What Is Trump Accomplishing Right Now?

What Is Trump Accomplishing Right Now?

The president’s refusal to accept defeat won’t affect the outcome of the election. But it may do immense harm.

November 9, 2020, 9:55 PM GMT+9

It’s over, guys.

It’s over, guys. Photographer: Chris McGrath/Getty Images

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Let’s talk about the damage President Donald Trump is doing by failing to concede an election that he lost. To be clear: He lost. There’s no realistic chance that the outcome will change, and no serious analyst thinks that Trump’s lawsuits have any chance of succeeding. So this is purely, at this point, about waiting for the president to accept reality.

First: He’s threatening to derail the transition. Norm Ornstein has a good item on the potential ways that Trump could make things difficult over the next 10 weeks, but for now the biggest practical question is when the General Services Administration will officially turn President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team into the quasi-governmental organization that, by law, it becomes once the winner has been declared. This usually happens quickly; so far, GSA Administrator Emily Murphy hasn’t filed the necessary paperwork.

Second: He’s harming his own party. As long as Trump doesn’t concede his obvious defeat, high-profile Republicans are torn between loyalty to the president and loyalty to the nation. Former President George W. Bush and at least two senators, Mitt Romney and Lisa Murkowski, are among those who’ve congratulated Biden. But others are still holding off, presumably because they don’t want to be criticized for failing to go along with Trump’s pointless charade. I agree with Rick Hasen that this will likely resolve itself soon enough, with more and more Republicans accepting reality, and Trump eventually going quietly — whether he actually concedes defeat or not. In the meantime, though, Trump is creating fractures within his party for no good reason.

Third: He’s harming the nation. Trump’s fictional accusations of fraud, just like the similar claims he made after winning in 2016, are undermining faith in the democratic process and in legitimate electoral institutions. It’s hard to measure the effects, but it seems likely at this point that some part of the country will always falsely believe that Biden stole the presidency. Remember: If there was evidence for any of this, the Trump campaign would be spelling it out clearly. Instead, we get wild accusations from Trump and an unimpressive group of hangers-on, accusations that aren’t backed up by the nuisance lawsuits that the campaign is bringing to court.

This is all completely unnecessary. If Trump simply said that he owed it to his voters to fight hard as long as any possibility of a reversal still existed, the damage would be minimal and he would still be protecting his rights. John Kerry made the nation wait an extra 12 hours or so in 2004, and no one held it against him. Losing campaigns in any remotely close race are able to send out teams of experts and lawyers to make sure nothing was overlooked. And they can do so even after the candidate has conceded, given that such statements don’t actually carry any legal weight. Indeed, President Richard Nixon still receives occasional praise for handling the close 1960 presidential election in exactly this way: He conceded, and then continued to fight it out in court. I’m not sure how much of that praise is really warranted, but it sure beats what Trump is doing.

To contact the author of this story:

Jonathan Bernstein at jbernstein62@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story:

Timothy Lavin at tlavin1@bloomberg.net

The Party of Self-Doubt

The Party of Self-Doubt

By Seth Masket

November 8, 2020

4 min read

This weekend, with the news networks calling the presidential election for the Biden-Harris ticket, saw massive outbreaks of celebration across the country. Democrats took to the streets to express relief and joy, emotions that have been in short supply in 2020. Yet these celebrations came in the middle of a week of self-reflection and doubt for a party that had hoped to do better.

My recent book examines how the party that loses a presidential election constructs narratives to explain its failure. It's a vital process that helps the party chart a course for the future, even if the narratives they cling to aren't 100% true. So I've been curious to see the loss narratives adopted following the 2020 election.

What I didn't expect is that those loss narratives would come from the winning party.

I don't have particularly hard evidence on all this, at least not yet. But from following conversations on Twitter, in the news media, and elsewhere, it seems like Democrats began to form a circular firing squad fairly quickly after polls closed on Tuesday, expressing disappointment that Trump was within firing range of reelection. Some questioned whether Joe Biden, nominated for his perceived electability above all other traits, was truly all that electable. Some suggested Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren or Kamala Harris might have produced more enthusiastic turnout from progressives or from black voters. Some noted disappointing Latino support for Democrats, especially in Florida, suggesting the party had done poor outreach there.

Now, there are reasons for the Democrats to have discussed loss narratives so much at that point. For one, as in 2018, the first votes coming in had a largely Republican lean to them. As had been widely predicted, mail-in ballots were cast early but counted late in many states, and Democratic fortunes didn't look better until later in the week. For another, Democrats had expectations, based on the most thorough state-level polling to date, that they would do quite well in this election, with Biden possibly picking up Ohio, Florida, and even Texas. While Biden appears on track to a decent Electoral College victory and a solid popular vote majority, it appears substantially less than expected, and a lot of narrative creation is a product of expectations.

