POTUS/General Election Thread 2020 + Aftermath

[Greyblades]

Harris' problem isnt so much across the aisle, its in-house.

Expect Gabbard's takedown to resume circulating in liberal circles, as the BLM "all cops are bastards" tone of the last two months crashes against the symbol of all that is corrupt in law enforcement being selected VP.

A twist of the knife in the bernie bros, no mistake.

[Hooahguy]

I dunno, I feel like the vast majority are fine with the pick, even if some are grumbling about it not being Warren or Bass. The fact that some of her biggest critics early on such as Shaun King are expressing their support now speaks volumes. The loudest people complaining about Harris being picked are the very online folks who Biden has been successfully ignoring during the campaign. If any lesson is learned from all of this its probably that Twitter isnt real life when it comes to electoral politics.

[a completely inoffensive name]

A twist of the knife in the bernie bros, no mistake.

*checks primary voter turnout stats* W H OMEGALUL

[rory_20_uk]

This is the perennial pragmatism vs purity. Biden's pick is a solid one for trying to get minorities and as many "law and order" types from the middle as humanly possible. They are the ones which are required to win elections.

I imagine that there are some Democrats who wanted Bernie to team up with AOC and the rest of The Squad who can then all snipe at Trump from Twitter for the next four years as he does further damage. But Bernie and AOC is the wonderfully "pureist" choice of proper Left wing politics which is quite some way from the "average" voter and would probably galvanise a nasty mix of money, racists and xenophobes to ensure that the Useful Idiots stay in power.

[Hooahguy]

I mean Trump is already going full-blown dog whistle and its not even September yet.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

I mean Trump is already going full-blown dog whistle and its not even September yet.

He never stopped. He is always on the attack. It is his metier.

[Greyblades]

I dunno, I feel like the vast majority are fine with the pick, even if some are grumbling about it not being Warren or Bass. The fact that some of her biggest critics early on such as Shaun King are expressing their support now speaks volumes. The loudest people complaining about Harris being picked are the very online folks who Biden has been successfully ignoring during the campaign. If any lesson is learned from all of this its probably that Twitter isnt real life when it comes to electoral politics.

Forgive me, I periodically forget liberal is paradoxically synonymous with progressive in america.

My point is she's a nightmare for those who are less than enthused with the drug war, for-profit prisons, wrongful death sentances and pretty much every other thing people have been railing against the last two months in the american legal system. They might be happy enough now but Biden's got to keep Harris' AG record an obscurity for another three months else people start realizing she has an even deeper "tough on crime" authoritarian streak than he does.

[Hooahguy]

Forgive me, I periodically forget liberal is paradoxically synonymous with progressive in america.

My point is she's a nightmare for those who are less than enthused with the drug war,

She was far better than any of her white counterparts at the time.

During Harris tenure, people charged with petty drug crimes were given a chance at diversion as an alternative to prosecution. Harris’ diversion program was so successful it became a national model. That didn’t exist before she was in office — she championed that program specifically as a route to reduce the injustices that POC face against the system.

The agency’s data shows there were 1,883 admissions to state prison on marijuana offenses during the years Harris was attorney general. There were another 92 admissions for crimes related to hashish, a drug made from cannabis resin. Notably, the figures dropped dramatically during Harris’ tenure, from 817 marijuana-related admissions in her first year in office to 137 in her last.

SOURCE:


So let’s be clear: Kamala was sworn into office in 2011 and within the very first year used her prosecutorial discretion to reduce marijuana related prosecutions by 70% — despite that marijuana remained illegal and her role as AG requires she enforce the existing laws on the books regardless of her personal feelings.

70%! That’s a whole lot of discretion favoring would-be defendants. By the time she ended her tenure in 2016, she reduced marijuana related prosecutions by 83%. Again, marijuana was still illegal in California the entire time she was AG. Yes, she has discretion, but discretion doesn’t mean refusing to enforce the laws that are on the books ever again.

Dropping 83% of prosecutions for marijuana isn’t nothing.

for-profit prisons,

The state prison population went down under her watch.

wrongful death sentances

Do you mean the Kevin Cooper case? Because by the time she became AG he had already exhausted all appeals, and the only avenue left was clemency which is solely up to the governor. Other than that, shes pretty infamous in California for being anti-death penalty, refusing the death penalty for a cop killer which really angered the police unions and Senator Feinstein who famously held a grudge against her when Kamala was running for senate.

and pretty much every other thing people have been railing against the last two months in the american legal system.

Biden's got to keep Harris' AG record an obscurity for four months else people start realizing she has an even deeper authoritarian streak than he does.

