https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
(I tried to slip the expression "flip flop" in there as a joke since that was a popular and widely over-used term at the time too, but I couldn't make it work).
For what it's worth I think it bit him the ass with the senate election in Georgia. If he hadn't told all his voters that it was rigged and there was no point in voting, the senate seats might have gone differently.
Overall I'm hoping that most people see through it and are tired of the stupidity and games that he plays. God help us if he wins the Republican primary in 2024.
And why would that be the better way to go about it?
Respecting an election you consider stolen that an institution favored to "respect the institution" means you're respecting a faulty institution - and encouraging similar behavior in the future.
In 2020's case, there was no dodginess, but nevertheless one candidate would rather discredit the institution rather than admit he lost, and -there is nothing to replace it with-. We've had 250 years of peaceful transfers of power because of this system; without a universally agreed to system to transfer power, we will have civil war.
Many of those changes have since been thrown out by State level supreme courts for being unconstitutional: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/01/28/pennsylva...
But judges don’t have time machines so that doesn’t change the outcome of anything.
Anyone that can say that there is zero shenanigans in Philadelphia’s electoral process with a straight face should consider becoming a professional poker player.
That's a ruling by a single state court that's going to be immediately appealed, and it's of a law passed by the republican-held legislative branch.
But, perhaps I should clarify then, rather than the abstract "dodginess", I'll instead say "uncertainty as to whether votes were cast legally, and counted correctly".
The question you aren't answering is: At what point do YOU draw the line. Stop trying to explain that the line wasn't crossed in 2020 election (or in any other election before that).
When, according to you, is the line crossed and the system has shown itself to be faulty.
My claim is that your answer will be either a deflection or implication that the system can never be faulty (anything but a clear answer).
-I- said that the system "worked" in the sense that power was transferred peacefully. I didn't say the system was flawless; just the opposite. But to tear down and discredit the system, as Trump has been endeavoring to do, without providing a replacement (other than "Trump is president no matter what the vote says", if that needs clarifying), means that power will no longer be able to transfer peacefully. That's the -one and only feature- that the system HAS to have; and it's that one that we'd be dispensing with.
I have no idea what any other lines being crossed has to do with anything.
Now that said, Gore is a lot better than Trump on this for sure.
To say "Gore is better than Trump on this" is to imply that they are both operating in the same universe, just on different levels. That is a false premise. There can be no comparison here.
Trump simply does not live in reality and was enabled by lawyers abusing the legal system and attacking our institutions and literally attacking the government. On absolutely bonkers baseless accusations.
Gore had solid arguments, actually argued in court (didn't get thrown out with prejudice).
This is pure hyperbole and exaggeration. Emphasis on “our whole system of government”.
After debasing yourself by jumping to Trump's defense with "Trump is obviously being sarcastic" when all the evidence from his previous statements and behavior and impeachment trial proves that he most certainly was not, you're certainly easy to trigger into instantly flip-flopping to the other extreme when it's the other side.
So why are you so eager to believe and defend Trump's "sarcastic" "pure hyperbole and exaggeration", but so disrespectful of anyone else's freedom of speech?
Both parties need to learn that if you lose it’s because you didn’t get enough votes and to reflect on why that is. Although I’m sure it’s a lot more fun to complain about how you were cheated.
She raised specific complaints regarding the process, but never suggested that they invalidated the results.
She proclaims the election was stolen.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/hillary-clinton-trum...
> The investigation by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III concluded that the Russian government interfered in the 2016 election “in sweeping and systematic fashion” with the goal of helping Trump and harming Clinton
> You can run the best campaign, you can even become the nominee, and you can have the election stolen from you
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2019...
This one also references the Mueller Report.
What you're saying is only true in a dream world where gerrymandering, closing polling places, and preventing access to ballot boxes (in-person or otherwise) isn't happening. Unfortunately this isn't the case. So, no, you are wrong.
It’s a serious problem for all citizens, but republicans are incentivized to keep doing it.
Large scale change is supposed to require multiple types of majority, not just a snap mob decision. That’s a feature, not a bug.
You make it sound like the number of states has always been the same, and cannot change. In reality, Congress gets to decide which states to add (and which potential states to deny), and it does so with deliberate consideration of how the electoral votes would be affected.