This raises an important question about how exactly Democrats should have done. They've underperformed polls somewhat, but that's more a problem with the polling than with the Democrats. We're never good at determining a baseline for candidate or party performance -- a lot of people cling to the idea that Hillary Clinton should have beaten Donald Trump in 2016 simply because she should have -- but this year it's harder than most. Second quarter GDP saw the sharpest drop since the Great Depression; third quarter GDP saw the biggest increase ever. What exactly were the fundamentals this year?

One could note that incumbent presidents rarely lose reelection bids. The last time a party lost a reelection after just one term in control of the White House was 40 years ago. The fact that Biden achieved this victory, likely winning the popular vote by a bigger margin than we saw in 2000, 2004, 2012, and 2016, is no small thing. But it was a victory that didn't translate well for Democrats down the ballot.

And the recriminations from Democrats have fallen along familiar lines. In a much cited conversation among the House Democratic Caucus, more moderate white members worried that attacks on them as being socialist or embracing more progressive messaging on racial justice were making them less electable. As the New York Times reported, "Representative Abigail Spanberger, who narrowly escaped defeat on Wednesday in a conservative-leaning district in Virginia that Democrats had also toiled to protect, chastised her progressive colleagues for embracing the 'defund the police' movement and for not pushing back forcefully against accusations of socialism. If Democrats did not acknowledge the election results as a 'failure' and change strategies, she said using an expletive for emphasis, they would be 'crushed' in future elections."

These criticisms were met by pushback from people of color from more left-leaning districts. "We didn’t get the repudiation of Trump we wanted, but we turned out huge numbers of young people, brown and Black people," said Rep. Pramila Jayapal of Washington. "Don’t be so quick to blame the members who have been responsible for energizing these groups, who will ultimately save the day in the race for the White House." Rep. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan added, "To be real, it sounds like you are saying stop pushing for what Black folks want."

In a series of tweets and interviews, Progressive icon Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York claimed that more moderate Democratic House members campaigned poorly and massively under-invested in digital advertising, and that this was more likely a cause of defeat than any progressive messaging. She noted that those swing-district members who embraced Medicare For All did just fine in their reelection bids.

These are the same sorts of arguments Democrats have been having for years, possibly decades, every time they underperform in an election. More moderate whites argue that winning the votes of other moderate whites is essential to future victories, and being too embracing of racial justice policies or anything that can be branded "socialist" will cause those voters to drift to the Republicans. More progressive people of color argue that motivating other people of color is essential to future victories, and trying to woo centrist whites will reduce turnout.

I am not claiming one side is clearly right or wrong. Comb through the exit polls (and honestly I'd encourage you to wait a few weeks to do that) and you can usually find some evidence to support your side. It's also not obviously terrible for the party to have this fight. The Democratic Party is a massive and increasingly diverse coalition, and different groups and factions will compete for resources and attention. And they've been stifling a lot of these differences all year.

But what impresses me is that the Democrats are having this conversation at all. They have just taken the White House. That it's the Democrats publicly airing their grievances with each other, rather than the Republicans looking to blame someone within their party for a loss that didn't need to happen, is notable. Perhaps this will change over the coming weeks. But it may also simply be an aspect of party culture. Self-doubt may be alien to Republicans, but it's sewn into Democrats' nature.

Trump advisers are telling him it’s slipping away. There’s poetic justice here.

Opinion | Trump advisers are telling him it’s slipping away. There’s poetic justice here.

Opinion by 

Greg Sargent

Columnist

November 7, 2020 at 8:42 a.m. GMT+9

President Trump’s advisers are trying to convince him that the ongoing count of votes is putting the race out of his reach. But he isn’t reacting well, according to CNN’s Jim Acosta.

“In the words of an adviser I spoke to a short time ago, Pennsylvania ‘is the fat lady singing for President Trump,’” Acosta said on the air Friday afternoon.

“But they’re having a devil of a time behind the scenes trying to convince the president that this is slipping away from him,” Acosta continued.

Acosta also reported that this is leading to “chaos” inside the White House.

As we wait for the networks to call the race, it’s worth noting that there’s a kind of eerie poetic justice in how this is winding down.

Politics is hard. It’s profoundly painful to watch election returns when the candidate you support — one whose campaign you followed for many months and poured a good deal of intellectual and emotional investment into — is slowly and inexorably getting overtaken as more and more votes come in.

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This must be extraordinarily difficult to endure when you yourself are the candidate. But Trump himself is largely responsible for his experience of the way this is winding down. And that captures something essential about his pathologies, and about his corruption and contempt for democracy.

Trump began attacking vote-by-mail as riddled with fraud in earnest last spring. This dissuaded his own voters from using it, as Republicans themselves warned would happen.

Trump telegraphed the real intent of his corrupt endgame over the summer. He would get his supporters to vote in person, and then he’d seek to invalidate millions upon millions of mailed ballots on the grounds that they shouldn’t be counted for too many days after Election Day.

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Trump would rely on GOP state legislatures in places like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, which refused to allow the counting of mailed ballots before Election Day, helping to create the delays that Trump would then exploit.

