If I recall, pre-covid I was saying it's the economy and it would be good if we went into a recession in 2020 as we were overdue anyway. There was a discussion that asked if we would be willing to undergo a recession if it guaranteed Trump was kicked out, don't remember the nos. but I said yes.

It's pretty evident that Trump has support beyond the 38-42% core even in this worse case scenario for him. I do think Trump would have won a 2nd term if he would have acted like any other President, accepted it as real and showed he took it seriously.

Very interested in the demographics and post-mortem analysis to better understand those that voted for Trump.

I hope this is just Trump looking for attention otherwise this could quick start to be sedition and/or insurrection.

Election results – latest: Trump reportedly plans voter fraud rally tour across US as Biden begins transition

With the exception of Romney, Murkowski, a handful of Reps, and the NE governors, the entire GOP is going all-in on overthrowing the will of the voters. They'll probably fail, but it doesn't make the attempt any less despicable.

where do you see that at?

Bush congratulates Biden, says election was 'fundamentally fair' and 'its outcome is clear'

If he does this it becomes a clear dereliction of duty and I hope they invoke the 25th amendment and he is afforded no secret service protection.

Not one dime of taxpayer dollar should be spent on that.

Much to his credit. I was talking about currently elected or party leaders.

Just wanted to apologize for the Kluge family drama going on Facebook right now if you are friends with me there. I had hoped to reach out to the "other side" after the election went to Biden, but sadly its just revealing how entrenched we all are in our beliefs

It's been interesting to observe how the Trumpers on my social media are behaving. One has left to go to Parler. The consensus among the others has been on the 'we'll accept the results of the election, but we think it was fraudulent so wait until the Electoral College finalizes' front. I think this is what a lot the notably silent public Republicans are doing. They're just waiting it out; they know Trump has lost but they aren't going to tick off the peole that voted for him, since most of those people voted for them also, so they're just waiting for the inertia of the process to do it .

Your post was absolutely wonderful. Sorry it devolved like that. :(
My "blessed are the peacemakers" post from last night had you (among others) in mind.

Thanks Ben :)

Echoing Brian a bit, I was not surprised that Trump kept his base engaged, but I was/am truly flabbergasted that he managed to pick up any voters in the process of this 4-year shitshow.

it is no secret that piece of shit wants things to end up in front of the supreme court so they can give itto him

TIL

https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/08/polit...rnd/index.html

This is what my trump supporting friends are absolutely certain will happen.

100% of Trumpers think it will either go to him through recount or the courts.

So what happens if they actually do?

As far as I'm aware, the only legitimate challenge on the table is the PA mail ballots, that may remove about 10k ballots from the count. Even that is very unlikely because it involves a rule that counties say they were already following even before Alito's ruling.

Biden leads by 43k votes there. He also doesn't have to have PA as long as AZ and GA hold up.

I have also heard that the PA decision by Alito was "setting up groundwork" to have the court give the election to Trump. But on what basis? They would literally have to overrule 4 state's results to do so on no basis right now, because there hasn't been any decisions that would rise to the dire level of needing emergency relief by the Court.

It's literally the last throes of a cult leader dragging his followers over the cliff of reality.

Trump is still at .12 on Predict It.

Civil War.

Sounds like his first rally will be tomorrow night. They are all going to be in deep Trump red territory. Just insane: https://news.yahoo.com/trump-reporte...022114589.html

I refuse to believe it would happen.

If it did would be the death of our democracy as we know it.

One thing to think about with Trump increasing his base from 4 years ago is that many of the things he did to motivate his base also motivated his opposition. I think Biden ran a great campaign, but he was aided by an opponent so disliked by many that the Dems for once were able to stay on message and work together to defeat him.

Mr. Piece-of-shit,
TEAR...DOWN...THIS...WALL!

And that lasted until about 2 pm on Wednesday. It's so ridiculously hard to keep Dems from going at each other's throats.

you are saying that republicans need a reason to shit on the country?

My understanding is those ballots, ones postmarked on or before Election Day but received after Election Day, are already segregated and not in the count. Which means Trump is still way behind and those ballots are not going to swing the state in his direction even if they are counted which he doesn’t want even though he is losing.

