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., won his bid for re-election, reports the Associated Press. He defeated Democratic challenger Amy McGrath in the closely watched Senate race.

Shortly after 8 p.m., McConnell was ahead of McGrath 61% to 35% statewide.

In his victory speech delivered at the Omni Hotel in Louisville, McConnell said that the results indicated that Kentuckians felt that “challenging times need proven leadership,” and that voters wanted the state to keep their “front row in the Senate.”

“We’re not finished yet. Kentucky wants more of the policies that built the best economy in modern history, not socialism that would stifle prosperity and hurt workers,” he said.

McConnell, who first took office in 1985, was unanimously elected as Senate majority leader by Republicans following the 2014 elections. Before that, he served as Senate minority leader from 2007 to 2015.

If the Senate flips to Democratic control, an outcome that is being predicted by polling websites like FiveThirtyEight, the 78-year-old McConnell has already vowed to serve as minority leader, Politico reported in June.

McConnell’s obstructionist tactics have long been criticized by Democrats, with his enthusiastic shepherding of the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court following the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg in September prompting outcries of hypocrisy.

In 2016, McConnell refused to hold confirmation proceedings for Obama’s Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland, saying in a Washington Post opinion piece at the time that “given that we are in the midst of the presidential election process, we believe that the American people should seize the opportunity to weigh in on whom they trust to nominate the next person for a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court.”

While other red states like Georgia, Texas and Arizona have been slotted into the purple column this year, due in part to college-educated suburban voters swinging to Democratic candidates, reliable and recent Kentucky polls showed McConnell with a handy lead over McGrath in the home stretch of this election season, even as they predicted Trump’s lead in Kentucky, while still secure, might shrink. The AP called Kentucky, with its eight electoral votes, for Trump earlier this evening.

Despite national Democratic enthusiasm for McGrath’s campaign, which helped bring in millions of dollars in campaign contributions, hers would be an uphill fight from the start. In 2014, McConnell, who embraces his reputation as “the Darth Vader of Capitol Hill,” defeated Democrat Alison Lundergan Grimes by 16 percentage points; two years later, Trump won Kentucky by a nearly 30-point margin. McGrath’s previous run in Kentucky ended in a loss; in 2018, she challenged incumbent Republican Andy Barr for Kentucky’s sixth Congressional district seat, but the blue wave that flipped the House to Democratic control failed to carry her home.

McGrath’s campaign also hit some noticeable snags early on. The former Marine fighter pilot publicly wavered on whether she would have voted to confirm Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and in July 2019 she publicly said McConnell had prevented Trump from accomplishing much of his agenda during his first two years in office.

“If you think about why Kentuckians voted for Trump, they wanted to drain the swamp, and Trump said that he was going to do that,” McGrath said during the announcement of her candidacy on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “Trump promised to bring back jobs. He promised to lower drug prices for so many Kentuckians. And that is very important.”

This led to questions from the left over whether McGrath had decided to run as a pro-Trump Democrat. Republicans, as the Louisville Courier Journal reported, mocked McGrath’s TV appearance as pandering. As a result, her progressive views struck critics on the left as anemic, especially when compared to those of State Rep. Charles Booker, her challenger in the Democratic primary who was the youngest Black state lawmaker elected in Kentucky in nearly a century.

McGrath later established stronger anti-Trump messaging. In February she said that she would have voted to impeach and convict Trump, and she was an early supporter of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.

McGrath also managed a strong fundraising campaign. She raised $88 million, spent $73.3 million, and reported $14.7 million in cash on hand as of Oct. 14, campaign finance filings show, while McConnell raised $55 million, spent $43.9 million, and reported $11.8 million in cash on hand.

But in the end McGrath’s impressive fundraising wasn’t enough to beat McConnell.

Key 2020 congressional races: Democrats seek to shore up House majority

Update: The Associated Press confirmed on Tuesday that the Democrats will have at least 218 seats in the House of Representatives and, consequently, continue to hold that legislative body.

According to recent reports, President Trump believes that Republicans can retake a majority in the House of Representatives in 2020. He might be the only one. Political experts largely believe that the Democrats are overwhelming favorites to retain control of the House, extending Nancy Pelosi’s speakership for one more term — which she has suggested will be her last. It’s likely, in fact, that Democrats will expand their majority with wins in at least a few swing districts. But that doesn’t mean every House Democrat is safe — or that there aren’t going to be critical races to watch.

Nate Silver’s website FiveThirtyEight.com gives Democrats a 97 percent chance of keeping the House, while the Cook Political Report expects Democrats to expand their current 232-197 majority by 10 to 15 seats (one seat is held by an independent and five are currently vacant).

Democrats are only defending 12 open seats, while 32 House Republicans have retired, perhaps an indication that they didn’t like their chances in an election year dominated by Trump. FiveThirtyEight’s polling average on its congressional generic ballot tracker gives Democrats an average 7.3 percent lead, close to the 8.7 percent lead they held before picking up 40 seats in the “blue wave” of the 2018 midterm elections.

Salon has selected 20 races to watch, some because of how close they’re likely to be, and others for more symbolic reasons. For example, the two House Democrats who voted against impeaching Trump earlier this year are both up for reelection — although only one of them is still a Democrat. Rep. Collin Peterson of Minnesota faces a tight race against Republican Michelle Fischbach, whereas Rep. Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey, who switched to the Republicans after the impeachment vote, appears to trail Democrat nominee Amy Kennedy.

Democrats are also looking to extend their suburban gains from 2018 in places like Indiana’s 5th district, where Republican incumbent Susan Brooks is retiring and Democrat Christina Hale faced Republican Victoria Spartz; or in Arkansas’ 2nd district, where incumbent Republican Rep. French Hill was running against Democratic challenger Joyce Elliott. Then there are the ripe opportunities for expansion in Texas, including open seats in the Lone Star State’s 22nd and 24th districts.

Here are the House races we’re tracking. This story will be updated as results continue to roll in.

Arizona, 6th district: Republican David Schweikert (incumbent) vs. Democrat Hiral Tipirneni

Perhaps the most distinctive characteristic of this race is the scandals plaguing Schweikert: In July the Republican admitted to 11 ethics violations, including misuse of official funds, as well as violating other congressional and campaign finance rules. Although he was only reprimanded instead of facing harsher legal consequences, it should tell you something that the House resolution was unanimous — a rare moment of bipartisanship.

The Associated Press called this district for Schweikert.

* * *

Arkansas, 2nd district: Republican French Hill (incumbent) vs. Democrat Joyce Elliott

While Arkansas has a reputation as a Republican stronghold, this district only flipped red in 2010 after being held by Democrats for the previous two decades. Elliott was a public school teacher for 30 years before her entry into politics.

The Associated Press called this district for Hill.

* * *

California, 21st district: Democrat T.J. Cox (incumbent) vs. Republican David Valadao

A rematch of the 2018 election in the same district, Valadao is looking to win back a seat that he lost to Cox that year by a razor-thin 862 votes. Even in a state that Biden will win easily, Cox’s California seat is won Republicans could get back.

The Associated Press called this district for Valadao.

* * *

Georgia, 7th district: Open — Democrat Carolyn Bourdeaux vs. Republican Rich McCormick

Although the incumbent in this district (Republican Rep. Rob Woodall) is not seeking reelection, this is not Bourdeaux’s first time appearing on the ballot in that district. She lost to Woodall in 2018 by a mere 433 votes.

The Associated Press called this district for Bourdeaux.

* * *

Indiana, 5th district: Open — Democrat Christina Hale vs. Republican Victoria Spartz

When incumbent Rep. Susan Brooks won the 2018 election in this district as a Republican, she defeated her opponent by a margin of more than 13 points. The mere fact that this district is considered to be close in 2020 marks a significant shift from the status quo only two years ago.

The Associated Press called this district for Spartz.

* * *

Michigan, 3rd district: Open — Democrat Hillary Scholten vs. Republican Peter Meijer

This district is notable because its incumbent, independent Rep. Justin Amash, quit the Republican Party last year because of his opposition to Trump. Prior to his departure, Amash was the first congressional Republican to call for Trump’s impeachment, tweeting in May 2019 that “partisanship has eroded our system of checks and balances.” The question is whether his constituents share his disgust with the president.

The Associated Press called this district for Meijer.

* * *

Minnesota, 7th district: Democrat Collin Peterson (incumbent) vs. Republican Michelle Fischbach

Peterson, who voted against impeaching Trump earlier this year, has described himself as “the only conservative Democrat left, basically” in the House. He is running against former lieutenant governor and state legislator Michelle Fischbach, who is considered competitive even though Peterson has held that seat for 30 years.

The Associated Press called this district for Fischbach.

* * *

Missouri, 2nd district: Republican Ann Wagner (incumbent) vs. Democrat Jill Schupp

Although Wagner won her district by more than 20 points in 2016, her margin fell to a mere four points when ran again in 2018. Wagner has held this district since her first election in 2012.

The Associated Press called this district for Wagner.

* * *

Nebraska, 2nd district: Republican Don Bacon (incumbent) vs. Democrat Kara Eastman

This district is notable because, like Maine’s 2nd congressional district, its electoral vote could go to Biden even if the rest of the state is won by Trump. That is because Nebraska divides its electoral votes by congressional district, making Eastman’s race perhaps more significant to Biden’s Electoral College fate than most other House races.

The Associated Press called this district for Bacon.

* * *

New Jersey, 2nd district: Republican Jeff Van Drew (incumbent) vs. Democrat Amy Kennedy

This is a traditionally conservative district in the southern corner of New Jersey — a perennially blue state in presidential election — and it had been represented by Republican Frank LoBiondo since 1995, until Van Drew was elected as a Democrat in 2018. Van Drew switched parties Republican during Trump’s impeachment, however, and it’s unclear how his district will react to that.

The Associated Press called this district for Van Drew.

* * *

New Mexico, 2nd district: Democrat Xochitl Torres Small (incumbent) vs. Republican Yvette Herrell

This is another rematch from 2018, when Small eked out a victory over then-incumbent Herrell by just under 4,000 votes, making this a competitive district in a state that is widely expected to go Democratic in the presidential election.

The Associated Press called this district for Herrell.

* * *

New York, 11th district: Democrat Max Rose (incumbent) vs. Republican Nicole Malliotakis

This district in Brooklyn and Staten Island was for years the only Republican district in New York City, and was one of 31 in the House that were won by Trump in 2016 but flipped to the Democrats in the 2018 midterm elections.

The Associated Press called this district for Malliotakis.