He would enjoy a big lead as the Election Day votes were counted first, allowing him to declare victory, and then insist that the counting of millions of other ballots constituted an effort to steal the election from him.

It all unfolded exactly this way. Trump’s broadcasting of his scheme surely helped persuade millions of Democrats to get their mail ballots in early. Meanwhile, in the days leading up to the election, he kept tweeting about a “GIANT RED WAVE COMING!”

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These were the Election Day votes that would be counted first, and on Election Day, things went according to plan in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. Trump then did prematurely declare victory early the next morning. And he has since launched a legal effort to try to invalidate as many mail votes as possible.

But Trump never thought to imagine that all those mailed ballots actually would get counted, that the system actually would honor the votes of millions who opposed him, that election officials and volunteers across the country actually do believe in democracy and are willing to work extraordinarily hard to make it function on behalf of the American people, on behalf of all of them. He couldn’t simply make all of that disappear.

Many news organizations warned that those initially counted votes would constitute a “red mirage,” and that this would be followed by a “blue shift” as the mailed ballots were counted. But, because Trump has very deep contempt for the parts of the country that oppose him and has long regarded them as having no legitimate claim to political representation, their votes simply couldn’t end up counting.

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Meanwhile, the legal cases are falling apart because they’re baseless, and because they are targeting pools of votes that are too small to make a difference.

Trump couldn’t imagine that this would happen, either. He has long viewed large swaths of the government as little more than ready-at-hand tools to serve his own personal and political interests. And Trump assumed that the courts would just do his bidding. He simply declared that helping him by invalidating countless votes was what Amy Coney Barrett, his nominee to the Supreme Court, was supposed to do.

But it’s now getting away from him. And it’s precisely because of how Trump bought into this whole scheme all along that he is now suffering through the slow and prolonged shock of seeing his leads in Pennsylvania and Georgia bleed away over the course of days, to be replaced by Joe Biden leads. It must be a special kind of purgatory for him.

We Should Have Known



We Should Have Known

by David French, frenchpress.thedispatch.com

November 4, 2020

By late last night, it had become abundantly clear that poll after poll after poll that had projected a 1992- or 1996-style popular-vote and electoral wave for the Democrats had been wrong, wrong, wrong. Ever since, I’ve been pondering a single thought: In the battle between polarization and polls, polarization won.

In other words, as I wrote in a brief essay in Time, Americans were confronted with two conflicting streams of data. One was the avalanche of polls showing that Biden was clearly in the lead and that if the polling held, he could potentially win 350 or more electoral votes plus an eight or nine point popular vote victory. The other was the decades of data outlining the rise of negative partisanship and increased American tribalization.

We were also often confronted with a conflict between the polling data and the testimony of our own senses. If you live in Trump country you saw the enthusiasm of Trump voters. If you talk about politics at all on social media, you could read the intensity of the division.

The central reality of negative polarization predicts outcomes just like this week’s results. Remember, the definition of negative partisanship is that you vote for your side not so much because you love your own side, but rather because you dislike your opponents. Therefore, no matter your candidate’s failings, he has one abiding and unassailable virtue—he’s not the other guy.

Thus we go back to one of the central political realities of the Trump era. In the midst of tremendous volatility in the news cycle, there has been enduring stability in partisan politics.

We’ve gone through an economic boom and bust. We’re in the midst of one of the worst mass-casualty events in American history. The president was impeached. Riots have swept through American cities. Yet the political coalitions remain largely unchanged. I’ve written about this before, but the ingredients for 2020 include a dash of 1998 (impeachment), a helping of 1968 (urban unrest), a serious dose of 1918 (pandemic), a hint of 1929 (economic crash) and now potentially a sampling of 2000 (election contest). Through it all, American politics have hardly budged.

No, that doesn’t mean they haven’t budged at all. Given the closeness of our politics, a few thousand votes here and a few thousand votes there can flip the Oval Office. Trump won in 2016 by less than 75,000 votes in three states. Right now, Biden’s lead hinges on roughly 150,000 votes in four states and one congressional district (with the count changing hourly).

To put that in perspective, that’s 150,000 votes out of almost 140 million counted so far.

Moreover, if you look at the best available information on the composition of the competing coalitions, you can see that they tend to mobilize the same people in roughly the same percentages. Yes, I know exit polls can be suspect, but they still represent the best apple-to-apples comparisons available, and the stability of the coalitions is remarkable.

In 2016, Trump won 58 percent of white voters, 8 percent of black voters, and 29 percent of Hispanics. In 2020, those numbers were 57, 12, and 32, respectively. In 2016 he famously won 81 percent of white Evangelical voters. In 2020, it looks like he won 76 percent. These changes are so small we don’t even know if they’re real. (My colleague Sarah Isgur scorns exit polls, for many good reasons.)

I’m reminded of a political version of trench warfare. During World War I the combatants on the Western Front expended an enormous amount of blood and treasure to move the lines a mile here and a mile there, only to see them snap right back after the next counteroffensive. The effort was overwhelming. The gains were often nominal.

