Saturday, June 27, 2020

What Would Trump Do Differently If He Was TRYING To Lose The Election And Tank The GOP?

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People are looking at two big national polls this weekend, one by Marist, released by NPR and PBS that shows Trump losing with just 44% of the vote (and a sky-high disapproval of 57%!) and one from Kaiser showing Trump losing with 38% and with a disapproval of 56%. And, occasionally he's starting to face reality. One such occasion was Thursday evening on Fox with Hannity when he mused that Biden is "gonna be your president because some people don't love me, maybe and all I'm doing is doing my job." He then went into his whole litany of lies about what a great steward of the economy he's been, the myth on which he had been building his campaign-- until the reality of what he made into the Republican Plague hit him in the face and knocked him on his ass. Ezra Klein wrote that as Trump "has continued to treat the presidency as a media spectacle, the work of governance as a dull distraction from the glitter of celebrity"-- obsessing over cable news and Twitter conflict and neglecting the job Americans hired him to do-- he's loath to face up to his record: "More than 120,000 dead from Covid-19 [and] an economy in shambles. Coronavirus cases in America exploding, even as they fall across the European Union... Trump has spent the past three years and 158 days playing president on TV and social media. But he has not spent that time doing the job of the president. A strong economy that carried over from Barack Obama’s presidency hid Trump’s dereliction of duties. But then a crisis came, and presidential leadership was needed, and the American people saw there was no plan, and functionally no president."

Trump seems to be doing everything possible to lose in November. Even the far right editorial board of the Wall Street Journal mused yesterday that "Trump may soon need a new nickname for 'Sleepy Joe' Biden. How does President-elect sound? On present trend that’s exactly what Mr. Biden will be on Nov. 4, as Mr. Trump heads for what could be an historic repudiation that would take the Republican Senate down with him."

Friday morning, the Miami Herald announced that "A record week of surging coronavirus numbers was only heightened on Friday, as state health officials confirmed 8,942 cases, nearly doubling the previous record of cases reported in a single day, two days earlier... Over the last seven days, Florida has reported 29,163 new cases. That’s nearly a quarter of all the confirmed cases in the state so far." Brainless, Trumpist governors Ron DeSantis (FL) and Greg Abbott (TX) finally reversed themselves and ordered their states' bars to close, something they-- and all governors-- should have done in March.





Meanwhile, Fauci told the Washington Post that Trump's testing strategy is a failure.

Not enough to get himself kicked out of office? His regime is still trying to make matters worse for sick people by demanding the Republican-dominated Supreme Court abolish Obamacare-- along with the insistence that insurance companies cover customers with preexisting conditions, the part of Obamacare that is universally popular-- even with hard core Republicans. James Hohmann wrote yesterday that "The Trump team’s core argument is that every Republican who voted for the tax cuts three years ago knowingly voted to destroy the 2010 law in its entirely, not just to get rid of the mandate that individuals buy health insurance. And, because the Supreme Court previously upheld the constitutionality of the law on the grounds that the individual mandate is a tax, Trump’s lawyers say that the whole system became invalid once Congress got rid of the penalty for not carrying health insurance... The brief is full of little gifts like this to Joe Biden and Democrats who hope to ride his coattails down the ballot."

All this stuff is bad for Trump and bad-- deservedly so-- for the GOP. But Trump figured out a way to make it worse yet. Emily Larsen, writing for the Washington Examiner reported that "Trump’s extreme opposition to mail-in ballots is more likely hurting him and down-ballot Republicans than it is helping him. Mounting evidence in voter registration data, a survey, and organizer anecdotes shows that instead of preventing the voting method from being a major factor in the November election, his stance is turning Republican voters off from using the method entirely, which could have the effect of depressing Republican votes. The president’s rampant alarmism on mail-in voting-- most recently claiming that foreign governments will rig the election by printing millions of mail-in ballots, an idea rebuked by elections officials-- frustrates those trying to push state election officials and Congress to provide ample absentee voting and in-person voting options and resources in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. They point out that many analyses find that mail-in voter fraud is small and often prosecuted... Trump’s public lashing out against mail-in voting may come too late. All of the six most important swing states have some form of mail-in or absentee voting. Despite Trump, some state Republicans are doing what they can to organize mail-in votes. The Florida Republican Party sent an email in May to its supporters, reminding voters to request a vote-by-mail ballot. Pennsylvania’s GOP website includes instructions on how to vote absentee."



But not all state Republican parties are doing what Florida and Pennsylvania are doing. 85% of the votes cast for the Kentucky primaries were sent in by mail. How much of an increase was that? In 2016, there were 38,112 ballots mailed in. This year... around 800,000-- a 2,000% increase! But that record turnout is alarming Republicans. In Georgia and Iowa-- both controlled by the GOP-- barriers are going up to vote-by-mail, infuriating voters who find out what the Republicans are up to.