* * *

New York, 22nd district: Democrat Anthony Brindisi (incumbent) vs. Republican Claudia Tenney

Another rematch: Tenney was elected in 2016 and lost to Brindisi by less than 5,000 votes in 2018.

* * *

Ohio, 1st district: Republican Steve Chabot (incumbent) vs. Democrat Kate Schroder

This is another district that seems to be creeping blue. In 2016, when Trump was elected, Chabot defeated his Democratic challenger by nearly 20 points. By 2018, however, Chabot’s margin narrowed to less than five points.

The Associated Press called this district for Chabot.

* * *

Oklahoma, 5th district: Democrat Kendra Horn (incumbent) vs. Republican Stephanie Bice

This district, which used to be solidly Republican, was one of the major upsets of the 2018 midterms, when Horn defeated claimed then-incumbent Republican Steve Russell by less than 4,000 votes.

The Associated Press called this district for Bice.

* * *

Pennsylvania, 10th district: Republican Scott Perry (incumbent) vs. Democrat Eugene DePasquale

Perry has represented this district since 2012, but national Democrats have focused on this seat — whose boundaries were redrawn in 2018 — as a particularly promising potential acquisition.

The Associated Press called this district for Perry.

* * *

Pennsylvania, 17th district: Democrat Conor Lamb (incumbent) vs. Republican Sean Parnell

Lamb made headlines by winning the traditionally conservative district in a 2018 special election, and then retained the seat in the midterms later that year.

The Associated Press called this district for Lamb.

* * *

Texas, 22nd district: Open — Democrat Sri Preston Kulkarni vs. Republican Troy Nehls

Like many of the districts on this list, this one was held by a Republican (Pete Olson) for many years and by comfortable margins. In 2018, however, Olson defeated Kulkarni by less than five points. This year, Olson is retiring and this race appears highly competitive.

The Associated Press called this race for Nehls.

* * *

Texas, 24th district: Open — Democrat Candace Valenzuela vs. Republican Beth Van Duyne

This seat is being vacated by Republican Kenny Marchant, first elected in 2004. While Marchant defeated Democratic challenger Jan McDowell by roughly 17 points in 2016, that margin narrowed to three points in 2018.

The Associated Press called this district for Van Duyne.

* * *

Utah, 4th district: Democrat Ben McAdams (incumbent) vs. Republican Burgess Owens

McAdams is the former Salt Lake City mayor and managed to ride out that popularity to a 694-vote 2018 victory over the Republican incumbent, Mia Love — but the GOP sees a realistic opportunity to win it back.

The Associated Press called this district for Owens.

Protesters plan to take the streets if Trump claims false victory

As polls close on an acrimonious presidential election marred by fears of voter suppression and disenfranchisement, Americans across the country are preparing to take to the streets in protest to ensure that votes are counted.

“We can’t anticipate exactly how Trump and his enablers will try to attack democracy (although we have been gaming out a number of different scenarios), but we know that the stakes are too high to sit on the sidelines and wait,” the organizers of Shutdown DC, a coalition of activists groups, wrote on their website. “That’s why we’re making plans to be in the streets before the polls even close, ready to adapt and respond to whatever comes our way.”

Organizers in Washington D.C. have been protesting at Black Lives Matter Plaza since the late afternoon on Tuesday, which started with reports of singing and dancing. However, many businesses and establishments in Washington D.C. have spent the last week boarding up in anticipation of election night violence—including the White House.

On Monday evening, the Park Service started to temporarily restrict access to parks around the White House due to “the unique security requirements with the upcoming Presidential election, and the need to quickly de-escalate potentially violent encounters, protect park resources, and maintain public safety,” according to the Washington Post. A non-scalable fence, the same one that federal officials erected after the killing of Geroge Floyd in May, was installed at the White House on Monday, as reported by Salon’s Igor Derysh.

The Shutdown DC event is one of several actions planned in DC on Tuesday. Youth-led political group Generation Ratify held a gathering in the afternoon, and People’s Watch Party is hosting a watch party in Black Lives Matter Plaza, separate from the Shutdown DC event.

Across the country, from Oakland to Dallas to New York City, organizers with Protect the Results — a joint project of Indivisible and Stand Up America — plan to take to the streets and protest if one of the following scenarios occur,: “If Trump declares victory before all the votes are counted, makes unfounded claims that the election was ‘stolen,’ tries to stop votes from being counted, or otherwise threatens the integrity of the election or the peaceful transition of power,” the organization’s toolkit explains. In San Francisco, Protect the Results organizers plan on protesting in front of the Twitter building on Wednesday to put pressure on the tech company to fight disinformation. (Many pundits and politicos predict that Trump will declare victory and/or claim there was widespread voter fraud without evidence, as he did in 2016.)

By Tuesday afternoon, early voter turnout exceeded 101 million votes, according to the U.S. Elections Project. In 2016, nearly 138 million Americans voted in the entire general presidential election. The number of voters in this election is expected to far surpass the number of people who voted in 2020.

Meanwhile, over the past week, President Donald Trump has doubled-down on false assertions that the results of the election must be known on election night, in addition to pushing false claims that questioned the integrity of mail-in ballots and absentee voting.

“I think it’s a terrible thing when people or states are allowed to tabulate ballots for a long period of time after the election is over,” Trump told reporters over the weekend in North Carolina. “I think it’s terrible when we can’t know the results of an election the night of the election in a modern-day age of computers.” Yet it was only in the past few decades that knowing the results of a presidential election on the same day as the election became normalized by the 24-hour cable news cycle.

The rise in mail-in and absentee ballots a result of the coronavirus pandemic, a turn of events that is expected to slow down the counting process especially in states where election workers process each ballot by hand. Thus, it is likely that Americans will go to bed without a clear victor —and why protesters are gearing up for the beginning of what could be a long couple of weeks, or even months.

Various states are asking their national guards to be on standby to respond to anticipatory unrest. In Massachusetts, Republican Governor Charlie Baker asked 1,000 members of the Massachusetts National Guard to be ready in order to ensure Massachusetts “is positioned to maintain public safety following Tuesday’s election,” WBUR reports. In Oregon, Democratic Governor Kate Brown ordered a statement of emergency for the city of Portland on Monday through Wednesday, in addition to preparing National Guard troops for potential deployment.

According to the Washington Post, the National Guard Bureau put together a “600-soldier quick-response unit of mostly military police, split up between Alabama and Arizona.”

The preparations taken at the federal level extend beyond the National Guard. According to an NBC News report, Department of Homeland Security Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents have been told to stand by and protect federal property in Washington, which would be a first in an election. A report released by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project and MilitiaWatch in October warned that five states — Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin and Oregon — were at risk to experience increased militia activity before and after the elections.

Counterinsurgency expert David Kilcullen told Salon’s Chauncey Devega that the “extreme worst-case scenario” is a disputed outcome where both Biden and Trump both claim victories.

“There is a breakdown in the Electoral College, mass rioting in the streets and somewhere it suddenly becomes even more violent where 25 people are killed in one incident, or an IED is exploded, or it is not cars ramming a crowd but a mass shooting instead,” Kilcullen told Devega. “At that point it is the beginning of a second civil war here in America.”

Trump baselessly claims Democrats are “trying to STEAL” the election and falsely claims victory

President Donald Trump baselessly accused Democrats of trying to “steal” the election, offering no evidence, and falsely declared victory even as Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden appeared to have an edge in the vote count.

Biden — who has 238 electoral votes, as of 3:15 a.m. Eastern Time, per Associated Press reports, while Trump has 213 — spoke first after polls had closed across the nation, predicting that he is “on track to win the election.” Biden cautioned, however, that there were a lot of votes left to be counted.

“I’m optimistic about this outcome,” Biden told supporters in Wilmington, Delaware, adding that he was “feeling good” about Michigan and Wisconsin, where millions of mail-in votes remain to be counted. Georgia, he said, is still up for grabs.

Ballot counting in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania is sure to continue well into Wednesday. The New York Times’ dreaded “needle” gives Biden a slight edge in Georgia, although Trump remains ahead, with many votes outstanding in the Atlanta metropolitan area.

Trump quickly followed up by baselessly alleging on Twitter that Democrats were “trying to STEAL” the election and falsely claimed that votes were being “cast after the Polls are closed.” Trump misspelled the word “polls” as “poles” in his initial tweet before his second attempt was flagged by Twitter for violating its policy on misleading election claims.

Votes cannot be cast after the polls are closed anywhere in the country. Trump’s complaints have for weeks been aimed at states that count valid votes postmarked before Election Day but accepted up to several days later.

Trump later falsely told mostly maskless supporters in the East Room of the White House that Democrats were “trying to disfranchise” his voters and falsely declared that “we already have won” the election.

“This is a major fraud on our nation,” he baselessly claimed. “We’ll be going to the U.S. Supreme Court.”

“We want all voting to stop,” he added, referring to the counting of valid and legal votes cast before polls closed. “We don’t want them to find any ballots at 4 o’clock in the morning.”

“Almost everything President Trump said in his declaration of victory was not true,” CNN’s Jake Tapper said after Trump’s remarks. “He did not win. He has not won.”

“This is an extremely flammable situation and the President just threw a match on it. He hasn’t won these states,” Fox News’ Chris Wallace said on his own network.

The two candidates are locked in an unexpectedly close race as Democratic hopes for a decisive landslide have evaporated. Biden appears to have a clearer path to victory, but the result remains highly uncertain and the most competitive states remain too close to call. Trump still leads in early results in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Biden piled up a quick electoral-vote lead early, netting large totals in the Northeast and on the West Coast while picking up traditionally red Arizona, while President Trump won big in the South and across the heartland, including victories in Florida, Texas and Ohio, three of the biggest electoral prizes. Trump also holds narrow leads in North Carolina and Georgia, although the latter state looks to be exceptionally close once all votes are counted

Three important states won by Trump in 2016 remain undecided and may stay that way for a while. In Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, millions of mail-in ballots are still to be counted.

On the Senate side, Democrats need at least four pickups to regain the majority — and at this writing, it appears they may fall short. They picked up one seat in Colorado, where former Democratic Gov. John Hickenlooper defeated incumbent Cory Gardner, R-Colo., while losing one in Alabama, where former Auburn University football coach Tommy Tuberville, a Republican, defeated incumbent Doug Jones, D-Ala. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., were both easily re-elected. In a major disappointment for Democrats, Sens. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, and Steve Daines, R-Montana, also won re-election, making the prospect of a Democratic Senate majority very difficult.

