How Existential A Threat To Democracy Is Trump And What Do We Do About It?

I don't trust the voting machines... never did, never will. They're too easily hackable. And I've thought that Trump's hysteria over vote-by-mail was because he had it all down exactly how the election would be stolen via machine tampering. With the appointment of future federal penitentiary inhabitant Louis DeJoy as postmaster general, Trump may have handled the vote-by-mail threat to his November plans.

In an OpEd for The Hill, Al Hunt wrote that "The charge by Trump and his attorney general that mail voting risks massive fraud is a canard. Spencer Cox, the conservative Republican lieutenant governor of Utah, who oversees voting in one of five states that exclusively votes by mail, says it's a 'tremendous success' with little fraud. The stated reason for going after the Postal Service is red ink which totaled $8.8 billion last year. A little bit of context on Donald Trump worrying about deficits: As a businessman, he bragged about being 'the King of Debt,' and on his watch, the federal deficit has almost doubled to close to $1 trillion, before the pandemic.

The new postmaster general is a Trump loyalist. He has given $2 million to Republicans and Trump campaigns since 2016, the latest being a $210,000 contribution to the Trump Victory Fund in February. He was going to be finance chair of the Republicans’ Charlotte convention before it was curtailed; his wife has been nominated to be U.S. ambassador to Canada.

DeJoy told the Postal Board of Governors Friday that he's not making any changes that will impede voting by mail and declared: although he has a "a good relationship" with the president, any assertion he'd make decisions at the direction of Trump "is wholly off-base."

In response to an email from me, he wouldn't say whether he spoke with Trump about the job prior to his appointment or has communicated with him since taking over.

He has not assuaged Democrats.

Congressman Gerry Connolly (D-VA), chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Subcommittee on Government Operations, told me: "Trump has appointed a donor and political crony to undermine the postal service for partisan gain."

In the first month and half under DeJoy, instructions have gone out to the more than 600,000 postal workers to curb any overtime and cut back services.

There's a more pressing need for overtime during this health crisis. Most postal workers are out every day, exposed to the virus. Three months ago-- the latest data-- some 2,400 postal employees had tested positive for the virus; 17,000 had been quarantined, and scores died. Those numbers undoubtedly have risen since then.

DeJoy is playing with political fire.

In a recent Hart Research-North Star Opinion Research national survey, 94 percent of Americans say the Postal Service is important to them, and there's widespread backing of federal support. A large number of the 31,000 post offices are in rural America, areas that are generally more dependent on mail delivery and that are represented by Republicans.

This morning I woke up to this ominous tweet by by friend Frank Schaeffer:

Jamelle Bouie's NY Times column, published at the same time, came to a similar conclusion: To keep a crooked authoritarian threat to democracy from claiming victory on Nov. 3, Americans patriots who can vote in person may well have to. This is gettin' serious, friends.

There’s no mystery about what President Trump intends to do if he holds a lead on election night in November. He’s practically broadcasting it.

First, he’ll claim victory. Then, having spent most of the year denouncing vote-by-mail as corrupt, fraudulent and prone to abuse, he’ll demand that authorities stop counting mail-in and absentee ballots. He’ll have teams of lawyers challenging counts and ballots across the country.

He also seems to be counting on having the advantage of mail slowdowns, engineered by the recently installed Postmaster General Louis DeJoy. Fewer pickups and deliveries could mean more late-arriving ballots and a better shot at dismissing votes before they’re even opened, especially if the campaign has successfully sued to block states from extending deadlines. We might even see a Brooks Brothers riot or two, where well-heeled Republican operatives stage angry and voluble protests against ballot counts and recounts.

If Trump is leading on election night, in other words, there’s a good chance he’ll try to disrupt and delegitimize the counting process. That way, if Joe Biden pulls ahead in the days (or weeks) after voting ends-- if we experience a “blue shift” like the one in 2018, in which the Democratic majority in the House grew as votes came in-- the president will have given himself grounds to reject the outcome as “fake news.”

The only way to prevent this scenario, or at least, rob it of the oxygen it needs to burn, is to deliver an election night lead to Biden. This means voting in person. No, not everyone will be able to do that. But if you plan to vote against Trump and can take appropriate precautions, then some kind of hand delivery-- going to the polls or bringing your mail-in ballot to a “drop box”-- will be the best way to protect your vote from the president’s concerted attempt to undermine the election for his benefit.