I hope he at least tunes his guitar

how when democrats roll over faster than a puppy

i would have said you are crazy if we were actually there...but seeing the results....omfg....it pains me

MOST are segregated, but not all. It's not clear which ones aren't. Which is a problem, but minor

Nothing will come of the legal stuff. The problem for Trump is that he lost by a lot and would need to overturn the results in several states. It's just not happening. There is nothing they have filed that would come close to changing the results in even a single state.

The goal isn't to win, it's to appease Trump. The guy built his brand on being a "winner". This provides him an off-ramp of sorts to claim the election was stolen when he leaves. He wasn't a "loser" you see, it was the "deep state" and "democrats" and whatever else gets tossed into the fire.

Remember that this is nothing new for him. He claimed he really won the popular vote in 2016. He accused Cruz of rigging the Iowa caucus after losing. His brand is that he can't lose an election, it can only be stolen from him.

Which is great, but we’ve never had a losing candidate tell 48% of the voters that the election was stolen from them. Nobody expected Trump to gracefully concede and maybe this would have been the end result, but damn if it’s not utterly depressing and disheartening. And it just deepens the wounds... not sure how anybody could ever bring the country back together now.

The legal maneuverings isn't going to change anything. It's performative theater for the true believers. I mean when a a judge asks a lawyer for the Trump Campaign (slight paraphrasing here, don't have the exact quote at hand)

Judge: Ok, I want you to answer this as a member of the bar of this state before this court. (*) Were there observers for the campaign of Donald Trump in the room as the votes were being counted?

(*=meaning, I expect the right answer here, no equivocations, or I will nail your hide to my wall as a warning to other lawyers not to bullshit me)

Lawyer: Yes.

Judge: “I’m sorry, then what’s your problem?”

reference: Judge dismisses Trump’s attempt to stop vote counting in Philly - WHYY

edit: https://twitter.com/steve_vladeck/st...926977/photo/1 exact quote from person in the room.

folks thinking the supreme court are going to ride in and overturn MULTIPLE states results are deep in the bargaining/denial phase of the stages of guilt, or suffering from 2016 PTSD.

Would various members of the Supreme Court like to find a way to do so? I don't doubt it. But they are also smart enough to realize that doing so would not just end the judicial branch's neutrality, it would probably be the end of America

It’s not just performative theater for the true believers, but for Trump himself. They are largely filing these lawsuits for him. They need to placate his desire to be seen as a “fighter” and doing everything he can not to be a loser. It’s a lot of money, time and continued damage to the faith in our democratic institutions just to help cater to this pathetic man’s delicate, fragile little ego. It’s a part of the process to finally get him to a peaceful transfer of power.

...and start a Media empire catering to the deepest darkest extreme end beyond the normal GOP (GOP is dead - long live TGOP). Parler, OAN, etc are all a place of solace and respite from a world that has done them all wrong and won't listen to their crazed Q conspiracies. The most shocking thing to me is how many Christian Conservatives have dived into this. One day will they awake and find themselves surrounded by hatred and discrimination that they will realize how far away they've moved from the scripture?

I'm assuming they will be filing lawsuits and/or complaints with state election boards today. Let's see what they file. I've seen a lot of allegations, and I've seen explanations for most of it.

I don't expect any of it to stick, but I'll admit I'm still curious about the dead people voting thing. The registered dead people thing isn't a concern because that's explained away and there's no evidence those people voted. I've seen snippets of evidence of dead people whose votes allegedly are verified as having been cast. I'll believe it when I see a lawyer stand behind it in court, and I don't believe there will be anywhere near enough to affect the election if there's some proof, but even if they find just a half-dozen verified votes, that's just going to fuel the fire for the cult. That's the bigger picture I'm more concerned about.

My wifes cousin is screaming all over fqcebook to sign a petition to recount and revote.

I really want to ask her why she is surprised that a sitting president who virtually never got an approval over 50% would lose the election.