To this point, Biden has won California, New York, Minnesota, Arizona, Washington, Oregon, Virginia, Vermont, Massachusetts, Colorado, Maryland, New Jersey, Illinois, Rhode Island, New Mexico, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Delaware, Hawaii, one of Nebraska’s electoral votes and three of Maine’s, and Washington, D.C., according to the Associated Press.

Along with Florida, Texas and Ohio, Trump has won South Carolina, Missouri, Louisiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Utah, Tennessee, West Virginia, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, Wyoming, Montana, South Dakota, North Dakota, Indiana, Idaho, and three of Nebraska’s five electoral votes.

Biden entered the day leading Trump nationally by more than eight percentage points, according to FiveThirtyEight’s polling average. Biden had a similarly large lead in critical states like Michigan and Wisconsin, while holding narrower leads in Florida, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina. While FiveThirtyEight and other election forecasters gave Biden close to a 90% chance of winning, poll guru Nate Silver warned that state polls were significantly tighter than the national polls — and that a 10% chance of winning for Trump “isn’t zero.” Trump quickly defied any expectations of a Democratic landslide by running up the vote in the South.

This election is unlike any that has come before, largely because of the influx of mail-in and early votes. More than 100 million ballots were cast prior to Election Day, nearly double the 2016 total of early votes, and about 75% of the overall voter turnout in the last presidential election. As many as 150 to 160 million votes are expected to be cast in total, up from about 137 million in 2016.

Nearly 36 million early votes were cast in person while more than 65 million were cast by mail, according to data from the U.S. Elections Project at the University of Florida. The early vote heavily favored Democrats. Republicans edged out Democrats in the in-person early vote 42 to 36 percent in states that reported party registration, but Democratic mail-in ballots outnumbered Republicans 48-27.

Different states have different rules for how they count and report early and Election Day votes. The Cook Political Report’s Dave Wasserman cautioned that states like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan were not allowed to start counting mail-in ballots until this week, meaning that early Election Day results may show a “red mirage” in which Trump holds lead before the bulk of the vote is totaled.

“It will be easier than ever for initial vote tallies to lead untrained eyes astray,” Wasserman warned. “So patience is essential for the media and the public, and it’s critical to wait for experienced, statistically driven network decision desks to make projections.”

Though Trump has baselessly tried to sow doubt in the security of mail-in ballots and bet big on a strong Election Day turnout, some in the president’s camp believe that may have been a mistake.

“The team in Pennsylvania was not as prepared as it should be in a state that could decide the presidency,” one campaign source told NBC News’ Peter Alexander. “When you bank your entire election on Election Day turnout, you have to ask people if they’re going to stand in line for two hours.”

The latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll showed that Biden led 61-35 among self-reported early voters while Trump led 61-32 among the 28% of voters who said they planned to vote in person on Election Day.

Though there has been concern that large numbers of mail-in ballots could be rejected because of the influx of first-time early voters, early data suggests that a lower percentage of such ballots have been flagged than usual. More ballots may still be rejected for various reasons, including late arrival, a growing concern given that U.S. Postal Service processing times slowed down ahead of the election. The USPS told a court on Tuesday that it cannot trace what happened to 300,000 ballots and refused to comply with a court order to sweep 12 postal districts across 15 states to ensure that any found ballots are rushed to be delivered before polls close. A judge later allowed additional time for the agency to comply with the order in certain key swing states.

Trump and the Republicans have also waged legal battles seeking to invalidate late-arriving votes. One case in Pennsylvania surrounding ballots that are postmarked by Election Day but arrive later could still make its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where new Justice Amy Coney Barrett could cast a deciding vote. But election law experts note that the election would have to come down to that state — and the number of ballots would have to be great enough to swing the entire state’s electoral votes — in order to actually impact the presidential race.

“Even Kavanaugh gets this”: Elections experts debate whether GOP can hijack the electoral process

With multiple competitive races on the electoral map, and an unprecedented number of mail-in ballots to count, it is likely that the country will not know the outcome of the presidential election by Wednesday morning. And given the raft of threatening public statements from President Donald Trump, it is likely that he will reject any unfavorable results outright — a sentiment shared by his base.

But the “safe harbor” deadline, or the deadline that matters the most, is still more than one month away. Dec. 8 marks the latest date individual states can submit their presidential electors to Congress, and the Trump campaign has signaled that it has been eyeing that deadline as pressure point to convince state legislatures to override their voters.

However, the electoral issue this year will likely not be the same as 2016, when Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s decisive popular vote victory raised questions about whether so-called “faithless electors” would defect from their state’s mandate. (Seven did — five abandoning Clinton, and two turning on Trump.)

“There is zero concern about faithless electors,” Barry Burden, the director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin, told Salon. “The parties have learned from four years ago, and they’ve been careful to pick loyal electors.”

The electoral concern du jour is the faithless elector problem at the scale of an entire state, as The Atlantic outlined last month.

Trump campaign officials and legal advisers told The Atlantic on the record that they had been working with state officials to appoint their own electors as a way to secure victory in a tight election, a move which would precipitate a certain constitutional crisis.

While such a move is certainly possible, the likelihood that it happens and the likelihood of its success are both up for debate. To get an idea of how bizarrely the election may play out on the back end, Salon spoke with a number of experts. While the system may be stretched and strained in unthinkably weird new ways, it is more likely than not that our institutions hold, they predict.

The president is not directly elected by the people but rather by slates of electors who act on behalf of voters in their states. (Clinton is on New York’s Democratic roster this year.) Though most states have historically chosen these electors by popular vote, the Constitution does not mandate they do so. The document only says a state shall appoint its electors “in such manner as the legislature thereof may direct.”

While every state has complied with the will of its voters in every election since the late 1800s, the Supreme Court held in Bush v. Gore that the states “can take back the power to appoint electors” in 2000.

Sources in the Republican Party, at both state and national levels, claim that the Trump campaign has worked out plans to do just that — overriding votes for Democratic nominee Joe Biden in key battleground states where Republicans control the legislatures.

The gambit would set up a showdown in Congress that would play out in one of three ways (after going through a series of gates): If Democrats take the Senate back and hold onto the House, then Biden wins; if Republicans hold the Senate and flip the House (a less likely scenario), then Trump wins; but if Congress remains divided after the election, the Constitution does not offer a solution.

As Constitutional scholar Norm Ornstein told The Atlantic, “Then we get thrown into a world where anything could happen.”

But Jon Sherman, the senior counsel for the Fair Elections Center, told Salon that he believed such a move would not get that far in the first place. The courts would block it, he said, because it undermines one of the fundamental rights granted in the Constitution: due process.

“There are varying levels of crazy here. My view is that the time for this choose-your-own-electors strategy has long passed,” he said. “The states have all agreed to hold an election this year to appoint electors. People are voting according to the rules that they have been given. To negate that retroactively would obliterate their due process rights.”

A Bush-appointed federal judge in Texas sided with that argument on Monday, when he threw out a GOP lawsuit to invalidate nearly 127,000 ballots cast at what Republicans claimed was an unlawful drive-through polling setup in Harris County.

“Please just don’t assert that voters did anything wrong,” an attorney for the defense argued. “Their only fault was relying on the instruction of county election officials, even if was an error . . . invalidating the ballot would be profoundly inequitable, and it would almost certainly violate due process.”

While Wisconsin law does not provide the legal framework for an electoral grab, an absolutist reading of the Constitution may give Republicans grounds to argue otherwise, Burden, of the University of Wisconsin, said.

“It seems crazy, but it’s happened at times,” he said. “Hawaii was on the cusp of sending two slates in 1960 until Nixon conceded, and it wasn’t an issue. But partisan warfare today is so much more intense.”

Burden pointed to three key swing states to illustrate his point.

“There is a trio of midwestern states — Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania — where you have a split government: a Democratic governor and Republican legislature,” he said. “It’s conceivable that in one of these states, the legislature would go its own way, and they could send two separate slates of electors.”

“Rumors are going around this might happen in Wisconsin, but I don’t see a role for the legislature in our state law,” Burden said, pointing out that the Democratic governor does play a small part in certifying the electors. “Of course, the [U.S.] Constitution’s line is that the legislature has the power to appoint electors, and there’s a radical reading of ‘legislature’ that means only ‘legislature’ — that’s it. But jurists disagree about what that means.”

“Even Kavanaugh gets this,” Sherman argues, pointing again to the fundamental right to due process, which he believes the Supreme Court would uphold. “I think he understands that no one can take the election from the voters with this type of aggressive and extreme post hoc legislation.”

However, Sherman pointed to a “less crazy” twist that CNN analyst Brian Beutler put onto the elector strategy.

“This idea would be that they want to retroactively invalidate a portion of ballots, game it so that valid and invalid ballots appear to have been commingled, say the election has failed and we get to appoint electors,” Sherman said. “This is less crazy than the other theory, because it at least acknowledges there is a governing standard, and you would need a pretext to change the process.”

Sherman points to Pennsylvania’s decision to segregate ballots received after 8 p.m. on Election Day as a model way to prevent strategic commingling.

“It forecloses the argument,” he said. “I hope North Carolina takes the hint and does the same.”

The creation of such a pretext calls to mind the chaos of the Roger Stone-inspired “Brooks Brothers riot” during the 2000 recount in Miami, except perhaps multiplied across a number of precincts in a number of states.

“The issues this year will be different than in Florida. It won’t be about voter rolls or machines, except maybe Georgia,” Burden said. “The issues will be about mail ballots, like delivery problems with Postal Service. If they fail to deliver, what becomes of those ballots? These problems could emerge not just in one swing state but a few of them on election night or during counts or recounts afterwards. But it sets off litigation, and then we begin to bump into the safe harbor deadline.”

He pointed out that Wisconsin’s 2016 recount, demanded and funded by then-Green Party candidate Jill Stein, took about two weeks.

“It can be a lengthy process that could run up against deadlines and how much the party observers challenge, going ballot-by-ballot,” he said, which could put additional pressure on otherwise reluctant Republican state legislators to take the reins.

“Florida got right up to that deadline in 2000, and one legislative chamber moved ahead,” Burden said. “One could imagine a similar scenario.”

But Ted Allen, who heads election systems research at Ohio State University, suggested the system had too much diversity and integrity to be easily bent — even by the most powerful officials.

“In the U.S., elections are run at the county and state levels, providing significant shielding from federal meddling,” Allen said. “The election officials have party affiliations, but they are generally balanced within the system and generous and thoughtful people. These officials and state leaders have been hardened by continual press scrutiny and lawsuits, which may help them to resist pressures from the president and others.”