And so it is here in American politics. And the giant amount of effort often helps us understand the sheer vitriol directed at in-group dissenters. Don’t you know we need every man on the ramparts? How dare you stand down? They cannot be permitted to win.

But the problem is that the very imperatives of negative polarization often require the combatants to twist themselves into moral and ideological pretzels to stay in the field of battle. Can you imagine telling a pro-life conservative in 2014 that in a few short years, he’d be scorning mask-wearing during a pandemic, mocking the idea that deficits matter in politics, and defending presidential praise for the dictator of North Korea to help keep in office a president who’d paid hush money to a porn star, faced multiple corroborated claims of sexual assault, and who repeatedly lied to the American public about the nature of a deadly disease?

Of course that’s not Trump’s full record, but I raise those facts in part because the 2014 pro-life conservative would have found multiple elements of Trump’s biography and record to be utterly disqualifying.

And yes, it’s absolutely crystal clear that millions upon millions of Democrats went to the polls not to support Joe Biden but to defeat Donald Trump. As Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez put it, absent the political imperatives of the two-party system, she doubts she’d even be in the same party as the Democratic nominee.

None of this is new. I raise it because it’s vital to understand the context of last night’s polling miss. It’s vital to understand our political reality going forward. There is nothing about last night that will inherently heal our land. There is much about last night that will inflame our national divides.

And that’s why I’m finding it difficult to take too much solace from last night’s results—in spite of the fact that I belong firmly in arguably the tiniest constituency in American politics, the very small number of Americans who wanted Donald Trump to lose the presidency and the Republicans to keep the Senate. Remember the “burn it down” wars of this summer? Back when (until about 9:00 p.m. last night) Democrats and many Never Trumpers had the electoral power to purge the GOP? I wrote this:

I’m going to go ahead and admit to a sad reality, right up front. I want what the best available polling tells me that I’m highly unlikely to get. I want Donald Trump out of the presidency and the GOP still in control of the Senate. In other words, in the furious argument over the future of the Republican party and political conservatism, consider me squarely in the camp that seeks to dump Trump but not to seek vengeance on the rest of the GOP.

A rage, fury, and a “burn it all down” mentality is one of the maladies that brought us to the present moment. Repeating that same impulse, but with an entire party in the crosshairs, will only compound our political dysfunction.

Besides, it’s not necessary for those who seek to send a message that Donald Trump is an unfit president. And it’s counterproductive for those of us who still believe that the conservative elements of the Republican party provide the best prospects for securing the liberty, prosperity, and security of the American republic.

Going into this election, I was deeply concerned that the necessary removal of an unfit president would also lead to the enactment of multiple progressive statutory reforms that I believed were bad for the country. A Democratic president ushers Trump off the stage. A Republican Senate not only holds the bulk of American law in place until the next election season, it can provide oversight and accountability in the event of administration scandals or abuse.

But the underlying disease of American division and polarization remains. If anything, a divided government will cause it to intensify. And the nature of the division will deepen each side’s worst fears. Democrats are deeply frustrated that their enduring electoral majority (the GOP has won exactly one popular vote since 1992) cannot rule—it’s blocked by the Senate, and their presidential victories are rendered precarious by the Electoral College. Republicans look at the proposed Democratic agenda and fear majoritarian tyranny. There is no clear path forward.

But this essay has been too bleak. There is still much to be thankful for. In spite of our immense divisions and increasing animosity, we are conducting an orderly and (so far) peaceful count. An astonishing number of Americans participated in American democracy. We enjoy liberty and prosperity at a scale that billions of citizens of the world can scarcely comprehend.

These are anxious days, but it is still a profound blessing to be an American.

One more thing…

More on this later (and on the Advisory Opinions podcast), but I can’t let November 4th pass without noting a potentially promising development for religious liberty. My friends at the Becket Fund argued Fulton v. City of Philadelphia before the Supreme Court today. I’ve written about Fulton before:

The petitioners in Fulton seek protection from a Philadelphia rule that required a Catholic foster care agency to provide written endorsements for same-sex couples (in violation of church teaching) as a condition of participating in the city’s foster care system.

In addition, the petitioners are asking the court to revisit Employment Division v. Smith, a 1990 Supreme Court opinion that substantially restricted the strength and scope of the Free Exercise Clause. If the petitioners prevail, it could well represent the most significant advance for religious liberty in decades.

Tune into Advisory Opinions tomorrow for a deeper analysis, but in the meantime I’d refer to you the tweet thread below from Becket’s Luke Goodrich. As is often the case in First Amendment cases, it looks like the Court’s ruling may not break down neatly on ideological/philosophical lines, and one or more of SCOTUS’s more progressive justices may join with their conservative colleagues and protect or expand religious freedom.

But we shall see. Oral arguments are not always a good predictor of judicial outcomes.

One last thing…

Have you started watching Season 2 of The Mandalorian? No? Shame on you.

Baby Yoda just might be the last, best hope for a united America.

Photo by Seth Herald/AFP via Getty Images.