If you want justice in criminal justice, you need diversity inside the system. To me, a portion of the people hating on her career seem to be saying that we should leave all policing matters to white people. That doesn’t sit right with me.

You can’t judge her record in a vacuum. She didn’t build the system and isn’t personally responsible for failing to singlehandedly rectify a century and a half of racial oppression from the CA Attorney General’s office. Was she perfect? Of course not. But she definitely deserves far more credit than a lot of people give her. Kamala intentionally entered public service as a prosecutor at a time criminal justice was often led by very anti-Black, anti-immigrant, anti-sex work white men. Kamala was the first Black person to be AG of California - a state of 40 million in the 2000s tough on crime era. Any attorney general’s record for a state and department that huge (the largest state DOJ in the US) can be cherry picked.

Anyways, apparently the campaign raised a record-breaking $30 million in a single 24-hour period after Harris was named VP. The enthusiasm is definitely there.

[Montmorency]

On QAnon overwhelming the Republican party and base, as confessors increasingly run for office.
https://www.mediamatters.org/qanon-c...-congress-2020

Oddly, of the 75 examples listed 2 were running in Democratic primaries for the House. Both were also big believers in Pizzagate. Thankfully, both turned out to be marginal nonentities.


@Papewaio might be interested in this stuff.

Sections 11 and 12 of AB4 are also unconstitutional. Those sections set forth the
number of in-person polling places for early voting (Section 11) and vote centers for day-of-election
voting (Section 12). Under those sections, the number of in-person voting places a county must
establish is tied to the county’s population, resulting in more in-person voting places per capita for
voters in urban counties than in rural counties. [Ed. Do they know what "per capita" means?] This disparate treatment of Nevada voters based on
county population violates rural voters’ rights under the Equal Protection Clause.

This is the Trump administration suing Nevada over the alleged unconstitutionality of a new law that provides for mail ballots to be issued to all Nevada voters (and extends the deadline for their valid submission), and mandates per-capita minimums for in-person polling locations. The Trump administration insists this violates the Equal Protection clause of the 14th Amendment. The argument is reliant on Bush v. Gore, which was explicitly rendered as non-precedential at the time, and has never been used in case law in the 20 years since. The premise here is that the Trump administration believes the Nevada law will deny equal access of the franchise to some voters, even though the law is designed and provisioned to do the opposite, and the Trump administration and other Republican actors have persistently acted to deny voters equal access of the franchise. Very 1984.

The suit also claims that because the law would permit non-postmarked ballot mail to be accepted up to 3 days after election day - preexisting law allowed much the same but required a legible postmark - it creates the possibility that ballots mailed after election day could be counted, which could potentially conflict with federal election law that "electors of President and Vice President shall be appointed, in each State, on the Tuesday next after the first Monday in November, in every fourth year succeeding every election of a President and Vice President.” It is unclear why the potential for a ballot cast after election day would conflict with this clause if states failing to complete their counts or call the election before midnight of election day is not also in conflict with the law. In fact, in the subsequent clause of the legal code:

Whenever any State has held an election for the purpose of choosing electors, and has failed to make a choice on the day prescribed by law, the electors may be appointed on a subsequent day in such a manner as the legislature of such State may direct.

lol

LOL

But wait, there's more to this business than Nevada.

Trump just told us how mail delays could help him corrupt the election

It’s telling that after President Trump was widely rebuked for suggesting a delay of the election, he wasn’t remotely chastened. Instead, he floated another scenario that could help him accomplish the same goal of avoiding a free and fair election:

He suggested that only the votes that can be tallied on Election Day should count.

This may seem like Trumpian bluster. But it’s much more alarming in light of an important new exposé in The Post that reports on big backlogs in mail delivery due to “cost-cutting” by the new head of the U.S. Postal Service — who, by spectacular coincidence, just happens to be a top Trump fundraiser.

And here’s an additional reason for alarm that needs more attention: The impact of those delays could be dramatically exacerbated by state laws that invalidate ballots that are mailed before Election Day but arrive after Election Day.

Guess which key presidential swing states have such provisions invalidating ballots that arrive after Election Day?

All of them do, with the exception of North Carolina.

“In states where ballots won’t count if they are received after Election Day, the impact could be devastating," Vanita Gupta, the CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, told me, adding that this could “result in potentially hundreds of thousands of ballots getting rejected.”

“The delays are going to be unpredictable with the cuts being made on the postal service,” Gupta continued. “That impact could turn a swing state completely.”

The Post exposé reports that Postmaster General Louis DeJoy is implementing changes that have critics charging that mail delays may be “the result of a political effort to undermine absentee voting.”

