RR Memory Bank (Nov. 2, 2020)
Four years ago: the day before Election Day.
I began my newsletter in March 2020, just as the Covid pandemic was beginning. I started out writing far more regularly than today, often putting something out three to five times a week. It kept me sane. From time to time, I’m planning to continue to post some previous chronicles from that election year (mistakes and all intact), as a reminder of what it felt like to me at the time.
Credit: Colin Lloyd
This week, in addition to any new entries in my newsletter, I’m planning to republish day by day everything I wrote during the election “week that was.”
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Nov. 2, 2020
Friends,
Why does Donald Trump want to stop the counting in Pennsylvania before it’s done? Because his campaign knows he’ll lose the election if all the votes are tallied.
Why are Kamala Harris and Barak Obama spending so much precious time in Florida and Georgia. Because a robust Black vote in both states, especially in the Miami and Atlanta metro areas, would almost certainly put Joe Biden over the top in the Electoral College and make it much more difficult for Trump to try to steal the election elsewhere.
Biden will win the popular vote by a wide margin, probably by at least 4 percentage points and perhaps more. But there is still a remote possibility Trump could stay in office, if the Supreme Court helps him out.
Ben Ginsburg is a Republican lawyer who, by his own account, “spent four decades in the Republican trenches, representing GOP presidential and congressional campaigns, working on Election Day operations, recounts, redistricting and other issues,” including on Bush v. Gore in 2000.
In a Washington Post op-ed, Ginsburg confesses to some of his own sins but draws the line at Trump's blatant lies.
President Trump has failed the test of leadership. His bid for reelection is foundering. And his only solution has been to launch an all-out, multimillion-dollar effort to disenfranchise voters — first by seeking to block state laws to ease voting during the pandemic, and now, in the final stages of the campaign, by challenging the ballots of individual voters unlikely to support him. . .
As he confronts losing, Trump has devoted his campaign and the Republican Party to this myth of voter fraud. Absent being able to articulate a cogent plan for a second term or find an attack against Joe Biden that will stick, disenfranchising enough voters has become key to his reelection strategy. . .
Trump has enlisted a compliant Republican Party in this shameful effort. The Trump campaign and Republican entities engaged in more than 40 voting and ballot court cases around the country this year. In exactly none — zero — are they trying to make it easier for citizens to vote. In many, they are seeking to erect barriers.
Start with Pennsylvania. If Biden wins there, he’s almost certain to win Michigan and Wisconsin as well, restoring the Blue Wall and assuring victory. But Pennsylvania lawmakers wouldn’t let the huge mail-in vote count start until Election Day so we probably won’t know the final result for days.
Biden is comfortably ahead in Pennsylvania, according to the final survey by the trustworthy Monmouth University poll.
Biden leads Trump by a 51% to 44% margin among likely Pennsylvania voters in a high turnout model+. The race stands at 50% Biden to 45% Trump in a low turnout scenario – which at this point would basically mean a large number of mail ballots have been rejected.
Both presidential campaigns are focusing on the state today (Biden will spend nearly all his time there today, except for a short foray into Ohio), so you know they see the state as crucial.
For an excellent election roundup, NYT reporters Katie Glueck and Annie Karni pay most attention to Pennsylvania while providing the crucial news of the weekend in one place.
Both campaigns see Pennsylvania as increasingly crucial to victory: Mr. Trump now appears more competitive here than in Michigan and Wisconsin, two other key northern states he hopes to win, and Mr. Biden’s clearest electoral path to the White House runs through the state. Pennsylvania has more Electoral College votes, 20, than any other traditional battleground except Florida, and Mr. Trump won the state by less than one percentage point in 2016. . .
Throughout his final sprint of rallies, Mr. Trump has moved to baselessly sow doubt about the integrity of the electoral process. At an appearance in Dubuque, Iowa, on Sunday, Mr. Trump claimed, inaccurately, that the result of the election was always determined on Election Day. “We should know the result of the election on Nov. 3,” he said. “The evening of Nov. 3. That’s the way it’s been and that’s the way it should be. What’s going on in this country?”
Mr. Biden countered with his own warning later Sunday, saying, “The president is not going to steal this election.”
Florida, as always, is close, and may slip into Trump’s column if Black voters fail to turn out the way they did for Barak Obama in 2008 and 2012 (or if the deliberate disruption of the Post Office by the Trump administration blocks tens of thousands of ballots in Miami Dade County from reaching election offices in time.)
In the New York Times, three top political reporters -- Jonathan Martin, Patricia Mazzei and Astead W. Herndon -- were all reporting from Florida yesterday. That tells you a lot.
Four years after President Trump carried Florida by just over one point, no other single battleground poses quite the impediment to his re-election as America’s largest traditional swing state. A loss in Florida, where several late polls show Joseph R. Biden Jr. with a modest lead, would be the most ominous sign for the president’s re-election chances on Tuesday night, given that the state was expected to report results faster than most key battlegrounds.
And no group of voters may be as vital to Mr. Biden’s success as African-Americans in Florida, a complicated political patchwork that is difficult for Democrats to capture under favorable circumstances and all but impossible for them to win if there is any ebb in enthusiasm among Black voters.
Personally, Trump is facing more than just losing the election; he and his family could be hounded by prosecutors and creditors for years. In The New Yorker, Jane Mayer provides a comprehensive look at why Trump can’t afford to lose.
No American President has ever been charged with a criminal offense. But, as Donald Trump fights to hold on to the White House, he and those around him surely know that if he loses—an outcome that nobody should count on—the presumption of immunity that attends the Presidency will vanish. Given that more than a dozen investigations and civil suits involving Trump are currently under way, he could be looking at an endgame even more perilous than the one confronted by Nixon. The Presidential historian Michael Beschloss said of Trump, “If he loses, you have a situation that’s not dissimilar to that of Nixon when he resigned. Nixon spoke of the cell door clanging shut.” Trump has famously survived one impeachment, two divorces, six bankruptcies, twenty-six accusations of sexual misconduct, and an estimated four thousand lawsuits. Few people have evaded consequences more cunningly. That run of good luck may well end, perhaps brutally, if he loses to Joe Biden. Even if Trump wins, grave legal and financial threats will loom over his second term.
It’s impossible to say much more about the future until we know the results of the election. But it’s a sign of just how crazy this year has been that I turned for reassurance to an op-ed in the Washington Post by Richard Hanania arguing that the United States is not about to descend into civil war.
Americans are more divided on social and political issues than in previous decades, and they hate each other more. Violence is boiling over: Armed right-wing militants traveled to sites of left-wing protests this summer, supposedly to enforce order, and deadly clashes occurred. If tensions continue to grow, these isolated incidents could become more common — and the United States might follow the path of other nations that have experienced full-blown armed conflict in recent decades.
Despite its appeal, this view betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of political violence. Historically, the academic literature on the causes of civil war was divided into two categories: Some scholars viewed such conflicts as a predictable outcome whenever there were deep grievances within national populations, while others stressed the importance of citizens having an opportunity to act on those resentments. Much of the discussion about violence in the United States today centers, implicitly, on the grievance model, holding that if we know how much different tribes of Americans hate each other, we can predict the likelihood of fighting in the streets.
But scholars now prefer the opportunity model, thanks to large-scale studies that examine political violence worldwide with cutting-edge statistical methods. Grievances and societal cleavages exist everywhere, waiting to be exploited. What distinguishes the countries that descend into civil war from those that do not is the lack of state capacity to put down rebellion — for reasons rooted in politics, economics or geography.
No civil war? Trusting the police and the military to put down a rebellion from the right? Let’s hope it doesn't come to that.
Stay safe,
Tom