“When it comes to the election itself, everyone’s opinion, including the president, is irrelevant,” Sherman said. “The media and sometimes academics do a disservice by indulging these fantasies. The election system can’t sue you for defamation, but if it could it would win.”

Electoral College researchers Michael Geruso and Dean Spears at the University of Texas also take a longer view, pointing out that the absurdities of the electoral system incentivize chaos.

“A close election in a tipping point state, like Pennsylvania today or Florida in 2000, provides the opportunity for elections officials or courts to tip the election, whether that is through voter suppression and other bad-faith actions, or merely because of judgement calls, limited capacity or mistakes,” Geruso told Salon in an email.

“If you understand that you need a close race in a tipping-point state to generate this type of formula for crisis, then the simple question is: Was 2000 a fluke? Is 2020 a fluke? Or is all of this something we should expect frequently given the statistical fundamentals of the Electoral College System?” he asked.

Odds are greater than 1-in-10 that the Electoral College outcome in any given year could hang on as few as 20,000 ballots in a single state, Geruso and Spears’ study shows.

“And it’s easy to imagine administrative decisions disqualifying a few thousand ballots,” Geruso added. “In 2016, 10,000 mail ballots or more were trashed in each of Arizona, Ohio and Florida, for example.”

“The risk of a disputed election is a phenomenon that the Electoral College creates,” Geruso concluded. “It wouldn’t happen under a national popular vote.”

Trump trashes Fox News’ election coverage while on “Fox & Friends”: “Fox has changed a lot”

President Donald Trump on Tuesday attacked Fox News for its election coverage during an early-morning interview on Fox & Friends.

While talking with the president, host Brian Kilmeade asked him to talk about former President Barack Obama accusing him of spreading the novel coronavirus around the country with his campaign rallies.

Trump responded by slamming Fox for airing Obama’s speeches.

“Fox puts him on more than anybody else, which is sort of shocking to me,” the president complained. “Because Fox has changed a lot. Somebody said to me, ‘What’s the biggest difference between this and four years ago?’ And I say ‘Fox, it’s much different.'”

Kilmeade then rushed in to defend his network’s honor.

“Unlike other networks, we’re trying to show both sides,” Kilmeade claimed. “So hey, here’s President Trump live, here’s Joe Biden live.”

“We report, they decide,” chimed in co-host Steve Doocy.

“I don’t think it’s an endorsement of anybody,” Kilmeade added.

“Well, in the old days they wouldn’t have put Sleepy Joe Biden on every time he opens his mouth,” the president complained. “It’s a much different operation, I’m just telling you.”

You can watch the video below via Twitter:

LOL — Fox & Friends hosts are forced to defend Fox News as Trump bashes the network for not being sycophantic enough pic.twitter.com/42of6aNt4j

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 3, 2020

An election that lays bare America’s soul — and the rot goes well beyond Trump

As we stand on the precipice of election night, with the shadows of yet another deadly wave of COVID looming over us, our sense of collective dread continues to build.

How did it come to be that our president is himself sowing the seeds of fear and division, turning red states against blue states as the virus’ death toll mounts across them all?

Should we be surprised? He told us, before we gave him the nuclear codes, that he was so adored that he could get away with shooting someone on Fifth Avenue. Perhaps we didn’t think big enough about just how big a body count he would rack up in order to cling to power.

He is protected around the clock by patriotic civil servants who are duty bound to offer their lives for his, even as he willfully puts their lives at risk with his traveling snake-oil sideshow disguised as a presidential campaign.

The Chicago Tribune reports that a “group of Stanford University economists, who created a statistical model, estimate that there have been at least 30,000 coronavirus infections and 700 deaths as a result of 18 campaign rallies President Donald Trump held from June to September.”

Elections have consequences, but perhaps none so tragic as 2016, which gave rise to a megalomaniacal authoritarian who can ignore the loss of 1,000 Americans a day in a pandemic that his vanity forces him to deny. So we hold the thought of our cast ballots like candles in the wind, anxious about just how much we should fear our neighbors and fellow Americans. Just how durable is this democracy to which so many of us paid scant attention for so long?

‘There is a great temptation to blame our deteriorated situation entirely on this one man. This strain of toxic self-regard, when held by leaders, has always been a scourge on humanity that can result in a Jonestown scenario, where one man’s whim results in a mass suicide, or in poverty and disease in a failed state.

In ancient Roman times, it was seen as something to be strenuously resisted and correctly perceived as a dangerous character flaw, particularly if it afflicted military generals into whose hands the fates of so many had been entrusted.

As a seventh-grader struggling through Latin class, I recall textbook pictures of slaves accompanying victorious Roman generals in their chariots and whispering, “Remember, thou are but a mortal,” to the conquering hero amidst the tumultuous adoration of a roaring crowd.

Embedded in that simple phrase was the implication of serving something greater than oneself — a psycho-social planetary alignment in which the celebrated general was not the sun.

Unfortunately for the Roman Empire, there were significant lapses in such humility with ruinous results, when a flesh-and-blood monarch demanded to be worshipped as a living god on earth. As the historian Suetonius tells us, the Emperor Caligula was fond of reminding his subjects often, “Remember that I have the right to do anything to anybody.”

But a bullying autocrat can’t rise to power or hold on to it without a cadre of supplicants and opportunists helping to make it so. Through their proximity to the tyrant, these mercenaries hope to improve their own circumstances by any means required, no matter how high the body count or how widespread the collateral damage.

In our own lifetimes, we have seen this with the 2013 Bridgegate scandal in my home state of New Jersey, where a still unknown number of government officials and law enforcement employees conspired to target a town of tens of thousands with lane closures that provoked crippling traffic jams on the George Washington Bridge during rush-hour. Why? Because that town, Fort Lee, had elected a Democratic mayor who refused to kiss Gov. Chris Christie’s ring.

When the former U.S. attorney for New Jersey, Paul Fishman, decided to prosecute the Bridgegate scandal, his “pursuit” of the case was a fig leaf of sorts that obscured the true extent of the rot at the heart of New Jersey’s political culture and, in the long run, actually reinforced it.

The manipulation of traffic on the GWB on the anniversary of 9/11 was the masterpiece of David Wildstein, who has gone on to prosper as editor-in-chief of the New Jersey Globe, which has been embraced by incumbents of both political parties.

Wildstein pled guilty as part as a deal with the Department of Justice to take a turn as the star witness in what ultimately turned out to be a very expensive and pointless show trial, thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court tossing out the two convictions it did yield.

Incidentally, in June of this year, Wildstein’s conviction on two felony counts was overturned.

As it turns out, the only thing worse than no justice is feigned justice. Over time, those who evade accountability can become stronger, as they burnish their personal brands as can-do players who can take the heat and then can go on to dominate our kitchen.

Fishman’s multi-million-dollar failed prosecution of public corruption gave the appearance of holding the Christie junta accountable. Yet with the way it was resolved, that architecture was left largely intact, including sealing from public view the identities of the “unindicted co-conspirators” — who were on the taxpayer-funded payroll.

And the names we do know, who are closely associated with that Roger Stone-style trans-Hudson dirty trick — Christie and Bill Stepien, now President Trump’s campaign manager — are central figures in Trump’s quest for re-election. Of course it’s the Trump campaign that has sought to undermine Americans’ faith in the democratic process itself, by refusing to commit to a peaceful transfer of power if former Vice President Joe Biden wins the election.

Some might hope that just by turning Trump out of office we can restore our national character. That is ahistorical and ignores our soft spot for the bullies and dirty tricksters who have been in our political soil since Watergate, helping to bring this presidency to fruition.

We can trace the rise of the Living Menace in the Oval Office to America’s failure decades ago to hold Richard Nixon accountable for his crimes, thanks to President Gerald Ford’s pardon, which must be re-evaluated in light of what historians have learned since then.

In addition to his Watergate cover-up, his use of the IRS to punish political opponents and his secret bombing campaign in Cambodia, Nixon had previously intervened as a presidential candidate to sabotage Lyndon Johnson’s Paris peace talks with North Vietnam, so he could win the 1968 election.

And while several high-profile Watergate convictions did stick — unlike in Bridgegate — confessed Watergate-era dirty trickster Roger Stone used his proximity to that 1970s betrayal of America to build his own brand and portfolio.

“Using a pseudonym, he made political contributions from the Young Socialist Alliance to the Republican challenging Mr. Nixon for the party’s nomination in 1972, Pete McCloskey,” reported the New York Times. “He then presented the campaign donation to a newspaper as proof that Mr. Nixon’s opponent was a puppet of the left. He also hired an operative to try to infiltrate the campaign of George McGovern, the Democratic nominee.”

After Nixon left office, Stone served as a kind of media concierge for the disgraced former president, who was still important enough to hold court from his comfortable exile in Saddle River, New Jersey, and wield influence.

Stone’s “can and will do anything to win” approach helped him to get campaign work on behalf of former New Jersey Gov. Tom Kean and Republican Senate candidate Jeff Bell, who knocked off Sen. Clifford Case in a 1978 primary.

“It was Stone’s years in New Jersey where he tempered his craft and libertarian ideology that defined his career,” wrote Ian Shearn for NJ Spotlight this summer, after Stone’s sentence on federal criminal charges was commuted by President Trump. “It is no coincidence that his time in New Jersey — throughout the 1980s — overlapped the rise and fall of Donald Trump’s casino empire in Atlantic City. It was then that Stone formed a lasting though volatile codependent relationship with The Donald. This was the period when the rising GOP hit man transformed into The Prince of Darkness.”

Through Stone’s role in Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign, he was given access to Michael Deaver’s rolodex, which included Roy Cohn’s contact information. Cohn, the notoriously ruthless right-wing lawyer who was once chief counsel to Sen. Joseph McCarthy, had gone into private practice with a dark-side power client list that included Fred and Donald Trump, as well as several reputed mobsters.

“When Stone arrived at Cohn’s Manhattan apartment, the lawyer was sitting with one of his clients, Anthony ‘Fat Tony’ Salerno of the Genovese mob family,” the Washington Post reported, based on an interview with Stone. “Cohn suggested Stone go meet a friend: Donald Trump. The dashing young real estate developer, still in his early 30s and building his empire both in business and as a tabloid celebrity, was also busy conjuring the legend that he was a self-made success story, rather than the son of a wealthy man who set him up in business. In Stone, he encountered a bon vivant with a similar gift for grand illusion.”