These changes, The Post reports, include “prohibiting overtime pay, shutting down sorting machines early and requiring letter carriers to leave mail behind when necessary to avoid extra trips or late delivery on routes.” The result:

The new policies have resulted in at least a two-day delay in scattered parts of the country, even for express mail, according to multiple postal workers and union leaders. Letter carriers are manually sorting more mail, adding to the delivery time. Bins of mail ready for delivery are sitting in post offices because of scheduling and route changes. And without the ability to work overtime, workers say the logjam is worsening without an end in sight.

A spokesperson for the USPS is vowing that the changes are temporary and are not intended to delay the transmission of mailed ballots. But delays could nonetheless end up having a massive disenfranchising effect whatever the USPS’s motives, due to the precise confluence of factors coming together right now.

What’s more, USPS officials can plead innocence all they want, but Trump himself is banking on these delays to save his reelection hopes. Trump is basically telling us so himself.
[...]
It’s all there. Trump is looking to declare himself winner on Election Day, no matter how many mail ballots remain uncounted. He will say they are fraudulent. And if they tip the result against him, he will say that outcome is rigged, something he has already said publicly is inevitable.
[...]
This sheds more light on an important piece by David Wasserman predicting a disaster brewing around absentee ballots. Democrats will use vote-by-mail in far higher numbers than Republicans — due to Trump’s nonstop attacks on it — yet absentee ballots get rejected at disproportionate rates, due to procedural complexities.
[...]
“This is particularly unreasonable during a pandemic,” Weiser said. “We’re already experiencing substantial delays in the mail that will make it exceedingly difficult for many to meet those states’ deadlines, through no fault of their own.”

There is recourse here: Top Democratic lawyer Marc Elias tells me Democrats are litigating against these laws in every swing state, with an eye toward getting ballots counted that are postmarked before but arrive after Election Day. The absurdity of that deadline amid a pandemic and postal cutbacks might boost their legal case.

How the Media Could Get the Election Story Wrong

The coronavirus crisis means that states like Pennsylvania may be counting mail-in ballots for weeks, while President Trump tweets false allegations about fraud. And the last barriers between American democracy and a deep political crisis may be television news and some version of that maddening needle on The New York Times website.

I spoke last week to executives, TV hosts and election analysts across leading American newsrooms, and I was struck by the blithe confidence among some top managers and hosts, who generally said they’ve handled complicated elections before and can do so again. And I was alarmed by the near panic among some of the people paying the closest attention — the analysts and producers trying, and often failing, to get answers from state election officials about how and when they will count the ballots and report results.

“The nerds are freaking out,” said Brandon Finnigan, the founder of Decision Desk HQ, which delivers election results to media outlets. “I don’t think it’s penetrated enough in the average viewer’s mind that there’s not going to be an election night. The usual razzmatazz of a panel sitting around discussing election results — that’s dead,” he said.

The changes the media faces are profound, with technical and political dimensions.

First, there’s already a shift underway from a single-day, in-person election. In the 2018 midterms, only 60 percent of the votes were cast in person on Election Day. More votes will probably be sent in this year by mail or cast in September and October. That risks coverage misfires: In 2018, cable news commentators spent election night suggesting that the “blue wave” hadn’t arrived. But they were simply impatient: The Democratic surge showed up when the final California races were called weeks later. If the 2016 election had been conducted amid the expected surge in mail-in voting because of the coronavirus crisis, the Pennsylvania results might not have been counted until Thanksgiving.

Postal Service overhauls leadership as Democrats press for investigation of mail delays

Postmaster General Louis DeJoy unveiled a sweeping overhaul of the nation’s mail service, displacing the two top executives overseeing day-to-day operations, according to a reorganization memo released Friday. The shake-up came as congressional Democrats called for an investigation of DeJoy and the cost-cutting measures that have slowed mail delivery and ensnared ballots in recent primary elections.

Twenty-three postal executives were reassigned or displaced, the new organizational chart shows. Analysts say the structure centralizes power around DeJoy, a former logistics executive and major ally of President Trump, and de-emphasizes decades of institutional postal knowledge. All told, 33 staffers included in the old postal hierarchy either kept their jobs or were reassigned in the restructuring, with five more staffers joining the leadership from other roles.
[...]
The Postal Service will implement a hiring freeze, according to the reorganization announcement, and will ask for voluntary early retirements. It also will realign into three “operating units” — retail and delivery, logistics and processing, and commerce and business solutions — and scale down from seven regions to four.