What the Republicans are doing-- whether in healthcare, voting, pandemic response... is all leading to what is going to likely be the most gargantuan repudiation of the GOP since 1932, when Republican incumbent Herbert Hoover was defeated 22,821,277 (57.4%) to 15,761,254 (39.7%)-- losing 42 states (carrying just 6). In the process, the Republicans lost 11 Senate seats (including their Majority Leader, James Watson (R-IN)-- the Mitch McConnell of his day) AND 101 House seats-- yes 101!-- losing the White House, the Senate and the House, all by immense margins. The news lineup in the Democratically-controlled House was 318 Democrats, 117 Republicans. The GOP lost all their seats in Colorado, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Utah, Virginia, Washington and West Virginia.





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5 Comments:

At 11:16 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

He's wasting his time. The only thing the "Democrats" do well is give away electoral victory to Republicans.

 
At 12:39 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Given that much of what trump has tried to do, going back to his businesses for the past 40 years or so, has been a dismal failure, if he was TRYING to tank himself and the Nazi party, he'd probably fuck that up and make them the perpetual ruling party and himself the fuhrer for real.

It really helps that the opposition is so fucking worthless, feckless and corrupt.

 
At 1:15 PM, Blogger Cugel said...

"The new lineup in the Democratically-controlled House [in 1932]was 318 Democrats, 117 Republicans. The GOP lost all their seats in Colorado, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Utah, Virginia, Washington and West Virginia."

That just shows the old New Deal Coalition of working class whites in the South and West, combined with unionized labor and liberals in the North.

But, that coalition broke fatally apart in 1968 over the Civil Rights Acts and the Vietnam War, and was never put back together. Nixon won 49 states in 1972 with many of those same voters who voted for Johnson and Kennedy.

Nothing like that kind of repudiation is remotely possible in 2020. No matter what Trump does, 40-42% would vote for him, even if he shot someone in the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue -- as long as it was Nancy Pelosi one Trump supporter said. He wasn't kidding.

That means that about the most Biden can possibly get is around 52-42. That would be a 10 point landslide, but not remotely like FDR 1932 & 1936, Nixon '72, or Reagan '80 or '84.

We'll be lucky if the landslide is enough to prevent Republican governors in AZ, FL, NC, and OH from stealing the Election. A large panel of experts just war-gamed a lengthy scenario in which Trump narrowly prevailed in the Electoral College amid massive fraud and blatant vote suppression, all sanctioned by Trump's appointees to the S.Ct.

In their war-game scenario total chaos, massive riots and violent military and police response caused a total breakdown of the social order by mid-January as Trump inaugurated himself with John Roberts in attendance, with tens of thousands of protestors being detained, beaten and tear-gassed as martial law is imposed all across America's cities.

We need to win by more than 5%. The closer to 10% it is, the more unlikely that Russian intelligence, fraudulent Republican Secretaries of State and corrupt GOP Governors will be able to steal or suppress enough votes to steal the election.

 
At 6:59 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

-10% is about the size of biden's anti-blue wave, as I'm seeing it.

that means that trump must inspire his own -11% anti-red wave to compensate.

if only as an academic exercise, I'm curious just how small the turnout on both sides might be... and how tiny a minority of voters will be responsible for handing near absolute power to one of the corrupt neoliberal fascists (or Nazi).

In '16, 31% elected trump and 32% failed to elect $hillbillary.... and 37% did not show up.

imagine a president elected by 26% of American voters. maybe less.

seeing how the money has to cough up a couple billion for this dog and pony show, it makes martial law pretty inevitable. the money won't want to flush billions any more and it will be too tricky to defraud/suppress/disaffect just a few more voters so your side can "win".

 
At 12:31 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Cugel, great points. Largely agree. One thing to note, the Arizona Secretary of State is a Dem, so that's one state where I think the Dems might actually win in 2020 in a wave election and where shenanigans aren't a given.

Even in states where the GOP will rig the vote -- in places like Florida, Georgia, and Texas -- if these COVID-19 impacts continue, those states might also flip in November. GOP vote suppression may be able to quarantine a 5% national vote surge, but if it's a 10% national wave, you might see the barrier breeched.

Instead of those other wave elections, I would probably be looking more at 1856. Biden could be a post-modern James Buchanan. i.e. Both were long-serving political hacks who represented a coalition of stasis in the face of an unfolding crises. Buchanan won comfortably in 1856 and couldn't get anything done, even if he had wanted to. The Courts at that time too, served as the last vanguard of an old regime and helped to precipitate the 1860 crisis and election.

History never repeats, but sometimes it rhymes. The Dems may have an actual governing coalition in 2020, but I don't think that the current leadership has learned anything over the past 12 years. The blundering of the Obama-Biden team in 2008 -- the complete squandering of a massive mandate -- helped to get us to this newest crisis. The Courts are going to be an even bigger obstacle now than they were then. The international situation as it relates to COVID-19, a slowing global economy, and climate change, should make things interesting.

 

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