Stone was also a partner in Black, Manafort & Stone, an infamous Washington lobbying firm that was the public face for dictatorships around the world who received U.S. taxpayer aid, despite well documented systemic human rights abuses.

In 1992, the nonprofit Center for Public Integrity published “The Torturers’ Lobby,” which chronicled the role of Black, Manafort & Stone in block-and-tackling for the governments of Kenya and Nigeria, with their “widely criticized human rights records.” The previous year, “Kenya [had] received $38 million in U.S. foreign aid, and spent over $1.4 million on Washington lobbyists to get it. Nigeria received $8.3 million and expended in excess of $2.5 million. Whom did both countries call upon to do their bidding before the U.S. government? The lobbying firm of Black. Manafort, Stone and Kelly Public Affairs Company, which received $660,000 from Kenya in 1992-1993 and $1 million from Nigeria in 1991.”

The white paper continued, “Former Reagan political operative, Paul Manafort, oversees foreign accounts; his partner, Charles R. Black, was a senior political strategist in the 1992 Bush-Quayle campaign. Their firm’s fees to represent Nigeria, Kenya, the Philippines and Angola’s UNITA rebel group in 1991, totaled more than $3 million. All four receive U.S. aid and abuse human rights.”

The white paper was prefaced with a quote from Elie Wiesel.

“The greatest evil is indifference,” wrote Wiesel. “To know and not to act is a way of consent to these injustices. The planet has become a very small place. What happens in other countries affects us.”

Now, thanks to the intercession of President Trump, Stone is a free man and back in the trenches, bayoneting for the president.

In a recent interview with Alex Jones’ Infowars, Stone suggested that Trump should actually declare “martial law” to seize power if he loses what, as the Huffington Post reported, “Stone characterized as an already corrupt election. The results will only be legitimate if the ‘real winner’ — Trump — takes office, regardless of what the votes say, Stone declared. A loss would apparently be justification for Trump to use force to take over the nation.”

While the outcome of our election may be blurred by the fog of a civil war that Trump, Stone and their allies are all too eager to foment, let’s never forget the names of the Republicans, in New Jersey and elsewhere, who had a choice of where to stand and stood with them.

And please, this time no pardons.

Former Clintonite David Rothkopf on how Biden and the Democrats can redeem themselves

Election Day 2020 is more than a choice between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. It is a character test for a nation as to what its present and future will be. Will the American people stumble into political and societal effluence as they did in 2016 by “electing” a fascist authoritarian, or will they instead choose to take the first steps toward rehabilitating their democracy?

Pondering the ominous weight of this election, Richard Ford, the Pulitzer-winning author, writes at The Globe and Mail:

In America, as you may know, we will soon be voting to determine who will be our next president. And we will also be voting to find out what kind of country America is now and will be, and what kind of people we are. If this sounds like an uneasy, precarious, possibly momentous and actually quite pathetic state of affairs, that’s because it is. That a great nation should have so much riding on a single, well-scheduled, legally prescribed civic exercise is alarming. …

My country of 76 years seems to exist today at a strange and unnatural distance from me, and not at all clearly. This, as we approach the most consequential election in the lifetime of any American living. At this perplexing and virtual distance, America feels more like just any other country — any other that could fail. Even in the worst of Vietnam, or in the aftermath of 9/11, I didn’t feel this way.

Ultimately, all elections matter in their own way. But some elections matter so much more than others.

Today, the American people will be answering the following questions about their country and themselves.

What type of people are they? People who believe in and embrace democracy and freedom with all of their attendant responsibilities and challenges? Or weak followers of authoritarianism and autocracy who will surrender to a political cult?

Are they ready to embrace civic maturity and hard truths about the country and the work necessary to improve it? Or will they succumb to the toddler-like simplemindedness, anti-rationality, anti-intellectualism, conspiracy theory and scapegoat solutions offered by Trumpism and the right wing?

Will the American people hold high the United States Constitution and its commandment that church and state should be separate, or instead passively slouch further toward a Christian theocracy?

Will the United States be a country where a white tyrannical minority creates a new American apartheid state to rule over the majority in an increasingly diverse and multiracial society?

Will the United States return to its status as the leader of the free world and role model for democracy, or embrace its new status as a global embarrassment, a decadent democracy that surrendered to homegrown fascism?

Will the United States stop the coronavirus or instead choose to embrace a right-wing gangster capitalist death cult where everyone but the rich is to be sacrificed to some vicious, abstract notion of “the economy”?

Will women — and working-class and poor women in particular — be denied basic human rights of reproductive freedom and autonomy?

Will migrant and refugee children be released from Trump’s concentration camps and detention centers and then reunited with their families?

Will the United States confront its critical wealth and income inequality, in which the 50 richest Americans have more wealth than the bottom 50 percent of the country’s population?

Is health care a human right in America?

Does the United States respect science and reason, or does it elevate lies, nonsense, mass delusion and religious fundamentalism as valued truths and reality?

Will the United States continue its policies of ecocide and omnicide, or begin to do its part to save the planet and humankind from global climate disaster?

These are just a few of the many questions to be asked and answered on Election Day — and the many days ahead.

And what about the Republican Party and the other architects and beneficiaries of the disastrous Age of Trump? Can the Republican Party somehow be rehabilitated and brought back to normal politics and some sense of commitment to the common good and democracy?

David Rothkopf, a former senior official in Bill Clinton’s administration and a longtime executive at various major publishing companies and consulting firms, believes that the answer is an emphatic “no.” Moreover, Rothkopf argues that today’s Democrats need to evolve, becoming “scorched-earth Democrats” who will burn today’s Republican Party and its policies to the ground, offering no quarter or compromise.

Rothkopf is currently CEO of his own firm, The Rothkopf Group. He is the author of numerous articles and several books, the latest being “Traitor: A History of American Betrayal from Benedict Arnold to Donald Trump.”

He is a frequent contributor to such media outlets as the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Financial Times, Time magazine and CNN. He also hosts the twice-weekly podcast Deep State Radio.

In this conversation Rothkopf reflects on the Democratic Party’s record of institutional weakness, and how that helped to enable the Republican Party’s decades-long embrace of right-wing extremism and authoritarianism. But he expresses hope about the future: He believes that the Democratic Party can embrace its younger and more progressive voices, and create transformative policies that will begin to reverse the damage. If Joe Biden wins this election, Rothkopf says, our new president must be forced to become the best version of himself.

How are you feeling, given all that is happening with the Age of Trump and the election?

It’s a complicated moment. It is hard for anybody who’s got their eyes open to not see all the people who are suffering from a crisis unlike any crisis any of us have ever seen in the United States. This is the public health crisis, the economic crisis, and the overall social crisis created by all that has gone wrong.

Whether we are looking at the public health crisis or the economic crisis or society-wide crisis caused by this, it breaks your heart. But this crisis also makes me angry because it was not necessary for 230,000 or so people to be dead at this point from the coronavirus pandemic. It was certainly not necessary that this government would not provide for the people of this country in the ways that other countries have. The pandemic and the economic crisis have revealed deep flaws, again, in American society about social inequality. People of color and the poorest are suffering the most. Our system is not just systemically racist but more generally inhumane and conscienceless.

It is unacceptable to have a society where tens of millions of people in the richest society in the world are afraid to go to a doctor because they do not have health care, and because going to the doctor and discovering that they have an illness could bankrupt them. We should not a system in the United States where 130 million people — a third of the people in the richest, most powerful country in the world — are living in poverty or are low-income. There are also millions of people who are hungry in America because of this ongoing crisis with the pandemic and economy. And of course all these problems are made worse by incompetence, corruption, insensitivity to human needs, racism and rejection of science and of participation in the global community by the Trump administration and other elites who are doing its bidding.

There is still this narrative about Trump and his movement and presidency being some type of “crisis of imagination,” a surprise and still unimaginable. Folks in the mainstream news media and among the country’s leadership who say such things are in such denial and continue to be so. They are stuck on old ideas about American politics and life.

Sometimes people see what they want to see. They imagine themselves to be who they wish they were, and they imagine their country to be what they wish it would be. And if you look at our country right now, it seems that too many people have somehow just discovered racism. In reality, the United States was established on racist principles. People who believe that the problem is just Donald Trump, and once Trump is gone then everything will be better, are just plain wrong. I include Joe Biden among that group as well.

Income and wealth Inequality has been growing in the United States since the late 1970s. However, the period of the 40 years that began with Ronald Reagan as president have seen the minimum wage go down and the average income of the average American remain unchanged. The rich gain enormously in terms of their share of the wealth in our society, but they also gain enormously in terms of their control of the politics of our society because of Citizens United, dark money, gerrymandering and other levers on the country’s democracy.

We have been in a process not of creating the greatest democracy in the world, but rather creating a platform for big corporations to get wealthy, set the rules, reap the benefits, exploit the planet and do it with ever-greater efficiency and with absolute lack of concern for the consequences for average people. This includes destroying the environment, undermining the rights of workers, not providing adequate health and many other examples.

I had a senior role in the Clinton administration, and I regret what happened. Our innovation as “third way” Democrats was essentially to buy into Reagan-lite. We went in and said, “Why don’t we do welfare reform? Why don’t we give more money to the police?” Those were both racist dog-whistle issues.

We ended up being the administration that got rid of the Glass-Steagall Act. We were the administration that deregulated telecommunications.

And then of course, George W. Bush continued along with that. Barack Obama took more money from Wall Street than any presidential candidate in history. But we have to recognize that when you meet the enemies of democracy halfway, democracy loses. And inequality is the ultimate enemy of democracy. And of course, of all the presidents, Donald Trump is the worst one.

With Joe Biden and other Democrats who share his policy background and history, how does the Democratic Party confront its own responsibility for gangster capitalism and the social inequality it causes? What does such a reckoning look like?

I wish I thought it was coming. We have got to all go out and vote for Joe Biden, and make sure that people show up to vote, because the threat posed by Donald Trump to our democracy is enormous.

Donald Trump is a traitor. I also believe that the threat posed by Mitch McConnell has been around longer and in some ways is more pernicious. For example, McConnell has transformed our judiciary, changed the way our Congress works, and essentially eliminated critical checks and balances. “McConnellism” has got to end as well.

Is Joe Biden going to be the revolutionary champion of major change? No. Is he better than Donald Trump by an immeasurable amount? Yes. Now we as a country have got to ask ourselves, how do we get to these deeper changes? As Americans we have to rule out the GOP. They’re out of it. The Republican Party has bet on racism. They bet on Russia. They bet on lying. They bet on crushing democracy. The Republicans do not offer credible political options.