One could even argue that states gerrymander their own electoral vote by choosing to give all their electors to the plurality winner within their state, when they could choose to assign electors proportionally instead. They don't literally draw up per-elector districts to produce this skewed result, but the result is the same as a very skilled after-the-fact gerrymander, so I think it's a reasonable comparison.
Anyway, I wasn't just talking about gerrymandering at the Presidential level. The problem exists in the individual state legislatures too (although it's hard to calculate an average across different states), and in Congress. For example, an interesting analysis[0] from 2016 found that:
> In the past four congressional elections, then, Republicans, as the party with the majority in the House, received a “seats bonus,” wherein members of their party secured a larger share of the seats in the chamber than the share of votes won nationwide.
[0] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2016/11/22/gop-seats-b...
Millions of votes of a difference and complete capture of many states. My vote, living in Massachusetts, has no value in the presidential election because there’s a 100% chance it’ll be blue.
It is a flaw. Republican votes in California count for much less than Democratic votes in Wyoming. It's a national election, the counting should be done nationally. We did away with states voting for Senators, it's time to do the same for President.
Not all voters are equal, but if people dont like you, you won't win
Does that sentence not completely contradict itself?
How often in modern times has a Republican president won a majority of the popular vote? Seems like the will of the people is not consistently respected, and even if people like you then you may very well lose. Especially if the people that like you are urban voters.
Also, Hillary Clinton wasn't entirely wrong. That there was Russian interference in both the 2016 and 2020 elections on behalf of Trump's campaign is a fact - only the effect of that interference in the first case and the degree of Trump's foreknowledge are in dispute. Meanwhile, there was no actual conspiracy to steal the election from Trump... that was entirely bullshit. Like Hillary Clinton's weird brain disease. And Hillary Clinton's kill count. And Hillary Clinton's pedophile sex slave ring. And all of the Benghazi hearings. And whatever "treason" was supposed to be in the DNC email leaks. And Joe Biden being a pedophile. And Joe Biden having crippling dementia. And whatever Hunter Biden's briefcase was supposed to be about. And whatever the bullshit sandwich du jour for 2024 turns out to be.
He's a private citizen now, so his tweet equivalents and lawsuits don't matter
It's the false equivalence I'm objecting to. It seems clear to me that one side went off the deep end further than the other in this case.
— South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg (D), in remarks in Bow, N.H., Oct. 25, 2019
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/10/30/did-racia...
Also don't forget about Bush v. Gore. It's apparently a "historic" moment when Gore finally conceded the election to Bush.
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/al-gore-concedes...
Those are legitimate political arguments about voter suppression laws.
No one on the left claimed Kemp and Republicans stuffed ballot boxes or China hacked whatever.
The argument is based in facts. Many Republican controlled states, especially in the south, have historic issues with suppressing the votes of black and brown Americans.
You can argue over the extent to which this suppression still exists and how much it affects election outcomes.
But it is not even close to the same as arguing that the election was completely fraudulent because of real voter fraud, that the SOS or whatever bureaucrats should overstep their authority to throw it out.
Others talk about stopped counts, regions not reporting until seeing the results of other regions, and then ballot harvesting to make up numbers.
There are many such examples.
- Abrams defends lack of concession after 2018 gubernatorial loss (CNN) https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/03/politics/stacey-abrams-conces...
- Stacey Abrams is running for Georgia governor in 2022 (AJC.com) "Abrams lost to Kemp by less than 1.4 percentage points in 2018, the closest Georgia gubernatorial election in decades, and her refusal to concede defeat because of what she called an “erosion” of voting rights" https://www.ajc.com/politics/politics-blog/breaking-stacey-a...
Her whole platform for her new gubernatorial race is predicated on the "fact" that she was cheated out of her last election.
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/01/huge-georgia-ballot...
and videos coupled cell phone data show many other traffickers going in between democrat NGOs and drop boxes. Abrams run some of these NGOs.
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/01/new-video-voterga-r...
This is an example of us living under Marcusas repressive tolerance where people with the correct ideology can make claims with no evidence, while the other side is censored and persecuted even when coming with concrete evidence. It’s a Mao style cultural revolution. For Bernie, orange man and many other candidates we have proof of rampant cheating.
