re: #67 ericblair

I don’t know what we’re supposed to do with a statement like “it will be an unprecedented clusterfuck and they’ll steal it somehow”. How are they going to do it? How are they going to get enough electoral votes in close states to the Supreme Court to throw the election that way? How many close states are Republican legislatures and governors and Supreme Courts (I think FL and TX)? Any Dem in the chain is going to throw sand in the gears of a stolen election.

How are enough balloting precincts going to be shut down, if the Dems are outright leading in the suburbs too and a huge number are voting early or by mail? Fucking with the mail has made Dems paranoid about banking their votes early, and discouraged goopers from voting by mail and therefore maybe voting at all; how is that actually helping them? We’re already able to monitor mail-in returns, and Dems look like they’re doing substantially better than expected (a good resource here).

Every Dem I know is paranoid about this election in a way that is totally, utterly unlike 2016. The whole public discussion of the election is about how Biden is significantly ahead and how the Republicans are trying to steal it. Third parties are essentially dead. I don’t think complacency or optimism are problems here.

The answer, I suspect, is that they will simply pretend the results are invalid and that Republicans actually won. There will be some conspiracy theory-type nonsense about how 50k votes here in PA are invalid, or a basket of Trump votes in WI was thrown away, or someone saw a black antifa truck next to a polling booth in Florida or something. In the end, the election won’t be stolen by judges or faithless electors or anything like that. It will be decided the same way so many major issues are decided - by mainstream American media companies pretending that made-up Republican issues are real.

If CNN and the like spend the weeks following the election bringing Republicans on to state that we can’t trust these election results, and what about this judge here in Florida that said something about a minor fraud issue, and what about that story that FOX said where Democrats were bringing in trucks of illegals to vote, the American people will believe the election is fraudulent. They will believe that any Democrat win is ‘controversial’. They will believe that any win, even a landslide win, is ‘in doubt’. And then when the same media presents some authoritative statement, such as a Supreme Court ruling or even just Trump declaring that he won and holding another inauguration, they will pretend that that decides the matter. And for millions of Americans, it will.

Even if not, the goal will be to damage any subsequent government permanently. To ensure that any Democratic government is seen as illegitimate before it starts, and to ensure that any Democratic policies are seen as tyranny of the minority. US mainstream media has been doing this for nearly 20 years now. They, not the votes or the judges, will decide the outcome of this election.