TRUMP'S "CINDERELLA" APPROACH TO THE BIG LIE WON'T WORK -- AGAIN

This Rolling Stone headline seems alarming:

Trump Plans to Challenge the 2022 Elections — Starting in Philly

But I'm not really worried about his approach to this -- or at least I'm not worried that it will be effective at overturning the results. I'm sure it will succeed at stirring up the base, which is bad enough. But it will be unpersuasive to the rest of America, and it will fail as a legal strategy:

IN EARLY SEPTEMBER, Donald Trump welcomed a handful of Republican allies to Manhattan’s Trump Tower with an urgent message: He saw a “scam” happening with midterm election voting in Philadelphia and elsewhere in Pennsylvania, and he wanted conservatives to do something about it.

In recent months, Trump has convened a series of in-person meetings and conference calls to discuss laying the groundwork to challenge the 2022 midterm election results....

If there’s any hint of doubt about the winners, the teams plan to wage aggressive court campaigns and launch a media blitz. Trump himself set the blueprint for this on Election Night 2020, when — with the race far from decided — he went on national television to declare: “Frankly, we did win this election.”

... Pennsylvania has grabbed his interest most keenly, including in the Senate contest between Democrat John Fetterman and the Trump-endorsed GOP contender Mehmet Oz. If the Republican does not win by a wide enough margin to trigger a speedy concession from Fetterman — or if the vote tally is close on or after Election Night in November — Trump and other Republicans are already preparing to wage a legal and activist crusade against the “election integrity” of Democratic strongholds such as the Philly area.

He's going to do this again? Assert that whoever is leading at 11:00 P.M. or midnight on Election Night should be declared the winner, no matter how many uncounted votes there are?

For most Americans, this was unpersuasive in 2020, and it will be unpersuasive this year, because of the way the media reports election results.

What happens? Votes trickle in. They get posted to maps on TV and on news sites. On TV in particular, analysts like Steve Kornacki on MSNBC and John King on CNN explain where the outstanding votes are and how, based on past voting patterns, they're likely to affect the outcome. We're used to this. We expect that we won't know exactly when we'll have every vote reported. In tight races, we know it will take a while.

Yes, Republicans think it's all a big plot. But for the rest of America, elections with prolonged vote counting are just standard operating procedure. The majority of Americans know that vote counting is like baseball or tennis, not football or basketball. There's no clock. You keep going until the process is complete. It's expected that the process will take a while.

So I'm glad Trump wants to pull this failed stunt again. Even the Big Lie crowd eventually abandoned it, talking instead about surreptitious ballot drops and manipulated computers and "mules" stuffing dropoff boxes.

It's a weirdly Trumpian approach to election manipulation. It's all about his lifelong belief that if you seize any opportunity to look like a winner, you'll be a winner. A normal would-be election stealer would grab a mic at midnight and talk about specific voting problems, while refusing to concede. Many Republican candidates will probably do just that this year. But Trump's idea is to say that merely counting votes after an arbitrary deadline of his choice ought to be disallowed, and since it ought to be disallowed, he -- or, this year, any candidate who's a substitute for him -- has the right to declare that he won.

And why fixate on Pennsylvania, where the governor is a Democrat, the secretary of state is the governor's appointee, and the courts were hostile to Trump's challenges two years ago? The obvious answer is that Trump's arguments precisely reflect the racist narrative that's been in his head all his life. If it's a close race by John Fetterman is on course to win narrowly, based on ballots reported late, what's the story? That there was cheating in Philadelphia -- an Eastern city with the approximate racial mix of most cities in the East. To Trump, you don't even have to offer evidence that vote-counting in an Eastern city is crooked. Philadelphia is full of Those People. Trump thinks everybody knows Those People cheat in every election. Who needs evidence?

If we approach midnight and it looks as if city votes will put Fetterman over the top, I really hope Trump persuades Dr. Oz to go out and declare himself the winner. Every major news organization -- yes, quite possibly including Fox, which has tended to play Election Nights straight -- will be saying it's too soon to call the race, or will say that the numbers look better for Fetterman. The strategy will fail.

There will undoubtedly be other Republican election deniers claiming their losses are the result of fraud. The smart ones will have laid the groundwork by identifying phony voting problems in advance, or at least during the voting on Election Day. But Trump and his crew appear ready to offer as little proof of fraud as they did last time. They'll just claim that Those People cheated the way they always do.

There are plenty of reasons to worry about other Republicans' claims of election fraus. I worry that Ron DeSantis's election Gestapo will arrest one or two apparently ineligible voters, and the story will be blown out of proportion by the right-wing media. I worry that innocent glitches will spawn conspiracy theories. I worry that aggressive challenges to voters by GOP poll watchers could create a sense that our elections have real problems.

But Trump worries me less. Elections don't end at midnight. This isn't "Cinderella." Trump can sell that idea to his base, but not to the rest of us.