I'm sort of curious about the dead-voter thing, too. Indiana has a long and storied history of sucking at purging our voter lists. I get that it's one of those things that's hard to do because you don't want to disenfranchise anybody accidentally by being too vigorous with your cuts, and it's the sort of thing that makes for headlines with bad optics.

It's not really an issue here because up until 2020, we've never had a particularly robust mail-in voting system, so I'd sort of assumed that states like Washington(?) who have done it for a decade just built a bunch of best-practices into their design to handle keeping the voter registration system updated with the most current data to ease the vote counting process.

So most of my curiosity revolves around how other states made it work and where this election might expose gaps in that system.

I mean, if it's people who cast their ballot and then died before election day, it's not clear that those votes shouldn't count. Some states say they shouldn't - Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, South Dakota and Wisconsin. Others say they should count and some are unclear. However, it's not very clear that states even have a way of removing a ballot once they've found out someone has died.

If it's just general Democrats use thousands and thousands of dead people to vote for their candidate, well that's just crazy conspiracy nonsense. The Democrats aren't organized enough to pull that off.

Man are they going to be disappointed when none of this happens.

Heh. I just realized reading my own post that I think about the process like a programmer.

1. Build a system, trying to account for as many variables as you can.
2. Do a bunch of regression testing to make sure your logic accounts for all of the knowns.
3. Expect that the "unknowns" are going to crop up when real users start interacting, and either fix them on the fly or in v2.0 depending on the severity.

Seems perfectly reasonable until you realize that getting elections right the first time is REALLY important.

OMG

The guy featured at the 4 Seasons Landscaping presser is a registered sex offender and the Four Seasons Hotel is close to a charter school.

What delusional talking head is spewing that garbage you quoted? The straw grasping is unbelievable.

SCOTUS just gonna be like "Trump wins".

I was listening to Fox News yesterday and they had a Repub lawyer on who pretty much said there was a slim chance anything got over turned in PA and there was no chance of any of the other states get changed. So, get used to the idea of Biden being POTUS.

The funniest part of that is they actually have one thing right - about Congress breaking a tie with each state getting one vote - but then make up some weird rule where it has to be down party lines.

Not sure if this can be done, but if so the Biden campaign needs to file a lawsuit to get the Trump admin to immediately start cooperating with the Biden transition team so if the lawsuits go in Bidens favor he isn't staring behind the 8 ball.

No, these are people who died 20-30 years ago. If you believe the snippets of "evidence" I've seen being passed around the internet. I posted one of them way earlier in this thread, that *appeared* to verify a guy in MI who died in 1984 requested and sent back an absentee ballot. I assume this is the kind of evidence they claim to have.

I am not sure that they want to start the bothsides narrative of "competing lawsuits" yet.

Isn't that the same strategy that multiple people called out several months ago? I know I read a couple of articles saying "Here's what they are going to do once they've lost." None of this is exactly unknown.

Unfortunately nothing is 'official' yet. Trump team will argue that media projections are not official pronouncement of a new President and therefore they don't need to start transition protocols, esp when there are lawsuits filed - and they would be right.

but us it competing lawsuits or filing suit to allow Biden to do his job unencumbered?

Yup. Technically, Biden isn't the President-Elect yet. All of the things like a concession speech, White House visit with the outgoing, and working together on the transition are non-codified traditions that have been dependent on having Presidents who cared about America, the peaceful transition of power, etc. There are things we're used to seeing happen as part of the transition that this scumbag simply won't do, and there's not really anything that can be done about it if Trump wants to be a jackass about it all.

I wonder if Trump will do the traditional letter to the incoming President in the Oval Office, and if so what it will say?

I won, you cheated.

What was possible was a much more narrow intervention than what that Facebook rant suggests. I think there was a risk of absentee votes received after Nov 3 being thrown out and possibly unsegregated absentee ballots being used as a predicate for throwing out more votes. What won't happen is throwing out all fraudulent votes. What does that even mean?

To an all-too-large segment of the right, it's axiomatic that thousands upon thousands of illegal aliens, dead people, and people who live in other states vote fraudulently in every state. That was the case before this election cycle. Having a President who is "validating" that is truly awful.