...There are reforms that could keep the president from taking this tack. To account for postal delays, states can pledge to count ballots postmarked on or before Nov. 3, so that they’re included in the total even if they arrive late. To speed up the process, states could permit election officials to verify and count mail-in ballots even before Election Day. They could also decline to release results until all polls close and all votes are in. News organizations, similarly, could set expectations for viewers and bring as much transparency as possible to vote counts and other forms of election analysis.

Nonetheless, there is a chance that the president takes this path regardless of state officials and the media. And there’s every reason to think that some portion of the Republican Party will back him. The Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee are already challenging mail-in voting laws and suing to keep states like Nevada and Pennsylvania from enlarging their scope. It is easy to imagine a replay of Florida 2000, except on a national scale.

The best defense for the president’s political opponents is, if possible, to vote in person. For some, this will mean going to the polls in November, in the middle of flu season, when the spread of Covid-19 may worsen. In most states, however, there are multiple ways to cast or hand in a ballot. Every state offers some form of early or absentee voting, and 33 states-- including swing states like Arizona and Wisconsin-- allow absentee voting without an excuse. Trump supports absentee voting-- it’s how his older supporters in Florida vote-- and his opponents should take advantage of the fact that those systems won’t be under the same kind of attack. Many vote-by-mail states also offer drop boxes so that voters can deliver ballots directly to the registrar. And if you must mail in your ballot, the best practice would be to post it as early as possible, to account for potential delays.

Earlier this year, a group of more than 100 people-- Republicans, Democrats, senior political operatives and members of the media-- gathered to role play the November election, using predetermined rules and procedures. “In each scenario other than a Biden landslide,” writes Nils Gilman of the Berggruen Institute, who helped organize the exercise, “we ended up with a constitutional crisis that lasted until the inauguration, featuring violence in the streets and a severely disrupted administrative transition.”

There you have it. To head off the worst outcomes, Trump must go down in a decisive defeat. He’s on that path already. The task for his opponents is to sustain that momentum and work to make his defeat as obvious as possible, as early as possible. The pandemic makes that a risk, but it’s a risk many of us may have to take.

Christine Pellegrino is favored to replace a worthless Republican Trumpist on Long Island. This morning she mentioned to me that "Trump's popularity or lack there-of is absolutely going to drive people to the polls, or their mailboxes, to vote. But I'm not taking my foot off the gas. At the end of the day, voters care about common sense issues: good jobs, good schools, and healthcare. Talking to voters about the change Albany can create for all of us is empowering for the disaffected. The voters want a real representative. They’re tired of lazy, lifetime politicians and they’re demanding more than they just show up for photos. Down ballot candidates like me need to make sure that people mobilized by the 'Trump factor' fill out their entire ballots."

My old friend, Jerry Leichtling, came up with a brilliant idea-- that's what brilliant people like Jerry do... come up with brilliant ideas. Take look at this proposal he just sent me:

Inasmuch as E-Commerce companies have benefitted tremendously from the Covid-19 Pandemic, these same companies should be willing to do the people of the United States a massive public service. Given the Trump-ordered slowdown of the United States Postal Service there is no reason why federally-bonded companies like Amazon, Fedex and UPS should not, as a patriotic public service, pick up all voters' ballots and deliver them to Local Boards of Elections. These companies, and hundreds more, already do massive business with the Postal Service. They have literally millions of employees and are NOT slowing down. Please write to the CEO’s of Amazon-- Jeff Bezos (Jeff@Amazon.com); Fedex-- Fred Smith (Fredric.Smith@Fedex.Com) and UPS, Carol Tome (CTome@UPS.com) with the heading or hashtag Special Delivery Democracy. and send copies to your elected representatives as well. Let’s see if we can derail Trump’s express train to tyranny.

Counting Sheep by Nancy Ohanian

Close Calls… And 2020 Opportunities For Progressives

In 2020, Trump will force voters to pick a torch again

Is it too soon to start thinking about the 2020 congressional cycle? Not for the Blue America team. We’re even starting to hope who our two first candidates will be to flip red seats blue. One district’s on Long Island-- yeah, we’re looking’ at you, Peter King-- and the other is deep in the heart of Tejas.