We need to look within the Democratic Party. Then what must happen is that we must acknowledge that there is an older generation of leaders who are responsible for the compromises that made this crisis with Trump and the Republicans happen — and that includes Joe Biden. It includes Nancy Pelosi. It includes Chuck Schumer. Are they good people? Are they better than Republicans? Yes. But are they the people to lead necessary change? No.

And so what I think you have to start to do is change the leadership in the Congress. You have to take the voices of change in the Congress and give them positions of power where they could influence President Joe Biden, influence the agenda of a new Democratic administration, and ultimately receive the torch that Biden will pass to them. There are a lot of choices out there.

Ultimately, there are many people who are ready to lead and force Joe Biden to be Joe Biden 2.0, a Joe Biden of the 2020s and not the Joe Biden of the 20-teens or the 1990s or 1980s.

Why have the Democrats been so consistently outmaneuvered by the Republican Party in terms of power and policy? The Republican Party’s policies are unpopular among the majority of Americans. Yet Republicans are able to advance their agenda and run over the Democrats.

Republicans are just as subtle as a punch in the nose. In response, the Democrats are like, “Oh my God, Mitch McConnell has stolen a Supreme Court seat! That’s not fair play!” It is the equivalent of falling down on a fainting couch. The reality is that the Republicans play dirty. They play at the very edge of the rules. The Republicans and the right wing realize that power is something that can help one acquire more power and can be used to protect itself from its own abuse.

History wants results. Democrats have got to stand up and say, OK, we’ve got power. Now that we’ve got power, we’re done with the filibuster. Now that we’re done with the filibuster, we’re going to start pushing things through. If that means a couple more justices on the Supreme Court because otherwise we are going to lose our democracy, then add the justices. Likewise, with the power we should impeach justices on the Supreme Court who got their positions there by virtue of lying. We have also got to turn our attention to Trump judges and others across the country who should not have their jobs. Many of them are not qualified.

With power, the Democrats need to stop voter suppression. Campaign finance laws need to be reformed. Citizens United needs to be undone. Roe v. Wade should also be made permanent.

Is it hard to change the Constitution of the United States? Yes. But there are 27 amendments to the U.S. Constitution, so it is not impossible. We must become “scorched-earth Democrats” or we will never be able to defeat the scorched-earth Republicans.

Unless we see this as an existential threat and say, we are going to play hardball, we will never defeat scorched-earth Republicans. Do we have to break the law? No. Do we have to take the low road? No. But we have to stop the Republicans on whatever road they are taking. The Democrats have got to play to win and not be on defense.

If Donald Trump is defeated by the American people on Election Day, does he accept the verdict and leave office peacefully?

There are many things that can be done by the Republicans to interfere with the results of the election and the voting process itself to help Trump. Do I think the president of the United States will hunker down in the White House and refuse to leave? Not if the electoral totals show that Trump has got to go. The United States military and others will make Trump leave. However, can Donald Trump rig the outcome by interfering with votes being counted? Yes. That is what I am more worried about.

Public opinion polls and other data seems to suggest that Biden is ahead in the polls and will win. Are you comfortable with such predictions?

First of all, I don’t trust Trump. Trump has proven over and over again that the only way he knows how to win is to cheat. He cheated with the Russians before. He’ll cheat with the Russians again. He tried to cheat with the Ukrainians. I’m sure he reached out to cheat with the Chinese. Russian intelligence agents are still in his orbit, through Rudy Giuliani, for example. If the election somehow gets to the Supreme Court with Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh — both of whom are hacks — if they are presented with the opportunity to do the wrong thing, they will do it. Nothing can be taken for granted in terms of the outcome of the presidential election.

One of the reasons I am optimistic is because the Democrats and Joe Biden know that to be true. Democrats have said Trump and the Republicans are going to challenge the outcome if the vote is too close, which means we are in big trouble.

It is impressive that more than half as many people have voted before the 2020 election as voted in total in 2016. It sure is impressive that the majority of those people seem to be Democrats and that the infrastructure is there to give people information about how and where to vote and to handle the obstacles being thrown up by Trump and the Republicans.

These pictures of lines go on for miles. People standing in the rain, being willing to do that to vote, is so moving. That’s the Resistance. That’s people recognizing that our Department of Justice doesn’t work anymore and won’t hold the president accountable. Our Senate doesn’t work anymore and won’t hold the president accountable. That there is only one mechanism in our system to hold the president of the United States accountable, if they get up off of their couches, go down to their polling place, wait as long as it takes and make sure that their vote counts. And so far, it looks like that’s what is happening.

I am prepared to be disappointed. If Trump wins, that would be catastrophic for the country. But right now, looking at the polls, the long lines of voters willing to wait as long as it takes to make sure their vote counts, the outpouring of energy and commitment, it does give me hope.

There are some influential voices, as in Jill Lepore’s recent essay in the Washington Post, who reject the idea that if Trump is defeated, a truth and reconciliation commission and similar investigations should begin. The claim is that historians and journalists should be the ones who expose the truth and that punishing the crimes committed by Trump and his agents would create a dangerous precedent. What are they afraid of? Why not hold the Trump regime accountable for its apparent crimes?

My response to such people is, “Nonsense”. To make such claims and stake out that position is not only an egregious error, but it is repeating a mistake that has been repeatedly made in this country.

If Nixon had been held accountable, we would not have Donald Trump. If the Iran-Contra wrongdoers had been held accountable, we would not see the same people around Donald Trump. If Dick Cheney and the people around George W. Bush who advocated torture and the violation of human rights at Guantánamo and around the world had been held accountable, we would not see so many of the abuses with Trump.

In America no one is supposed to be above the law. The only way to prove that is true is to hold the president and the powerful people around him to the same standards of the law as everyone else.

Now, as for a truth and reconciliation commission, I have no desire to reconcile with supremacists and others of that ilk. I have no desire to reconcile with people who would throw the country under the bus or embrace the Russians.

But without accountability, there will be another Donald Trump. There will be another Bill Barr. We, the American people, will live in a world in which, if the president wins and has a majority in the Senate, the message will be clear: They are above the law. You can break the law. You can ignore subpoenas. You can ignore statutes. You can ignore norms. You can steal. You can work with our enemies. You can screw the American people. You can violate human rights on the border. You can throw children in cages. And you can do all that with complete impunity. If there is no accountability for the president and his party, then there will ultimately be no democracy in the United States.

Should Donald Trump be prosecuted for crimes he’s committed while president or before being president? Yes. Should members of his cabinet? Should members of his staff? Should members of the Senate and Congress who took money, who violated the law, who violated ethics guidelines, who adhered, aided and abetted to foreign powers? Yes! It has to happen. If it does not happen, regardless of how big a majority the Democrats win the election by, we will see such criminal behavior again because there will be a precedent. At some point in the future a president will say, “Look what Trump did. He didn’t get held to account.” Look at how they quashed the investigation into the truth of Trump’s obstruction of justice, which was there for all to see and which Mueller detailed. Or Trump’s collusion with the Russians, or his cooperation with other foreign dictators. It will happen again.

Truth and reconciliation is not for revenge, it’s for our children and our grandchildren. It’s to say no one is above the law. It’s to prove you can’t bury it. It’s to guarantee that if you are in power, somebody, someday is going to hold you accountable. Without that, the United States is a failed state.

Let’s assume that Biden defeats Trump and a friend or relative calls you elated with joy. What do you tell him or her?

One of the things that created Donald Trump was apathy. Too many citizens stopped and started to believe that what happens in Washington does not matter. They bought into the right wing’s notion that government was evil and that the less government we had the better, and that Washington was just a problem that offered no solutions.

We must get engaged. You do not get rid of Trumpism by beating Donald Trump at the polls. We get rid of Trumpism by getting rid of inequality, by getting rid of racism, by embracing and celebrating demographic change in the country, by updating our institutions, by recognizing our flaws and fixing them, by throwing away idiotic notions like American exceptionalism, and recognizing that the rules of civics and a good society apply to us all.

And then if Trump somehow wins the election and someone calls you overwhelmed with despair, what do you tell them?

The answer, if we win or lose, is the same. We have got to keep working. As citizens our responsibility is to fix what is broken in society. If that means working with your political party within the system, great. If the system has been taken over by corrupt forces and it means going into the street and protesting, dissenting and applying pressure by any means available that are legal, then we as citizens must do that. If a leader or party poses a direct threat to American democracy, then we have to heed very carefully the words of the founders of this country about the necessity for doing whatever it takes to fight for our democracy.

Deutsche Bank wants to dump Trump if he loses, may “seize” assets if he fails to repay debts: report

Deutsche Bank is searching for a way to end its tumultuous relationship with President Donald Trump after the election following years of negative media coverage stemming from their relationship, a new report reveals.

Trump has long relied heavily on the German-based financial giant, and he currently owes the bank about $340 million. Bank officials concerned about the president’s ability to repay the loans have discussed foreclosing on his properties or even seizing his assets, according to Reuters.

Deutsche Bank was one of few financial firms willing to do business with Trump after a series of bankruptcies and defaults in the ’90s, lending the president more than $2 billion over about two decades. The bank continued to lend Trump hundreds of millions even after he sued it for “predatory lending practices” and fought for forgiveness for his unpaid debt, according to The New York Times. Trump has about $340 million in outstanding loans to the Trump Organization, which he has personally guaranteed, that come due in 2023 and 2024.

But Deutsche Bank executives have met to discuss ways to end their relationship with Trump, according to Reuters. The bank’s management committee overseeing reputational risks for the company in the Americas has floated an idea to sell off Trump’s debt on the secondary market, as it did in the past. However, the idea has failed to gain traction, because “it is not clear who would want to buy the loans and the attendant problems that come with it,” according to the report.

Executives tired of the negative publicity and legal scrutiny believe they will have more “freedom” to sever their relationship with Trump if he loses the election, which they hope will ease congressional scrutiny of the bank if Democrats win the Senate. Deutsche Bank has already faced numerous federal and local investigations into its dealings with Trump, which one senior executive described as “serious collateral damage” for its longtime relationship, according to Reuters.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., who sits on the Senate Banking Committee, has vowed to investigate the bank over its relationship with the Trump family. Such a probe would face fewer roadblocks if Democrats win back control of the upper chamber.

Executives are also concerned about Trump’s ability to repay his debts. The loans were given for the development of his Doral golf resort and hotels in Chicago and Washington. But those properties were already struggling from Trump’s drag on their business before the coronavirus pandemic dealt a serious blow to the hospitality industry.