I was watching the latter seasons of X-Files and Fox Mulder made a comment on 2000 elections, something like “that sounds about as reliable as our elections.”
Plenty of folks, Howard Dean comes to mind, said they were straight up illegitimate.
Even now many on the left insist it was a tie or something.
This thing of “if you don’t win the elections, question the results” started then.
The press had no problem allowing baseless speculation and outright dishonesty in 2000. But when it was a Democratic cadidate, suddenly the truth matters.
To make matters worse, so many journalists are Democrats … it’s insane. Not just Democrats, but urban, college educated Democrats. Not exactly a cross section of the country.
It was very close. Close enough to reveal the messiness that extremely close elections can create.
But not enough to change the outcome.
Bush won. He probably won by double digits in Florida. But he still won.
As late as 2008, Howard Dean was falsely claiming SCOTUS had “snatched” the election from the Dems, which was demonstrably untrue at this point.
https://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2008/05/howard-d...
Read that article. Nowhere do you see the “this is a lie” disclaimers. Yes, Trump is spreading disinformation, as Howard Dean did (and probably still does.)
Here’s another good example: by the end of the Democratic Primary in 2020, Biden had more than enough votes for the nomination. He had won, plain and simple.
But he and Sanders kept campaigning, because they knew an active campaign would turn out Democratic votes in downstream elections.
The press went along with this facade. At no point did they “declare a winner” even though Biden had effectively won.
They allowed the charade of a campaign to go on, allowing Democrats a heavy advantage in elections like the Wisconsin State Supreme Court.
Again, the election was already over, and a winner should have been declared. But it wasn’t.
The press is very selective. And study after study after shows journalists are almost exclusively Democrats.
President Trump. What was Howard Dean? The distinction really matters.
> They allowed the charade of a campaign to go on, allowing Democrats a heavy advantage in elections like the Wisconsin State Supreme Court.
Primaries are not elections, though, and there is no reason a political party has to call them off just because someone believes the game has already been effectively won. I.e. it ain't over until it's over. It's bad enough that voters in later primaries basically believe their vote doesn't matter, but you're suggesting that we should formalize that? The parties are private organizations, so who do you propose gets to decide when to call the whole thing off?
I’m criticizing the press for not calling the winner.
In most elections, the press takes their duty of calling the winner very, very seriously. Almost like it’s a constitutional role.
And yet when it would have mattered, they decided not to.
It doesn’t help that the US system can have a winner who didn’t get the majority of the vote.
There are a number of aspects of the US voting system which are less than perfect, and that’s just one.
This is incorrect.
You require a majority of votes in the USA in the presidential election. What you seem to be missing is that people do not vote for the President but vote to direct how their state votes.
States vote for President. People vote for states.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/12/16/13920444/...
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/11/the-ele...
> “There’s just a lot that I think will be revealed. History will discover,” the Democratic Party’s 2016 presidential nominee continued. “But you don’t win by 3 million votes and have all this other shenanigans and stuff going on and not come away with an idea like, ‘Whoa, something’s not right here.’ That was a deep sense of unease.”
[1]: https://news.yahoo.com/hillary-clinton-maintains-2016-electi...
Hilary Clinton again in 2020 (which is the same election that Trump complains about, by the way) [2]:
> The 2016 Democratic presidential nominee predicted that among several scenarios, Republicans are going to try to “mess up absentee balloting” so that they could get a potentially narrow advantage in the Electoral College.
> “We've got to have a massive legal operation, I know the Biden campaign is working on that,” she said. “We have to have poll workers, and I urge people, who are able, to be a poll worker. We have to have our own teams of people to counter the force of intimidation that the Republicans and Trump are going to put outside polling places. This is a big organizational challenge, but at least we know more about what they're going to do.”
[2]: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/hillary-clint...
I also remember well the "Selected not elected" days after Bush v. Gore. That went on the entire time that Bush was president and went to sleep for a couple of terms when Obama won.
Just to be clear, I'm not making a judgement on who is right here. I think the truth is a lot more nuanced than "right or wrong." I;m just pointing out that we have a long history of politicians/parties questioning election results, but until now we've never had widespread attempts to silence it.