How Claims of Dead Michigan Voters Spread Faster Than the Facts

How Claims of Dead Michigan Voters Spread Faster Than the Facts

By Jack Nicas. 

6 min

November 6, 2020.

The tweets began to arrive Wednesday night, carrying explosive claims that people in Michigan were voting under the names of dead people.

Austen Fletcher, a former Ivy League football player turned right-wing internet journalist, said in videos posted to Twitter that he had discovered registration documents on a State of Michigan website that showed that four people with reported birth dates from 1900 to 1902 had submitted absentee ballots ahead of Tuesday’s election. “How long has this been going on?” he asked.

By Thursday morning, Mr. Fletcher’s videos were the talk of the Republican internet. “Why is it taking regular Americans to expose this level of obvious corruption?” said Candace Owens, a conservative commentator, sharing one of the videos to her 2.7 million Twitter followers.

Yet a few phone calls by Mr. Fletcher would have revealed evidence that indicates that what appeared to be fraud were run-of-the-mill clerical errors.

In one case, a 74-year-old woman in Hamlin Township, Mich., had asked for an absentee ballot for the first time in years, setting off a notice from the state’s digital voter rolls that her birth date was not on file, according to Catherine Lewis, the town’s clerk. The system had assigned the woman the default birth date: 01/01/01, or Jan. 1, 1901.

Ms. Lewis said she knew the woman. Hamlin Township, a rural community on Lake Michigan, has just 3,400 people. She said she had driven to the woman’s home and collected a copy of her driver’s license so she could vote by mail. But Ms. Lewis had not gotten around to updating her file. “Rest assured,” Ms. Lewis said, “she is a legal voter.”

Then, on Thursday morning, after a marathon week for Ms. Lewis running the town’s vote, her phone began ringing. “I have had 18 calls and at least 20 strange emails asking me if I committed voter fraud,” she said. She was staying home with her family. “I need to be concerned about my family’s welfare,” she said.

In a text message on Friday, Mr. Fletcher, who goes by the pseudonym Fleccas online, said he was about to publish evidence that thousands of ballots in Michigan had been submitted under the names of dead people. He declined to speak on the phone. “Who is requesting, filling out, and returning these ballots,” he said in his message. “How many got thru? That’s my question.”

Since the polls closed on Tuesday, a number of internet sleuths have widely disseminated what they said was evidence that showed Democrats were trying to steal the election. In virtually every case so far, mainstream journalists have found the claims to be false or the product of typical errors in the election process.

Yet many people have not heard the truth behind the claims they are sharing — or, if they have, have dismissed it. Social media has created echo chambers where people hear largely from like-minded voices. And President Trump’s years of attacks on the media have caused many of his supporters to distrust journalists.

The result is a growing belief among some Americans that the 2020 election has been undermined by widespread fraud — a view sharply amplified by the president — despite virtually no evidence.

“What’s that saying? A lie gets halfway around the world by the time the truth gets its pants on,” said Matt Mackowiak, a Texas Republican consultant who inadvertently spurred false voter-fraud claims on Wednesday.

Mr. Mackowiak posted screenshots of an election map on Twitter that appeared to show that Joseph R. Biden Jr. had received 100 percent of newly counted ballots in an update to the vote count in Michigan early Wednesday.

Like Mr. Fletcher’s dead-voter videos, Mr. Mackowiak’s screenshots swiftly went viral. Conservative websites posted stories with headlines like “Very Odd: Michigan Found Over 100,000 Ballots and Every Single One Has Joe Biden’s Name on It.” About two hours later, Mr. Trump had shared the images on Twitter with the caption, “WHAT IS THIS ALL ABOUT?”

By that time, Mr. Mackowiak had seen people suggesting that the numbers he highlighted were the result of an error that had been fixed. He deleted his original tweet and wrote a new post clarifying that the suspicious numbers were not the result of fraud.

The New York Times found that Mr. Biden did not receive any of the votes in question and that the mix-up was the result of a typo in a small Michigan county that was caught and corrected in about 30 minutes.

Still, Mr. Mackowiak’s images continued to rocket around the internet. They were ultimately shared hundreds of thousands of times on Twitter. His correction? It had been shared 3,600 times as of Friday.

Election 2020 ›

Live Updates

Updated 

Nov. 7, 2020, 12:08 a.m. ET

“I certainly wasn’t intending to make a typo appear fraudulent,” Mr. Mackowiak said. “My worst fears going into the election was that half the country would see the result as illegitimate.”

A day later, after the claims connected to Mr. Mackowiak’s images had been widely debunked by news organizations, Mr. Trump spent 17 minutes behind the lectern in the White House briefing room, claiming without evidence that Democrats were trying to steal the election. One of his specific suggestions of evidence was a claim that a tranche of votes from Michigan “all had the name Biden on them.”

Immediately after Mr. Trump’s news conference, William Bennett, who was secretary of education under President Ronald Reagan, was asked on Fox News about possible voter fraud. “If there is evidence, and I believe there will be, it should come forward,” he said. He offered only one potential example of such fraud: “Large batches of votes with not a single one for Donald Trump.”