If Trump is no longer in office, Deutsche Bank executives believe it will be easier to demand repayment, according to Reuters. The bank could also refinance the debt, foreclose on the properties if he does not pay or “seize the president’s assets if he is unable to repay,” two officials told Reuters.

The executives believe they will have less recourse if the president wins re-election.

“The bank wouldn’t want the negative publicity inherent with seizing assets from a sitting president and would likely extend the loans until he is out of office,” the outlet reported.

The Deutsche Bank loans are just a fraction of Trump’s overall debt. The New York Times, which obtained years of Trump’s personal and business tax returns, reported that his company is on the hook for $421 million in loans that were personally guaranteed. A Forbes analysis found that Trump’s company has more than $1 billion in debt.

Trump has argued that his debt is dwarfed by the size of his personal wealth, but he has been unable or unwilling to pay back his full debt to Deutsche Bank and other lenders in the past. He also defaulted on bonds the bank helped sell to investors to finance his failed Atlantic City casinos.

The president has also infamously refused to pay his debts to vendors and contractors throughout much of his career. That attitude was on full display when he had issues with his microphone on Monday at one of his final campaign rallies in Kenosha, Wis.

“Don’t pay him! Don’t pay the damn bill!” Trump shouted while ranting about the sound guy, adding: “And then I won’t pay the bill of the company that does this crazy microphone, and they’ll do a story, ‘Trump is a horrible human being. He doesn’t pay a bill.’ No, I don’t like to pay bills when people do a bad job.”

Harris County closes 9 of 10 drive-thru polling sites amid Republican attempts to invalidate votes

Harris County’s elections chief decided to close all but one drive-through polling site amid legal challenges from a group of Texas Republicans despite state and federal courts rejecting lawsuits seeking to toss out ballots cast at the locations.

County Clerk Chris Hollins said he would shutter nine out of 10 drive-through polling sites in the county, which includes Houston, due to concerns over appellate challenges after a federal judge rejected a Republican bid to invalidate votes cast at the locations. Harris County, the most populous county in Texas with a population of nearly 5 million, still has more than 800 regular polling locations open to the public.

Hollins approved 10 drive-through polling sites for early and Election Day voting to provide more options amid the coronavirus pandemic after the state restricted mail-in voting and ballot drop boxes. But a group of Republicans sued to try to throw out about 127,000 early votes cast at the drive-through locations and ban their use on Election Day, arguing that they were an illegal expansion of curbside voting, which the legislature limited to voters with illnesses or disabilities.

The Texas Supreme Court rejected the lawsuit, and U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen likewise shot down the group’s bid to invalidate votes which had already been cast.

Hanen found that the conservative activist and three Republican candidates who brought the lawsuit did not have standing to sue, but he left open the possibility that his decision could be reversed on appeal. If that happened, Hanen said, he would agree to ban the use of drive-through polling sites on Election Day but would not throw out ballots already cast. Hanen also ordered county officials to create a registry of votes cast at the drive-through locations in the event the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals would come to a different decision.

Hollins initially said the sites would stay open, but he later announced that the county would shutter every drive-through polling site except the one at the Toyota Center — the home of the NBA’s Houston Rockets — due to concerns that further litigation may result in votes being rejected.

A key issue in the lawsuit was whether tents set up for the polling sites would qualify under the state law which requires that “each polling place shall be located inside a building.”

“This evening, Judge Hanen . . . stated his view that the tents that house most of the drive-thru voting centers would not qualify as ‘buildings,’ which are required for Election Day polling places,” Hollins said on Twitter. “My job is to protect the right to vote for all Harris County voters, and that includes those who are going to vote on Election Day. I cannot in good faith encourage voters to cast their votes in tents if that puts their votes at risk. “

Hollins said the Toyota Center was the only site which would qualify as a “building,” and he reiterated that there were about 800 walk-in locations available on Election Day.

Shortly after Hollins’ statement, a 5th Circuit Court of Appeals panel denied the Republican bid to ban drive-through locations on Election Day.

The litigation is not technically over, however, after the Republican plaintiffs asked the full 5th Circuit Court to rehear the emergency appeal.

The closings did not seem to discourage voters from turning out. More than 20,000 people voted in the first hour after polls opened on Tuesday in the county. An estimated 200,000 to 400,000 voters are expected to cast ballots in the county on Election Day, according to the Houston Chronicle.

Voters may shatter Texas’ voter turnout record this year with more than 9.7 million votes already cast before Election Day. The traditionally red state is surprisingly close this year with President Donald Trump leading Democratic nominee Joe Biden by just one point in the FiveThirtyEight polling average.

Trump’s supporters haven’t budged, despite everything. WTAF?

The orange spray-tan was barely wiped off Donald Trump’s inauguration Bible before the mainstream media went on Trump Voter Remorse Watch. Working off a common but incorrect understanding of human psychology — that, given evidence and time, people come to regret their worst decisions — journalists kept interviewing Trump voters over and over, in “heartland” diners and farm fields and gargantuan exurban malls, in search of evidence that doubts were starting to creep in.

I found the whole thing exhausting fairly quickly. In June 2017, I published an article in which I concluded, after interviewing psychological experts, that “the answer to the question of when Trump voters will come around is somewhere between ‘a long, long time from now’ and more likely ‘never.'”

Here we are, three and a half years later, and things have gone even more poorly than we could have imagined. Trump was impeached for trying to extort a foreign leader into smearing a political opponent, the economy is in the toilet and getting worse, and 231,000 Americans have died in a pandemic that spiraled out of control, largely due to Trump’s malicious incompetence.

And yet: Trump’s approval ratings remain at a stubborn 44.6%, which is only 1.3 percentage points below the popular-vote share that was enough to snag an admittedly flukish electoral victory in 2016. His rating has slipped a few points below that level here and there, but it always bounces back. Right now, it’s as robust as ever, and the vast majority of the people who voted for him in 2016 are clearly doing it again, while telling themselves a story about how this is justified because — seriously, they’re telling themselves this — he’s doing a good job.

Former Vice President Joe Biden leads in all national polls and most battleground states, but many Democrats are still sweating bullets in fear. That immovable approval rating shows that Trump has an electoral path to do it again, defeating a more popular opponent by appealing to conservative white voters in rural and suburban areas whose votes are hugely overvalued compared to people in big cities and major coastal states, thanks to the anachronistic and anti-democratic design of the Electoral College. That stubborn approval rating has been the stuff of nightmares for four years, the monster lurking in the closet in the horror film, ready to spring out at any moment and tear your throat out, while you scream helplessly.

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That’s why, I suspect, the Trump Buyer’s Remorse Watch pieces in the mainstream media never really ended. Even in these last waning days of the campaign, journalists are still digging up Americans who claim to regret voting for Trump and say they’ll now voting for Biden.

These articles certainly generate traffic from liberals who, fearful of what is happening to our country, cling to even the smallest shred of evidence that things may be turning around and “normalcy” may be reasserted. But these articles are mostly wishful thinking. Not that such people don’t exist at all — they do! — but they’re outliers, so much so that they barely register in the polls.

The real story is that Trump voters don’t regret their votes. Odds are, in fact, that they are more determined than ever to back their man. Part of it is that Trump voters remain deeply committed to racist and sexist values — and deeply resentful of being called out for that.

But as I wrote in my original article, this also reflects the psychological concepts of “cognitive dissonance” and “rationalization.” As psychologist Carol Tavris told me in 2017, most people want to believe, “I am a smart person.” That’s contraindicated by a vote for Trump, however. Instead of admitting they were wrong in the first place, many Trump voters dig themselves ever deeper into rationalizations for why they were right, and why anyone who says otherwise has nefarious intent.

That defensiveness is only heightened because the people who were right all along are liberals. The ego blow of admitting that they were wrong and the despised latte-sipping liberal “elite” was right is too much for most Trump voters. So they’ll cling to anything — including completely outlandish QAnon conspiracy theories — to craft a narrative where they’re actually the smart ones and the liberals are not just wrong but evil and immoral.

A third concept — the sunk cost fallacy — is also useful here. That’s what happens when a person invests significant resources — often money, but it can also be time, energy and emotion — in a bad endeavor, but keeps investing more out of a reluctance to admit they made a mistake and “wasted” those resources. It’s why gamblers keep betting after losing a big chunk of money, trying to win it back. It’s why people stay in bad marriages, fearful that leaving means “losing” the time and energy they invested. It’s why people stay in cults. Cutting bait and moving on may be more rational, but the pain of admitting you sacrificed so much for nothing is hard. People often simply can’t or won’t do it — and usually end up losing even more.

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Trump voters dug their heels in so hard because voting for Trump was understood, from the beginning, as a more fraught choice than voting for a more standard Republican. They invested more of themselves — more of their ego, more of their reputation — in this choice, and therefore the sunk costs of admitting they were wrong are much higher.

It’s one thing to admit it was wrong to vote for, say, George W. Bush, who even many liberals mistakenly viewed as relatively harmless during the 2000 campaign. But from the moment he announced his run, Trump asked a lot of his supporters: Overlooking the numerous alleged sexual assaults, denying the blatant racism, ignoring the corruption, pretending not to see he’s an idiot.

Admitting at this late date that the whole Trump venture was a huge mistake feels like giving up on all that time and energy. So Trump voters double down like gambling addicts at the roulette table, pouring more emotional resources into the black hole of Trump, in hopes that eventually this will pay off.

So there’s really no limit to how bad this can get.

I realized this a couple of years ago, when I was hanging out with a Trump voter in my life. During most of our time together, I held my tongue about politics, knowing that anything I said would just make her defensive and likely to dig in harder. At a certain point, two alcoholic beverages loosened my inhibitions and I reminded her of Trump’s adoration for dictators like Vladimir Putin and his obvious desire to be more like them.

Sure enough, she defensively replied, “What’s so wrong with Putin, anyway?”

“For one thing, he has journalists murdered,” I said.

Angrily, she retorted, “Sometimes I don’t see the problem with that.”

I reminded her at this point that I’m a journalist. She muttered at me angrily but, notably, did not apologize or take back what she said.

It was at that point that I saw how it happens.

I mean, I’ve always known it academically — many of us are familiar with Hannah Arendt’s writing about authoritarian tendencies — but it’s another thing entirely to look someone you know in the eye and realize they would stand by and let it happen to you.

