As the 2024 race enters its final days, there are increasing signs that the Harris campaign is failing and aware of it. My colleague Nick Arama reported on how Trump took the lead nationally and in battleground states; see Happy Birthday, Kamala. Have you checked the polls? I prefer FiveThirtyEight.com, although I know there are a lot of haters on RedState. These polls, as I posted previously, show Trump making steady progress, and when compared to Biden’s 2020 polls and election results, it appears that Trump is the favorite to win the national popular vote and key battleground states is; see Politico claims Trump is in a “media blackout,” objective reality demands and calls for a retreat.
All indicators point to the Harris campaign being on the precipice – out of altitude, out of airspeed, and out of ideas. The election can always be lost, but right now I think Trump needs to take positive action to lose this election, and Kamala has little chance of influencing it positively.
As the presidency slips further and further away from her, the “joyful” Kamala has become the “dangerous” Trump. All sorts of people, especially quislings from Trump’s first administration, have shown up to proclaim Trump a clear and present danger to our democracy.
Today, Politico follows up its unlikely claim that Trump evades the media by holding rallies and cooking french fries at McDonald’s (see EPIC: Trump Trolls Kamala in Hilarious Move As He Works Fries, Drive-Thru Window at McDonald’s) by claiming , he has a way to seize power even if he loses on Election Day… or whenever Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin finally get around to counting their votes: The very real scenario in which Trump loses and still takes power – POLITICO.
In the words of Donald Rumsfeld, they begin with “an illogical premise and then move perfectly logically to an illogical conclusion.”
2024 is not 2020. Trump’s path to making it this time is even narrower and more extreme. On the one hand, Trump lacks some of the tools he threatened to utilize four years ago to upend the transfer of power; Today, the military and the Justice Department respond to Joe Biden. Trump also needs allies to win elections that would enable him to reverse a defeat: Overturning a Kamala Harris victory would require enormous support from Republican power brokers in statehouses and Congress, some of whom spurned him four years ago.
Therefore, a Trump who has less power today than he did in 2020 and finds himself in a legal environment that has blocked some opportunities that could have been exploited last time will be more likely to try to distort the election results. With this claim, Donald Trump has officially achieved supervillain status.
“Nobody knows exactly what Trump’s attack on the electoral system will look like in 2024,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), a member of the Jan. 6 special committee. “What will he do this time?” According to lawmakers, congressional investigators, party officials, election officials and constitutional law experts, the answer goes something like this: – He will deepen distrust in the election results by making unfounded or exaggerated claims of widespread voter fraud and launching sweeping lawsuits against enough ballots to change the outcome in key states. — He will rely on affable county and state officials to resist certifying election results — a futile effort that would nonetheless fuel a campaign to pressure elected Republican lawmakers in statehouses and Congress. — He will call on allies in Republican Party-controlled swing state legislatures to appoint “surrogate” presidential electors. – He will rely on Republicans in Congress to support these alternative electors – or at least reject Democratic electors – as they come together to certify the result. — He will try to ensure that Harris is denied 270 Electoral College votes by sending the election to the House of Representatives, where Republicans will likely have the numbers to elect Trump as the next president.
If you want to distrust the election, Biden’s Justice Department is doing far more to challenge the results than anything Trump can do. It is Merrick Garland’s thugs who are preventing illegals from being removed from the voter rolls and challenging state voting procedures to support Harris.
It is possible that Trump and his allies will not make a sustained effort to overturn his election defeat. A resounding Harris victory would make it harder for Trump to win over Republicans. (If Trump wins, no one expects a similar effort by Democrats to undermine the election.) But poll watchers, elected leaders and some of Trump’s own allies agree on one basic premise: On election night, no matter what the results, how many votes are left are not counted and no matter how many advisers tell him the opposite, Donald Trump will be declared the winner.
The article then tells a story that would make Tom Clancy proud. All of this is based on two unlikely events. First of all, the idea that a twice-defeated Trump has enough influence in state legislatures to convince them to violate state law and simply hand the electoral votes to Trump is, frankly, both dishonest and possibly stupid. Second, the idea that a Republican majority in the House of Representatives, which literally cannot pass a single budget bill, has the unity to change the rules for certifying electors requires a level of ambiguity rarely seen even among political journalists.
They are not concerned that Kamala Harris, who serves as chair of the joint session of Congress that elects the president, has an intractable conflict of interest as she corrupts the process and outcome as well as playing practical jokes herself.
This is just fear porn that no sedate person believes in and is designed solely to support a narrative set by Kamala’s campaign.