Any recent info on Arizona? I know the election is called but having another state solidifies things that much more.

One good outcome of vetting the legal challenges (in addition to eliminating many/most of the conspiracy theories) is it will make us do this better next time. I am sure there are some "discrepancies/issues" and identifying them in 2020 will let me mitigate them in 2024, essentially lessons learn.

lol

The Michigan Court of Appeals rejected Trump's filing because it was defective. Real legal All-Stars working for him.

According to this:

Election 2020 Results

Arizon's last drop was 17 hours ago. ~17k lead with 81k left to count.

It's already been dubunked no? I thought one was a clerical error where the guy had the same name as his father and lived at the same address, and the clerk had entered it incorrectly. I was reading that like 75% of the ones examined were not true (dead people did not vote) and other 25% were things like above where somebody has a same name/address.

There just aren't that many people who are willing to risk a felony to add one or two extra votes...

I hope so, I didn't see any that were discussed in that article with the same name as the one I saw. And of course, they're saying they have lots of them, not just one or two.

The fact that they haven't shown one bit of proof yet is telling though.

If you're the sort of person who reads YouTube comments, watching folks turn their back on Fox News is fascinating.

I expect to see breaking news that Tucker Carlson and Hannity have resigned to accept positions with Newsmax any time now.

Makes me wonder if I could get elected to congress in Indiana running on the single-issue platform of abolishing Fox News...because at this moment, it seems to be the one thing everyone in the country agrees on.

Another one i saw as an explanation (not for actually dead people but 120 year old people) and which i know as a decently common one from first hand experience working at places with data input of personal Info: software putting 1901 DOBs as default and not have it start blank when making a new entry or clerks changing it/having to change it by cursor (not typing). Make enough entries and you are bound to forget to change it or save your changes.
Now i don't know what systems are used at clerks Offices, but i'd wager not all are state of the Art and mistake proof while being manned by super attentive people at all times.

This has always been it. How many people could you get to do a ballot fraud scheme? There certainly wouldn't be enough to swing a national election.

I have a relative who's legit arguing that nobody would risk a felony to steal a Senate election because a) it's a felony and b) trying to steal a Senate election on top of a Presidential election is "getting greedy and that's how you get caught."

Never fucking MIND that the level of complexity needed to steal an election for national office is at least an order of magnitude greater than the same scheme for statewide office, assuming you even COULD.

It's...the cognitive dissonance in the "Trump is being cheated" crowd is mind-blowing.

Nice timing.

Were Carson and him at the same gathering?

It's going to end up being a few hundred thousand votes. How would you ever get that to happen one ballot at a time?

It's all Trump's party. Both GOP Senators in GA are demanding the GOP Sec. of State resign because he failed to deliver honest and transparent elections.

And now McConnell is backing Trumpism that he should be able to exhaust the legal process before conceding and "the Constitution gives no role in this process of wealthy media corporations".

Well, it was a fun couple of days. I'm sure the next 4 years definitely won't be a partisan shitshow

SI

I keep thinking Quiksand is too pessimistic but the GOP actions are turning me into kombucha girl.

Yeah the GOP as it was known is DOA. It is the Trump fascist party and democrats only.

in all this circus i totally missed the fact that the Green Party candidate was Jesse "The Body" Ventura

And in other comedy, the man in charge of challenging the results of the election has tested positive for coronavirus

Maybe also worth noting that this is the first presidential election where someone with a birth year starting with '20' could vote.

Only the for the Green Party of Alaska. Which is a separate thing for some reason. So he was only on the ballot there. And this was done without his consent.

https://mustreadalaska.com/green-par...for-president/

still amusing :)

It's amazing to me that is legal.

Hmm I wonder if I'm on any ballots anywhere

Brb, going to put JIMG on the Democratic Socialists of America ballot.

Don't tempt me to break my anti-third party pledge.

So North Carolina is kind of weird, right? I know that they are waiting for military votes (I think tomorrow is the last day)? But they seemed to stop counting on Wednesday - it's been at 98% and 75k advantage for Trump for days. Are they just waiting until the military votes to count all the remaining absentees?