The republican party just literally spent months on questioning the election in places like Arizona with no evidence of any fraud, and there's plenty of documentation on how (almost always republican) politicians use lies to get people to not vote: https://lawyerscommittee.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Dece...
Basically, if you want to argue that its a "he said, she said" thing, you're going to need to come to the table with receipts about it, and trump is just completely full of shit on a level that's untenable and weirdly turned into this January thing where we almost had lawmakers killed.
I am not happy with either, but I don't really compare them in the same sentence.
Had there been statewide recounts, according to that page, things may have been different.
... actually conceded the night of the election. Bitched about it later, for sure. But conceded the election immediately. Something that hasn't happened yet for Mr. Trump.
In much the same way as dying of starvation can be technically described as 'missing a couple of meals'.
The difference between the two sides is that one believes that the system works, but is unfair, and the other one believes nothing.
It was a bit of a different time. But maybe not that different.
[1] https://www.history.com/topics/vietnam-war/kent-state-shooti...
I do get a bit sick of all this talk of "unprecedented". Of course, if you define an event precisely enough, everything is unprecedented, but a violent riot at the seat of government of a democratic country is hardly that unusual at the end of the day - we see a couple such riots every decade.
I think these folks rioted for a bad reason - I don't believe the election was stolen - but the lack of nuance and historical perspective in the media is certainly frustrating.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/leader-oath-keepers-and-10-ot...
https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/1462481/downl...
Likely many other people will be pulled into this if you read the above indictment.
Please don't try and with a straight face claim it would be trespassing. I'd have called it insurrection.
Anyway, while I do disdain the use of violence for political ends, I do think the events have been exaggerated and misrepresented by the corporate press for political purposes.
My feeling is that everyone actually agrees it was an insurrection, and the arguing is pro-forma.
You also seem to miss the point that violence by the pro-Trump protestors had no hope of actually capturing control of the government. Interfering with its operations for a time, sure. But not actual control. That's just not how any of this works.
The only hope the pro-Trump faction had (and a slim hope at that) was to peacefully pressure Mike Pence into refusing to count the ballots from contested states.
Your feelings aside, many people do genuinely disagree with you.
Which would potentially or eventually lead to the team they supported (Team Trump) capturing control of the government.
If Pence refusing to count those ballots wouldn't potentially lead to them capturing control of the government, why would they do it?
Again, there's no way that the protestors themselves would be able to take control. And if anything the breaching of the capitol building rather prevented Pence from throwing out votes.
The electoral count act is now out the window entirely and Trump has a bunch of the GOP claiming the election is fraudulent based on no evidence but that doesn't matter. Eventually after Trump has it all set up the house reconvenes and picks Trump as president because GOP has the most delegations and the vote was "fraudulent".
You see, all that really needed to happen is for them to create enough disruption for Trump and his allies to find a way to set aside the vote and let the house pick based on number of delegations. The brooks brothers riot basically did something similar. Created enough disruption to stop a recount.
That's not 'entirely different' from 'a bunch of yokels playing king-of-the-hill with the capitol building,' that's the intended result of 'a bunch of yokels playing king-of-the-hill with the capitol building.'
I really don't understand the point you're making here.
How is that not an attempt to end democracy. An insurrection.
The ringleaders seemed to be well aware that the objective was to invalidate the election and keep trump president. How is that not an insurrection?
I just don't see it as a realistic threat to our system of government.
It's pretty wild to see the mass denial of hyperbole... Like folks, do you have any idea what would happen if people really wanted to overthrow the government? You'd be kidnapped before you know what happened.
All that really needs to happen is to create enough disruption for Trump and his allies to find a way to set aside the vote and let the house pick based on number of delegations.
The brooks brothers riot basically did something similar. Created enough disruption to stop a recount.
Killing members of congress doesn't really change the fact that Pence was responsible for counting the votes, and the process would likely have resumed as quickly as possible.
This explanation is just so hand-wavy and doesn't really to capture what would likely happen in the case that a bunch of random Trump voters killed members of congress.
Now matter which way you slice it, any attempt by Trump or Pence to overturning official election results (even if they were fraudulent) was made impossible by the breach of the capitol.
Martial law was not declared after Jan 6th and the legal handover of power had already successfully occurred.