To realize that there’s no point where it gets too bad to be acceptable, where the human rights violations are so badly out of control, where democracy is taken away. We’ve seen kids in cages. We’ve seen close to a quarter-million Americans die. We’ve seen Trump tear-gas peaceful protesters and applaud right-wing political violence.

There is no point where they say that enough is enough. Not even if people in their lives, their friends and family, are the ones in danger.

By any rational standard, we keep telling ourselves, this election shouldn’t be close. We shouldn’t even have to worry that Trump, with his record of massive failure and obvious corruption, should be close enough that he could still steal this — or even, heaven forbid, win outright. But this is where we are, chewing our fingernails and praying that small shifts at the margins save us. Because 44.6% of our country would rather burn the whole thing to the ground than admit that liberals had a point.

Even if Joe Biden pulls this out, this country remains in real trouble.

What if Trump won’t go? Legal scholar Lawrence Douglas on the “world of hurt” that could follow

Lawrence Douglas saw it all coming.

Long before the pandemic, before mail-in voting became a crucial part of the 2020 election, before the Postal Service was deliberately slowed, before hundreds of election-related cases were filed with the courts, the Amherst College law professor recognized that Trump didn’t seem the type to share a limo ride down Pennsylvania Avenue with his successor and take part in a peaceful transfer of power. And so he asked a simple question: What guardrails exist if the election is close and Trump refuses to go?

The answer, laid out in his punchy and essential new book “Will He Go? Trump and the Looming Election Meltdown in 2020,” disturbed him. There weren’t many. Our constitution, Douglas discovered, does not secure the peaceful transfer of power but rather assumes it as a given. The system was protected by politicians and parties that had internalized the norms of a democratic process.

But when norms no longer constrain a president or his party? All bets are off. The laws are a muddle. The nightmare scenarios are real. And what Douglas imagined as an intellectual exercise has become a horror show: His worst-case possibilities could actually be in play.

We talked last month about those nightmares, how little we can do to fix it, and perhaps most importantly, what Douglas will be drinking this evening. You also might want to start early.

Our system is clearly ill-prepared for the challenges of this moment. Here’s a simple question: Why? How is this possible?

You’re right, the constitution and our system of federal law doesn’t secure the peaceful succession of power, they presuppose it. On one level you can say, “Why is that the case? Why don’t they do more to actually secure it?” And I’m not sure they necessarily could. Any political system — any kind of system, even any game, it always presupposes that the principal actors are behaving in good faith, and that they’ve internalized the norms.

No legal system can secure itself. A legal system always needs some kind of deeper normative fabric or structure to rely on in order for it to work. And if that normative fabric starts to fray, then the system really can’t protect itself. And I think that’s what we’ve really seen very, very disturbingly, is the way in which that normative fabric has frayed.

That fraying, of course, runs deeper than Trump — but sets the table for this moment.

Yes, completely. They’ve been distorting and deforming those norms for a long time. Then, suddenly, you have a Trump, who just kind of smashes through them.

One might expect that there would be a price to pay for smashing norms. But that hasn’t happened for Trump. What does that say about norms?

Norms are different from laws. If they’re broken, you don’t necessarily face legal sanctions, but you would expect to feel political sanctions. There would be some kind of political price to pay. This is one of the most shocking things about his presidency, the way in which he’s been able to smash through these norms with absolute impunity. The only way he could do that is because of the cover, protection and support that he gets from his other Republican lawmakers.

And with three cheers from conservative media. What role have Fox News and others played here?

The only way that Trump could continue to get the reliable support of these Republican lawmakers is to continue to have the reliable support of the Republican base. And he would not have been able to maintain the reliable support of the Republican base without right-wing media, and his megaphones in the right-wing media, like the likes of Sean Hannity. When people talk about the hyper-partisan politics of the moment, it makes it sound as if there’s a symmetry between the polarization, which is simply untrue. It’s very asymmetrical. The Republicans have, really, kind of a radical party. It’s not a conservative party. I think people need to appreciate that.

We have a similar nightmare scenario for November 3: That it takes days and weeks to count mail-in ballots, that Trump declares victory, everything heads into the courts, and Republicans tee up Bush v Gore-style cases in a handful of states. Then if things remain unsettled as December nears, there could be wholesale chaos with electors and state legislators, under the worst-case scenarios. Tell us what worries you most?

It’s exactly that. If you just look at the way balloting is going to break down on election day itself, potentially a lot more Trump supporters will be willing to vote in person than Biden supporters. It’s not unlikely that Trump could have a lead on November 3rd. The thing that I worry about is that Trump is going to try to leverage whatever lead he has on November 3 into a claim that he’s been re-elected. And that, as that lead erodes in the subsequent days, as the mail-in ballots start to get counted, that he will claim that, “Yeah, exactly. This is just everything that I’ve said coming true. That the Democrats have corrupted these mail-in ballots, it’s all fraud.”

Fox News will amplify it, naturally.

Yes, Fox repeats and amplifies it. You can reliably add Russian disinformation campaigns on social media. And then you could probably add in some genuine chaos when it comes to the counting of mail-in ballots. Chaos that results from human error, and chaos that results just from the litigation teams that are going to be descending on all these swing states, in particular. I mean, one of the statistics from the recent primary season in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, there were around 60,000 mail-in votes that were disqualified. And that’s almost the same margin by which he carries those three states in 2016.

Trump has been making these claims of voter fraud since the beginning of his presidency. He claimed, baselessly, that he would have won the popular vote except for voter fraud. He had an entire Keystone Kops commission searching for voter fraud, the Kobach/Pence commission, which finds no proof and disbands ignominiously. And you started thinking about this book as far as back as that — you noticed something in his willingness to talk about fraud that raised worrisome questions.

Exactly. I’m sure lots of other people saw this as well. But the very first piece that I wrote for The Guardian was exactly on his claim that, but for the three to five million phantom voters, he would have won the popular vote as well. People think of this as Trump being kind of extravagantly narcissistic, that everything he does has to be bigger and better than everyone else’s. But imagine the politics behind that kind of claim — and imagine what kind of damage you could do if you were to trot out that argument to challenge the results.

And then you started looking into the constitutional safeguards and laws surrounding this, and you became greatly comforted and relieved that the founders had thought about this in advance and had it all covered.

(Laughs.) I thought of it as a thought experiment. What would happen if he were to challenge the result, and how well is our system designed to troubleshoot a scenario like that? And of course the answer that I learned was, “Oh, it’s not well-designed at all.”

Was that a holy shit moment? Were you surprised by how little protections you found?

I think that’s fair to say. “Well, wait a sec, there’s got to be more here than this.”

Perhaps the key piece of legislation is the Electoral Count Act of 1887. Tell us about that.

Congress passed this in the wake of the disastrous electoral dispute of 1876. It’s meant to guide Congress in dealing with any kind of future electoral dispute that lands in its lap.

I would say the best way to describe it — besides that it’s impenetrable in its language, it’s impossible to make sense of the words on the page — is that to the extent that it supplies any kind of advice, it says the best way for Congress to deal with an electoral dispute is to make sure it never lands in Congress’s lap in the first place. “States, you figure it out yourself, and we’ll just give you a date by which you need to figure things out.” That’s the most we can say for the ECA, because when it starts coming down to its more specific provisions, they’re kind of gibberish. They lend themselves to so many conflicting interpretations that they provide very little guidance of how to get out of this kind of problem.

And this is the set of laws that we’ll be counting on, that the courts and Congress will be looking to, to guide them through chaos?

Yes.

Nonsensical gibberish.

Right. Precisely. That’s our great statutory savior.

The laws governing states and state legislatures are also unclear. I read an interview with one of the pre-eminent election law experts recently, and someone asked him, well, say state legislatures attempt to name electors. Would that be subject to veto by the governor? And he threw his hands in the air, and said, “I’ve been studying this for decades. I don’t know. Nobody really knows.”

Yes.

So what do we know? Walk us through what could happen, say, if Pennsylvania’s count stretches past a week, courts get involved, the state legislature gets restless, Fox News goes 24/7 on voter fraud in Philadelphia. The legislature says, “We’re going to name electors.” And the Democratic secretary of state and governor say, “No, it’s pretty clear that the popular vote went to Biden.” You could have two different slates of electors looking to be seated.

That’s right. If the state count gets slowed down as a result of human error, litigation, a fresh breakout of COVID — there are all sorts of ways that could really kind of slow down the count in states — then it could start pushing against the so-called safe harbor date of December 8, which is when, basically, the Electoral Count Act tells states, “Please figure out who has carried your state by then.” If it looks like the margins are pretty narrow and the count is caught up in delays and confusion, yes, you can have conflicting electoral certificates submitted to Congress — and that’s a world of hurt.

Then Congress needs to sort it out?

The new Congress that is inaugurated on January 3. If that remains divided, then it’s just stalemate. There is hope. I mean, if that happened and the Senate was captured by Democrats, it would save us from that particular calamity. But the other thing we also bear in mind is, the same kind of confusion that could envelop the count of a presidential vote could also involve the count of all these down-ballot races.

What’s the best case scenario to hope for if we want to avoid this? A big win that takes all the wind out of the “fraud” sales?

I think so. The best thing is to hand Trump a really decisive defeat, and that decisive defeat, obviously can’t simply be in the popular vote. It has to be in the Electoral College and it has to be in the swing states as well. And the other thing is that the contours of that defeat need to be pretty clear, pretty early on. It’s unlikely that we would know that on November 3, but it would be very helpful if we got the sense that Trump was heading towards a major defeat pretty quickly thereafter.

Would a big repudiation at the polls help create a Republican party that’s less willing to ride the system off the rails?

I hope so. Maybe it would be a real gut check to the Republican party and show them that Trumpian politics has been very powerfully repudiated and they need to change. Hopefully it would encourage new Republican leaders to come to the fore who don’t share contempt for democracy.

If this election is simply a close call, and we all breathe a sigh of relief, is there a way to strengthen these procedures so it can’t happen next time?

I’m not sure about that. I don’t think we would be worried about this election nearly as much as we are, if it weren’t for the electoral college. I mean, the electoral college is tailor-made for someone who wants to engage in this kind of constitutional brinkmanship, because all you do is try to contest the vote in a handful of swing states. It’s very hard to kind of cast doubts on — even though Trump tried, of course — to cast doubt on losing by 5 million votes. It’s not going to be that hard to cast doubt if the election turns on 10,000 votes in Pennsylvania. And so if we just had a national public vote, I think that would be a very healthy step in the right direction. Not easy to achieve, but it would be nice.

What are you drinking on election night?

Pretty potent stuff.