In the case of Mr. Fletcher’s dead-voter claims, the three other names in Michigan that he highlighted also appeared to be votes cast by living, eligible voters.

Amanda Kirkpatrick, the clerk in Jackson County, Mich., said a resident there who had appeared in one of Mr. Fletcher’s videos was an eligible voter who had cast her ballot, but the state’s voter rolls had an incorrect birth date for her. Ms. Kirkpatrick said her office had contacted the woman, checked her identification and updated her birth date.

There was a similar story in Detroit, where the other two examples in Mr. Fletcher’s videos matched eligible voters with identical names and ZIP codes there.

The city appeared to have mistakenly recorded the vote of William T. Bradley under his dead father, who had the same name and ZIP code. Mr. Bradley said in an interview that he had voted by mail for the first time because of the pandemic. He said that the ballot did not ask for his birth date and that he simply filled it out, signed it and sent it in mid-September. According to the State of Michigan website, his dead father mailed an absentee ballot on Sept. 19. It said Mr. Bradley never returned his.

In the fourth case, there was another eligible Detroit voter with an identical name and ZIP code as the person named in Mr. Fletcher’s video. That person could not be reached.

The Detroit city clerk did not respond to requests for comment.

Mr. Fletcher’s dead-voter claims were shared hundreds of thousands of times on Twitter, reaching millions of people. On Thursday morning, the Michigan Department of State tweeted its response.

“Fact check: Ballots of deceased voters are not counted,” it said. “On rare occasions, a ballot received for a living voter may be recorded in a way that makes it appear as if the voter is dead,” such as someone with an incorrect birth date or a son being mistaken for his father with the same name, the statement added. “In such scenarios, no one ineligible has actually voted, and there is no impact on the outcome of the election.”

The message was shared on Twitter fewer than 450 times as of Friday.

Mr. Fletcher doubled down. He shared an image on Twitter of four urns with a “Biden-Harris” and “I voted” stickers. Hours later, he uploaded a new video to YouTube, Facebook and Instagram of him walking through his findings again. In the video, he read the statement from Michigan officials.

“Maybe Michigan caught some. I hope they did. But how many didn’t get filtered through in the process and actually made it through and counted?” he said. “Maybe all these people voted for Joe Biden?”

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Fox News Hits a Dangerous New Low



Fox News Hits a Dangerous New Low

by Megan Garber, theatlantic.com

November 6, 2020 11:46 AM

The most-watched news network in America is choosing to mislead its viewers about the state of the election.

Photo by: The Atlantic

Here are some of the things that happened yesterday evening on the most-watched news network in America: The minority leader of the House of Representatives announced, absolutely falsely and with no pushback, that “President Trump won this election.” A former speaker of the House argued that, in the name of democracy, the U.S. federal government should “lock up” state election workers. One of the most-watched TV hosts in the country implied to the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee that the GOP-controlled Pennsylvania legislature should override the will of the state’s voters to appoint its own electors. Lindsey Graham responded, gravely, “Everything should be on the table.”

Fox News, which spent years flattering Donald Trump and his fictions, is finishing what it started. The network that first helped bring Trump to political power is now working—despite a fair election that seems poised, as of this writing, to be won by his opponent—to keep him there. Fox’s popular prime-time opinion programs, throughout this week, have functioned as a Trump-campaign ad by another means. But last night’s shows reached a dangerous new low. The Fox News Channel, this week, had the opportunity to reckon with reality; instead, the network chose to mislead its viewers about the state of the election, and to foment mistrust in the workings of the American electoral system more broadly. It chose the fate of Donald Trump—and the ratings that come from the viewers who love him—over the fate of American democracy.

Read: Do you speak Fox?

“As poll workers continue to slowly tabulate results,” Sean Hannity said last night, “we have serious reports of irregularities and fraud and not allowing vote counters to observe counting. Which is a matter of law. And they continue to come in, these reports, from all over the country.”

The reports have been coming from the Trump campaign itself. They have not been validated. They have been, in some cases, thoroughly debunked. “Trump,” The Washington Post noted yesterday, in an extensive summary of his campaign’s long-running attempts to claim voter fraud where there is none, “has offered no evidence that the election’s integrity has been compromised, and none has been found. In fact, cybersecurity experts in the Trump administration and local officials say the process has been smooth despite the unusual historic circumstance of a deadly pandemic.”

That did not stop the misinformation on the news network. On Wednesday evening, Laura Ingraham—who had spent part of the day in the White House with the Trump campaign—claimed that Democrats were trying to “destroy the integrity of our election process with this mail-in, day-of registration efforts, counting after the election is over, dumping batches of votes a day, two days, maybe even three days after an election.”

The election results trickled in as they did because the pandemic has changed the logistics of how Americans vote: New circumstances led to new systems, as they should. And the lag in vote counting is partially attributable to Trump himself: His campaign, operating on the conventional wisdom that in-person and same-day voting favors Republicans, spent months telling its base not to vote by mail.