Sharing this then taking a politics break. This shit gets me too worked up.

Shocked that Fox is doing this. :D

Fox News just cut away from @PressSec, saying the network could not in good conscience continue to air her false claims, for which she has provided no supporting evidence.

— Ashley Parker (@AshleyRParker) November 9, 2020

Still think that's a dangerous precedent to set. The people should be making the decision who to believe, not the media.

pic.twitter.com/zGdwP1Ytez

— CLA (@ConservativeLA) November 9, 2020

They're almost behaving like a credible new organization for small parts of their day. Maybe they're trying to carve out a center right niche because they know that when Trump TV comes online, they're losing all a huge chunk of the crazy demographic

SI

I read a quote that she said she was holding the PC in her personal capacity.

Also, the specific examples of NV fraud they brought forth were military family members who had been transferred out of state and legally voted in their home state of NV.

This isn't good. The GOP seems to be quickly becoming more radical about the election.

Pa House GOP members tomorrow will "call for a legislative-led audit of the 2020 election and demand election results not be certified, nor electors be seated, until the audit is complete," per news release.

— Andrew Seidman (@AndrewSeidman) November 9, 2020

I assume this is just some sort of putting the thumbs on the scale for the runoff or putting their person in place, right?

SI

Taking cues from Trump about saying the quiet part out loud.

Asked about whether the "irregularities" alleged by the RNC and Trump campaign would change the election outcome, @GOPChairwoman says "Is it going to be enough? No."...before promptly correcting herself and saying "we don't know" and asking for more time.

— Tamara Keith (@tamarakeithNPR) November 9, 2020

Let's not pretend this isn't too late by years. Too many people kept treating this whole thing like a variance of normal. A shitty variance you took offense in (or not), but still. The media reporting on it all like it was actually an ongoing democratic process that merely was a bit more "partisan" or "combative" or "dishonest" than usual is part of the reason why large swaths of the country could talk themselves into thinking people were merely mad at Trump or Republican policy.

Even the last few days and weeks (even here) people kept going with "that surely can't happen" rationality. About half the folks in the poll expected some form of a normal transition after a bit of squabbling. Because he's still a President, not some autocratic leader in Belorussia. When the only difference is oportunity, not motivation/morals. Enter a system based on the understanding that both sides respect tradition and the process. Yeah, right ...

Stop pretending this will play out following any usual playbook. Stop saying "The White House" or "The President" as if it has any of the old meaning still attached. Or pretend these abominations are press Briefings.

Makes me mad as hell, knowing there's a whole plethora of extremist politicians in Europe hoping like hell to emulate that when their time comes and enough folk have lowered their standards of what is normal.

To my mind it isn't about treating it as normal. It's about respecting the will of the people. They elected this monstrosity. We shouldn't decide to not report on what's going on just because we don't like their choice. We wouldn't like it if they chose to treat Biden that way. Before Trump, nobody cut away from press briefings even when the guy up there was lying through his teeth. Every.Single.Word Nixon said was televised even when we knew it was hogwash, just to use a relatively dated and noncontroversial example. That didn't mean everybody thought it was ok - he was still forced out of office. He was, however, still the President.

It's just like that old saying in my business: 'The customer is not always right, but they are always the customer'. Same with whoever holds high federal office, regardless of what they do.

Lot of people have been calling them what they are for awhile, fascists. Just seeing it up close now.

Short term it appears our systems will hold up. But it's going to be odd when in a two-party system, one doesn't believe in democracy.

Reporting on sth and broadcasting sth are not in fact the same thing as i see it. I realise this is american tradition, but lot of that being disregarded the last few years. He's elected President, not Host of a TV live act. His press secretary is there to inform media, media is there to report on what she's saying. Not merely document what she is saying.

That's true, but IMO besides the point. Is it ok for a news network to not broadcast a Biden press conference because they think what he's saying isn't true? Is it the job of the news media to tell people what to think, or to report the news and let people decide for themselves? Remember we're talking specifically about news media here, not editorials/talking heads.

My wife's FB feed is just a steady stream of people posting their new Parler accounts.