I don't think people appreciate the sudden crisis we'll face if Kamala Harris *wins*....This is plausible. However, there's a countervailing force -- not a noble one, but one that's important to democracy, even though it's all about profit. That force is electoral data wonkery.
First: Republicans are absolutely convinced that Trump is going to win again. There's no bed-wetting. No doubt. They have returned to the same levels of confidence that they had at the RNC, even though they're now losing or tied in polls.
Second: Unless Harris is winning in a blowout, the race will be too close to call until late into the night. (Or possibly the next day. Or the rest of the week.)
So on Tuesday night, the Harris campaign and all of the news orgs will be frozen and unable to say what the outcome is.
None of this will stop Trump. He is likely to declare victory on election night, possibly before 11pm, even.
The problem is that, unlike in 2020, once Trump declares victory this time it will immediately become Republican dogma.
At least 40 percent of the country will believe that Trump is the duly-elected, incoming president of the United States.
And something close to 100 percent of Republican elites will either confirm Trump’s claim, or pointedly refuse to contradict it.
This group will including every elected swing-state Republican at state and local levels.
... If Harris is ultimately declared the winner on Wednesday (or Saturday!), half of the country—and all of elite Republicans—will have (a) internalized the idea that Trump won and (b) publicly committed to this proposition.
What happens then?
It'll be a crisis.
... And that's the *best* case scenario for the next month.
Steve Kornacki at NBC, John King and Harry Enten at CNN, Nate Cohn at The New York Times -- these people attract eyeballs. They keep people watching and clicking. What they do on election nights is nerd out as data comes in. If Harris is winning (or still able to win) while Trump and other Republicans are claiming a Trump victory, the data nerds will be looking at counted votes, exit poll results, and past vote tallies in uncounted precincts and giving us granular assessments of the state of the race. They'll be telling the truth as far as they know it (and they know a lot): for instance, that Trump may lead by X number of votes in Georgia, but uncounted votes from Georgia's four most populous counties are likely to be Democratic at roughly the rate they were in 2020, so the state is still too close to call but could easily go blue.
Normie Americans trust these data nerds, and they should -- when the votes are being counted, they're honest about what they know and don't know. The mainstream media gives us a lot to complain about, but this is a good thing.
If the data nerds' narrative becomes the story most Americans believe, 2024 won't be much worse than 2020.
But what will Fox do? Historically, on election nights, Fox has tried to play vote counting straight. In 2012, Fox's data nerds called Ohio for Barack Obama over the strenuous objections of on-air commentator Karl Rove. And, of course, Fox called Arizona for Joe Biden very early on Election Night 2020.
However, Fox fired two executives connected to that early call of Arizona. So we don't know what Fox will be saying on November 5.
I think Fox will still try to play it more or less straight, but will also take every bad-faith allegation of voter fraud very, very seriously. I don't know what the other news organizations will do about those allegations, or whether they'll actually hold up vote counting. If state and local governments shut down vote counting in response to those allegations, we're in for a very bumpy post-election period.
And Last is right to focus on the fact that "close to 100 percent of Republican elites" will be echoing Trump's allegations of fraud. That didn't happen in 2020 on Election Night. Many Republicans never got on board.
Trump didn't even have all his false arguments lined up until days after the polls closed. For a while, all he had was I'm leading now, so stop the count. But news organizations knew the count wasn't finished, and they told us. The data nerds told us where the votes hadn't been counted. So the mainstream media's take was that it was an honest election.
I don't know whether Trump and the GOP can change the way normie Americans learn about the results. If they start early, as they clearly intend to do, I fear they can. But if Harris is winning, it's possible that it will be by a large enough margin to make the fake fraud allegations irrelevant. Or Harris's team needs to be very good at rapid response. Or we'll have to rely on the media to trust election officials who are being honest. (Hey, it happened in the post-election period last time.)
We don't know what the courts will do, but I'm not 100% certain that the Republicans on the federal judiciary are fully on board with Trump or J.D. Vance. I think they'd still prefer a bog-standard Koch Network Republican to either of them. (Both Trump and Vance occasionally express support for economic populist ideas that would make the non-rich richer, and we can't have that.) Trump will get a few lower-court wins from his own judges, but I think most of the Republicans on the courts still want to seem as if they're just calling balls and strikes, and will back away from overturning a legitimate election, the way they did in 2020.
If Harris wins and the GOP can't get the manistream media to take its fraud narratives seriously, we should be able to get through this. But even then, it will be worse than it was four years ago. And it might be a lot worse.
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