None of that was explained to Fox’s viewers. In fact, if you watched only Fox to get election results, as so many Americans do, you could reasonably forget that America is currently living through a steadily worsening pandemic. Instead, on Fox this week, “fraud” has been a refrain. Political actors who have various vested interests in a second term of Trump have filled the network’s air with baseless claims of Democrats’ malfeasance and, consequently, the wide-scale failures of a free and fair election. (PRESIDENT TRUMP DISCUSSES QUESTIONABLE ELECTION RESULTS read one Fox chyron last night. THE CORRUPT MEDIA MOB went another.) As ballot counts in remaining states continued to narrow in favor of Joe Biden, Fox’s viewers were misled: They were told, again and again, that an election whose outcome they might not like is the same thing as an election that has been stolen.

Senator Ted Cruz: “What we’re seeing tonight, what we’ve been seeing the last three days, is outrageous. It is partisan, it is political and it is lawless. We’re seeing this pattern in Democratic city after Democratic city, with the worst in the country right now is Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.”

Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich: “You have a group of corrupt people who have absolute contempt for the American people, who believe that we are so spineless, so cowardly, so unwilling to stand up for ourselves, that they can steal the presidency … No one should have any doubt: You are watching an effort to steal the presidency of the United States.”

Senator Lindsey Graham: “The allegations of wrongdoing are earth-shattering … So Senate Republicans are going to be briefed by the Trump campaign Saturday, and every Senate Republican and House Republican needs to get on television and tell this story.”

These baseless claims were echoes of the desperate and lie-riddled speech Donald Trump had delivered from the White House earlier yesterday evening. They were also distillations of arguments that had been building throughout the day on the network. On the early-evening talk show The Five, one of the hosts, Greg Gutfeld, made the eye-popping argument that Democrats’ dislike of Trump was its own evidence of voter fraud. (He said nothing about the grounds for the dislike.) “Because if you’re that emotionally invested in getting rid of somebody,” Gutfeld said—“and especially the hard left, who are emotionally invested in politics—they’re gonna do anything that they can. They will cheat.”

Hannity, meanwhile, spun—again, baseless—stories about polls that were wrong on purpose in order to discourage Republican-voter turnout. He aired a video of Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, insisting that Pennsylvania ballots whose counting wasn’t overseen by a cadre of Trump partisans must be thrown out. The arguments were incoherent, but they also worked to create a fog of uncertainty and indignation around the election. During an exceptionally fragile week in America, the opinion-mongers have been taking a line from Steve Bannon’s old playbook—flood the zone with shit—and modifying it for the present circumstances. They are flooding the zone with “fraud.”

Read: The Fox News powder keg

They are also, in the process, undermining the “news” element of Fox News. Martha MacCallum and Bret Baier, the news-side anchors who have been leading much of the network’s election coverage this week, have spent much of their own airtime pushing back against daytime guests who have echoed the Trump campaign’s baseless claims of fraud. They have repeated the need for evidence when it comes to validating those claims; they have emphasized, as well, how absent that evidence has been. This has been, in part, why some observers of the network have been wondering whether this week marks a new relationship between Fox News and reality.

But those most basic efforts at checking the president’s lies mean little when, on the same network, powerful members of the United States government, encouraged by Fox’s opinion hosts, are talking openly about arresting poll workers and staging coups. And those efforts mean little if, as CNN reported this morning, Fox is instructing its journalists not to refer to Joe Biden as the “president-elect”—even once the network itself calls the race. One of the stories of this week, as it will be during every election week in America, is the outsize power TV news networks have when it comes to processing the results of elections. (Fox itself made that power clear when it called Arizona, relatively early on Tuesday night, for Joe Biden.) The whiplash on Fox this week—reality crowded by lies, fighting for air on the network—is a reminder that that influence extends far beyond the mathematical calling of states. “Many Americans will never again accept the results of any presidential election,” Tucker Carlson warned earlier this week, as he insisted, baselessly, that the results for the current one should not be trusted. The host was taking the network full circle. He was fulfilling its own flawed prophecies. This is a crucial hour for American democracy. Fox failed it.

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The Final Gasp of Donald Trump’s Presidency



The Final Gasp of Donald Trump’s Presidency

by Olivia Nuzzi, nymag.com

November 6, 2020 08:00 PM

intelligencer is a Vox Media Network. © 2020 Vox Media, LLC. All rights reserved.

Donald Trump going out with a limp seems like an oxymoron,” a senior adviser to the president told me. In width and in word, in soaring skyscrapers and Brioni suits and arena rallies and various euphemisms for great (yuge, bigly), the man has been defined by and obsessed with largeness. His presidency is ending small.