Now is the beginning of recruitment time for us. We’re looking for solid, proven progressives who want to run and have the capacity to do two things:

1- run a grueling grassroots campaign
2- be a kick-ass member of Congress

What we’re doing right now is identifying districts to begin the process. The first wave are the districts that Democrats came very close in this cycle. Some of them were districts the DCCC just missed entirely-- for one reason or another, ranging from incompetence to venality-- like TX-10, CA-50, NY-27, IA-04 and NY-02). Others were districts with woefully weak candidates, especially Blue Dogs like in KS-02 and PA-16, seats where Paul Davis’ and Ron DiNicola’s Republican-lite approaches failed to ignite any grassroots enthusiasm. Others were districts with good enough first time candidates running good enough campaigns and who built a strong foundation for a 2020 re-match, like Kara Eastman did in NE-02 and Dana Balter did in NY-24.

So, try to imagine that Trump will stay the same between now and 2020 as he’s been since the mid-1940s when he was born, a malignant narcissistic sociopath and as entitled racist shit. That would make for an even bigger wave-- at least in theory-- than we had this cycle. Much of the low-hanging fruit, though, is now off the table, those red suburban seats that Hillary won in 2016, for example, like FL-27 with an R+5 PVI and where Hillary beat Trump by TWENTY points. There aren’t many quite like that left. But 2018 uncovered new opportunities election pundits hadn’t seen coming, like the aforementioned TX-10 and like GA-07. But let me give you a back-of-the-envelope sketch of the earliest map we’re looking at at Blue America. This is the first round of districts where we want to find-- or have already found-- candidates. The percentage is the winning GOP score from last week:

• CA-21 (Central Valley)- 51.0%
• CA-50 (eastern San Diego County)- 52.8%

• GA-07 (Gwinnett suburbs northeast of Atlanta)- 50.2%

• IL-13 (downstate from St. Louis suburbs to Champaign, Springfield and Bloomington)- 50.5%

• IA-04 (northern and western rural Iowa)- 50.4%

• KS-02 (eastern Kansas minus Kansas City)- 48.1%

• KY-06 (Lexington)- 51.0%

• MI-06 (southwest Michigan)- 50.2%

• MN-01 (southern Minnesota)- 50.2%
• MN-08 (northeast Minnesota)- 50.7%

• MO-02 (St. Louis suburbs)- 51.3%

• MT (the whole state)- 51.1%

• NE-02 (Omaha Metro)- 51.6%

• NY-24 (Syracuse)- 53.1%
• NY-27 (Buffalo to Rochester suburbs and exurbs)- 49.5%

• NC-09 (southern tier from Fayetteville to Charlotte)- 49.4%

• OH-01 (Cincinnati + Warren County)- 51.8%
• OH-12 (central Ohio including part of Columbus)- 51.6%

• PA-01 (Bucks County)- 51.3%
• PA-10 (Dauphin, York and Cumberland counties)- 51.4%
• PA-16 (northeast Pennsylvania including Erie and Butler counties)- 51.5%

• TX-10 (northern Austin to Houston exurbs)- 50.9%
• TX-21 (Austin to San Antonio corridor)- 50.3%
• TX-23 (Rio Grande Valley from San Antonio to El Paso)- 49.2%
• TX-24 (Dallas and Tarrant counties)- 50.7%
• TX-31 (Williamson and Bell counties)- 50.6%

• WA-03 (sw Washington, Portland suburbs)- 52.9%

These were, basically, districts left on the table. Ironically, one of the first candidates we’re looking at isn’t even from one of these districts. New York state Assemblywoman Christine Pellegrino won a special election in 2017 for the 9th district in Nassau County. It’s the most Republican area of NY-02, Peter King’s Nassau-Suffolk South Shore district, still being “protected” by Steve Israel. Pellegrino, one of the best legislators in Albany beat Republican opponent 52-31% in the 2017 special but was defeated by another Republican last week. She’s probably still the best bet to take on King and retire him in 2020. Now all we have to do is try to talk her into it.