Friday, November 06, 2020

WE DIDN'T THINK 2016 WAS ILLEGITIMATE THE WAY GOP VOTERS THINK 2020 IS ILLEGITIMATE (updated)

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution talks to pro-Trump protesters in Atlanta:
“Trump won. I have no doubt,” said [Lauren] Youngo, one of about 100 pro-Trump protesters, who gathered Thursday afternoon outside State Farm Arena chanting “Stop the cheat!” ...

“Georgia is a red state,” she said. “The truth is President Trump was way ahead. Now they’re suddenly finding all these Biden votes.”

... Nicole Wilson [made] the two-hour drive to Atlanta from Oconee County, South Carolina, where she works as a registered nurse. Though she acknowledges Georgia’s demographics are changing in ways favorable to the Democrats, she refuses to believe a state that’s been reliably red since 1996 would turn blue so fast.

Wilson said she’s convinced Biden’s vote total is artificially high, although she can’t say who is behind it. It’s worth noting that Georgia’s Secretary of State, who oversees elections, is a Republican

“I want every legal vote to count,” Wilson said. “Both sides should want the same thing.” ...

They were among those who pushed a claim out of Michigan that an update in the state’s vote count showed 138,339 votes for Joe Biden and zero for Trump.

“It’s the clearest case of voter fraud ever,” said protester Larry Mayo, 57, of Brookhaven. “That’s not even mathematically possible.”

It also wasn’t true. The overwhelming surge in Biden votes was captured on an election map from Decision Desk HQ and widely shared on Twitter. According to PolitiFact, the change resulted from a glitch in the file sent by Michigan election officials. The error was corrected, and so was the map.
And while Trump may not be getting a lot of backup for his claim that there's widespread fraud from sitting GOP politicians, he got this from an incoming senator:



This is mainstream Republican thinking. And no, it's not like mainstream Democratic thinking after the 2016 election, though you're likely to encounter many "both sides" comparisons equating the two. We had many explanations for 2016. We thought Russian interference helped Trump. We thought the last-minute intrusion of James Comey into the race hurt Clinton. We thought the media obsession with emails was very damaging to her chances, and we thought she was hurt by being vilified in the media for twenty-five years. We also thought she should have visited Wisconsin. Some thought Bernie would've won.

We didn't think there was fraudulent voting -- vote suppression, sure, but not electoral fraud. We believed there were enough legitimate votes cast for Trump to give him an Electoral College win. (We blamed the Electoral College, of course, but we accepted that it's our system, even though it's a bad one, and we vowed to change it.)

This is different. What you're going to hear from the Republican rank-and-file over the next four years is the notion that everything President Biden does is illegitimate because he came to office by fraud. Some birthers said similar things about Obama, of course -- there was the case of Terry Lakin, an Army colonel who refused to report for a second deployment to Afghanistan because, in his view, the order came from a president who hadn't proved his constitutional eligibility. But Lakin was court-martial and found guilty, and apart from that there was mostly grumbling. I think this could exceed what we heard in the Obama years.

I believe violence is coming:
Philadelphia police are investigating an alleged plot to attack the Pennsylvania Convention Center where ballots are being counted.

Action News has learned Thursday night that police got a tip about a group driving up from Virginia in a Hummer to unleash an attack at the Convention Center.

Police said they found a weapon and two people were transferred to Central Detectives.
I'm worried about this weekend in America, given the likelihood that the media will call the race for Biden today. And I'm worried about the future. It could get ugly.

But it won't be analogous to what Democrats did after 2016. And I don't want to hear from any right-wingers that I'm ignoring violent protests from this past summer. Those weren't about Donald Trump.

The response to 2016 was peaceful. It was pussy hats and organizing for the midterms. It was Stacey Abrams registering hundreds of thousands of voters in Georgia.

It wasn't what I'm afraid we're about to see from the right.

*****

UPDATE:



Also, I meant to add that the phase we may be entering is the equivalent of the moment when elements of the 1960s left turned to terrorist violence (around the time Richard Nixon was winning two elections). I've said that I see contemporary conservatism as a right-wing counterculture. This may be when we'll really see that manifest itself.

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