Trump is guided by instinct on most days, but the final year of his presidency was marked by something unusual: He wasn’t sure what to believe or what to do anymore. At first he feared Joe Biden, then he thought he was a joke, and then the joke was on him. By the summer, Trump understood that he could lose. Surrounded by yes-men, he yearned, on occasion, for the truth they would not give him. “At one point, he said, ‘Well, how are all the polls wrong?’ ” the adviser recalled. And by Election Day, he understood that losing was inevitable. He accepted, even if he had no plans to concede, that his presidency was over.

Nevertheless, in the residence, surrounded by senior advisers and family, he was furious. About everything. He was angry things weren’t going his way. He was angry Fox had called Arizona for Biden. He was angry that Biden had gone out on TV first. Everyone was offering him different ideas about what to say to the nation, to fight or to be measured or to say this or that, contradicting each other as the president grew angrier and angrier, throwing up one hand to silence people as he reviewed notes in the other. He was unhappy with the notes. He was unhappy with everything. And then he went out and ignored everybody who had tried to help.

“As the day wore on, the day wore on him,” the adviser said. White House and campaign staff whispered among themselves. “ ‘Wow, he’s so down. He knows he’s losing.’ ” But uncertainty crept back by dawn. When he woke, the race still not called, and his mood changed. On a phone call with the adviser, he said, “Why would I lose to Joe Biden? What’s going on?” He launched a demand — “STOP THE COUNT!” — on Twitter, but he didn’t understand that if the vote count were to stop on Wednesday morning, he’d be handing Joe Biden the presidency.

The adviser asked if he was trying to say that votes cast illegally (something that happens rarely, despite Trump’s claims) should not be counted. “He said, ‘Yeah, yeah. That’s what I mean.’ ” People knew that by “stop the count,” he didn’t mean to literally stop the count, Trump said. “No,” the adviser told him, “people think you mean stop counting. If they stopped counting, you’d lose because you’re behind.” Oh. The president asked the adviser what to say instead. After consulting with the campaign’s lawyers, they settled on a message that claimed if the count was confined to legal votes only, he’d win, which put through the presidential tweet filter came out like this: “ANY VOTE THAT CAME IN AFTER ELECTION DAY WILL NOT BE COUNTED!” and “STOP THE FRAUD!”

Meanwhile, the campaign mounted half-assed legal fights in states they thought he still had a chance to win — not because they thought it would bring them the election but because there wasn’t much else to do but fight. The New York Times reported that the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, said he was looking for a James Baker–type figure. Instead, they got Rudy Giuliani, Pam Bondi, Corey Lewandowski, and Dave Bossie. “That’s not a legal team,” one of the president’s friends told me. “It’s all so bizarre.”

This person, who speaks to the president often — or, more accurately, who listens and says uh-huh as the president speaks — said that Trump is not just done for, but done. “He wants to lose. He’s out of money. He worries about being arrested. He worried about being assassinated,” they said. “It hasn’t been a great experience for him. He likes showing people around the White House, but the actual day-to-day business of being president? It’s been pretty unpleasant for him.”

Everyone processes loss in their own way.

“A lot of what Trump says is the opposite of what he means. That’s true of all of us, to some extent,” the president’s friend said. But when Trump said he didn’t mind losing to Biden, even though he famously hates losers of any ilk, his friend believed him. “He doesn’t believe losing is shameful — quitting is bad. Losing isn’t,” this person said. “He’s afraid. He’s the most insecure, afraid person ever. He’s too afraid to be president. He’s afraid to exercise power. He’s afraid to do the job. It’s why he’s overbearing and crazy — he sabotages himself constantly because he hates himself and wants out. He’s always trying to hurt himself. That guy commits more self-harm than anyone I’ve ever encountered.”

Former Trump adviser Sam Nunberg didn’t buy that Trump could ever be okay with losing, but he figured he’d find a way to cope. After all, the plan in 2015, before Trump formally announced his candidacy, had been to drop out of the race and return to The Apprentice claiming that he could’ve won if he’d wanted to (NBC inadvertently kept him on the campaign trail when they severed its relationship with him over his anti-immigrant comments). That’s not so different from how Trump is preparing to spin his real loss now. “In general, he hates losing. In general, is he gonna be happy? Do you think this is what he wants, to sit here as Joe Biden gives his acceptance speech? Absolutely not,” Nunberg said, “He lost to an idiot, and he’ll believe this whole thing was rigged and stolen.”

In the weeks leading up to the election, certain White House officials and people close to the president were busy laying the groundwork for a post-Trump reputational and relationship recovery tour. Trump may be holding rallies and refusing to admit Biden is a legitimately elected president on prime-time Trump TV, but the anti-professional class of operators who assumed power on his coattails know that they’ll have to shape-shift if they want to survive. I received messages from multiple staffers who said they were counting down the days until freedom from the environment they entered, and stayed in, willingly. That they had so much to tell me now that it was too late to matter very much. That they were not the same as the others around them, the people who didn’t see the place, the presidency, for what it really was.

Others didn’t feel they had anything to explain or defend. “Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened,” a former White House official told me. “Live. Laugh. Love.” This person added, “Sometimes you own the libs; sometimes the libs own you.”