Notes From Battleground 2020: Endgame, Part One
To borrow a term from the world of chess, President Trump and former Vice President Biden are now in what might be called “endgame.” An extremely complicated campaign has turned into, no great surprise, an extremely complicated election. What follows are thoughts on what has happened and what is likely to happen.
•Inevitable
First, the predicament that our country now finds itself should have been predicted. It was inevitable, right from the time when the COVID virus was used as a pretext to encourage absentee, mail in and early voting. While it’s true that such options have been available to American voters in the past, their use was rare and the numbers traditionally small. Never before have early, absentee and mail in voting been promoted so stridently and used so extensively. And, never before did they constitute a STRATEGY. And, it’s no accident that the majority of the absentee and early voting went to Biden. That was the Democrat PLAN. More on that later. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a critic of the widespread use of absentee voting, put it best when he wrote that “charges of a rigged election could explode if late-arriving ballots change the perceived outcome.” And please don’t say that it would only be Trump that would challenge election results. If Biden been running behind, we’d find him, I’d wager, doing EXACTLY the same thing.
The reason why the widespread use of absentee and mail in options would inevitably result in a mess is simple: such methods are more difficult to verify, and they allow for “interested parties” to enter fraudulent ballots for counting. And, several rule changes were adopted to even FURTHER reduce verifiability. In Pennsylvania, for instance, the rules were changed so that the signature on voter registration records DIDN’T HAVE TO MATCH THE SIGNATURE ON THE BALLOT!…. On what possible grounds, outside of a desire to misrepresent voters, does such a rule change make sense? And, contrary to media claims, the rule change has NOT been affirmed by the Supreme Court. The court, in fact, did NOT rule on the merits of the Republican case. The Court declined to hear the case because they didn’t feel that the issue could be resolved by November 3rd. So, as a very predictable consequence, Pennsylvania’s rule changes opened the door to trouble. Fraudulent practices such as “ballot dumps”, dead people voting, and votes from those who are ineligible to vote are all so much easier to do when voting is not in person. And, there’s growing evidence to indicate that’s just what happened.
•America’s Sad State
As most Americans are aware, there was, and still is, a threat of election related violence. Although it’s unlikely that Trump supporters would take up arms following a Biden victory, No one would be surprised if Biden supporters did so after a victory for Trump. Boarded up stores in downtown areas are visible across our nation. One commentator said that the Saks Fifth Avenue department store in New York City looked more like it was expecting a “hurricane than an election.” Sad.
And, the fact there are now believed to be such things as “shy Trump supporters” is also downright depressing. The thought that Americans might be afraid to speak their minds, an American right and tradition, for fear of recrimination or reprisal makes you wonder if America has become no better than many Third Word Countries. Sad.
•Worse Than Useless
Once again, just as we saw in 2016, we have witnessed the complete and utter failure of America’s opinion polling. Several polls had Trump losing Florida by 8 points, yet he won the state by 4. Trump was predicted to lose Ohio by 5 points, yet he WON by EIGHT. The Democrats were predicted to a win a majority in the Senate, yet, so far at least, they have picked up just one seat. Democrats were predicted to gain 10 seats in the House of Representatives, yet they LOST six. Many pollsters predicted a “blue wave” would sweep the nation. That simply did not happen. While such poor predictive results could be accounted for by sheer ineptitude, I would wager that a good portion of it was deliberate deception. As Dinesh D’Souza has said, polling, like much else in America, has become partisan advocacy. Behind many of the polling outcomes was a plan to prevent a Republican victory by demoralizing the Republican constituency resulting in reduced voter turnout and reduced campaign donations. And, it’s possible that some of the polling deception was actually a part of an overarching strategy to corrupt the election results. But more on that later. In the meantime, Americans must no longer lend credence to contemporary political polling. If a financial advisor made very poor recommendations time and time again, they’d be fired, or at the very least, be ignored. The same should be true for America’s polsters. They’ve proven themselves to be worse than useless.
•A Seismic Shift
This election demonstrated that America’s political landscape has undergone a shift of seismic proportions. and, evidence for this shift is there whether or not Trump ultimately wins the Presidency. As Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson has observed: the REPUBLICAN PARTY has become the party of WAGE EARNERS, THE WORKING PEOPLE WHO ARE AMERICA’S BACKBONE. Parsing the data is beyond the scope of this essay, but blue collar workers, farmers, police, even industrial workers are now, increasingly, voting GOP. Even many working blacks and Latinos have joined the exodus. What constitutes today’s Democrats? The chronically unemployed, disaffected students, aggrieved “identity groups,” leftist academics, tech big wigs and various celebrities. Amazingly, corporate types that had been Republican constituents for eons, now vote Democrat. Such a shift is unprecedented in American history.
•No Bang For Their Buck
This election is said to have been the most expensive in history. Democrat mega donors spent insane amounts of money on many losing battles. Over NINETY MILLION DOLLARS was spent to try to defeat Republicans Leader of the Senate, Mitch McConnell, ONE HUNDRED AND NINE MILLION DOLLARS to try to defeat Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham, over SIXTY THREE MILLION to try to defeat Maine Senator Susan Collins. The feckless Democrats got no bang for their buck. All these Republicans were re-elected handily.
•Could Have Been Worse
If the plethora of legal challenges to the 2020 election currently in process are successful, Donald Trump will be re-elected to another four year term. But, even if Biden’s electoral victory is upheld, November 3rd could have been MUCH worse. Enormous amounts of Democrat money was spent to take a majority in the Senate (as explained above), but these attempts failed. The Senatorial majority, while technically still in play, looks good for Republicans. There are currently only 46 Democratic senators, but that number is a bit misleading since two of the Senate’s nominal independents, Angus King and Bernie Sanders reliably caucus with the Democrats, and should, therefore, be counted as Democrats. Consequently, at this moment in time, the Senate split is 48/48. And, although North Carolina and Alaska are still not fully done counting, the Republican candidates in both contests have strong leads. Alaska’s republican Dan Sullivan leads by 62% to 32%. North Carolina’s Senator Thom Tillis, leads with 97,000 votes with only 2 percent uncounted. While Georgia has two senate seats “in play,” Republican David Perdue leads Jon Ossoff with a comfortable margin of 2.1%. That contest, however, goes to a January runoff election because Georgia’s constitution requires a 50% majority, and a third party candidate kept Perdue’s totals (49.9%) a hair below the needed 50%. Georgia’s second “in play” seat, currently held by Kelly Loeffler, also failed the 50% requirement because the Republican vote was SPLIT by a SECOND Republican (Doug Collins) candidate! Adding the two Republican totals together, Republicans lead the Democrat, Raphael Warnock 45.9%/32.9%. Expect tremendous monetary contributions to the campaigns of both candidates, but this one should be winnable by Republicans.
•Corrupted
There appears to be increasing grounds to suspect that Tuesday’s election results have been corrupted in multiple states. I’ll go into this in my next essay which I hope to post tomorrow.