The structure displaces postal executives with decades of experience, moving some to new positions and others out of leadership roles entirely, including McAdams, Williams and chief commerce and business solutions officer Jacqueline Krage Strako, who previously held the title of executive vice president and chief customer and marketing officer.
[...]
A letter signed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), House Oversight Committee Chair Carolyn B. Maloney (D-N.Y.) and seven other Democrats, including Connolly, urged Postal Service Inspector General Tammy L. Whitcomb to examine how DeJoy came to implement policies that prohibit postal workers from taking overtime or making extra trips to deliver mail on time, and how such delays specifically affect election mail.

“Given the ongoing concerns about the adverse impacts of Trump Administration policies on the quality and efficiency of the Postal Service, we ask that you conduct an audit of all operational changes put in place by Mr. DeJoy and other Trump Administration officials in 2020,” the letter states.

It also asks Whitcomb to review the finances of DeJoy and his wife, Aldona Wos, the nominee for ambassador to Canada. The couple’s holdings include between $30.1 million and $75.3 million in assets in USPS competitors or contractors, according to a financial disclosure Wos filed with the Office of Government Ethics when she was nominated. Postal Service mail processing contractor XPO Logistics — which acquired DeJoy’s company New Breed Logistics in 2014 — represents the vast majority of those holdings. Their combined stake in competitors UPS and trucking company J.B. Hunt is roughly $265,000.

During the USPS’s quarterly board of governors meeting Friday, DeJoy said he negotiated the loan terms with Mnuchin. Upon accessing the loan, the Postal Service, subject to confidentiality restrictions, will hand over proprietary contracts for its 10 largest service agreements with private sector shippers. Those businesses use the mail service for “last mile” package delivery from distribution centers to consumers’ homes or businesses.

Mnuchin had sought sweeping operational control of the Postal Service in previous loan terms, including provisions that would allow the Trump administration to approve senior postal personnel decisions, service contracts with third-party shippers, collective bargaining negotiation strategies and high package prices.

In April, shortly after Congress authorized the loan, Trump called the Postal Service “a joke” and said he would not approve any emergency funding unless the USPS quadrupled package delivery prices, a move analysts said would quickly bankrupt the agency by chasing away customers to private-sector competitors.

As for mail voting for its own sake, let's just say I'm glad New York isn't a swing state. After what happened with the primary in June - I'm not sure if they've finally fully certified the results, but if they have it took them almost 7 weeks, taking 2 or 3 just to start tallying. Tens of thousands of ballots have been invalidated on technicalities. I'm not even going to bother in November. Between walking to the county board of elections to hand-deliver a ballot, and walking to an early voting location, I'll cut the middleman (requesting a ballot) entirely and opt for the latter. Universal mail voting (with ancillary in-person option) is a great goal for streamlining the electoral process and promoting consistency and access, but this country needs a little more stability and competence to fully adopt it, despite reaching the milestone of designating the vast majority of voters eligible to vote by mail for the first time in history.

Florida is relatively good with the logistics of mail voting at least, or so I hear. Just this week, the city of Portland, Oregon held a special election, counted 170K votes, and certified the results by morning of the day after. Oregon is a state that runs ALL-MAIL ELECTIONS, and has done so for 20 years, so this shit is not impossible.
https://www.kgw.com/article/news/pol...5-a85fda859208

[Montmorency]

What I think is needful: Punitive anti-GOP voting come November. Aside from those GOP'ers who have consistently opposed Trump (3? fewer?) we should pick the Dem and fire for effect.

Redpilled. Based.

If you meant, 'do I believe that they have lost the moral high ground to preach about the vital nature of one aspect of the Constitution by championing a fumbling would-be pseudo-autocrat who is at best operating extra-constitutionally and quite possibly in direct contravention of other portions of that document' I would say "yes" -- while noting that they will never recognize much less acknowledge the logical and ethical fallacy in which they are engaged.

The closest I've seen any of them come is Ammon Bundy distancing himself from organized anti-government groups because of backlash against him for suggesting that maybe immigrants aren't evil vermin.

...

Those who expect Trump to be memory holed or quasi-rehabilitated, like Bush II, or mythified like Reagan, are probably wrong.

There will be a new Lost Cause legend. Because it satisfies both the impulses to flatter oneself and one's commitments and to account for how a perfect ideology could be rejected on a national scale, which were the motivations toward the first Lost Cause (besides reinsinuating Southern power in an active way). The first Confederacy lost the fight but won the peace, enabling its adherents to advance the first Lost Cause. We must not allow it to happen again. The framework for permanent struggle is already here in QAnon.

(I do expect the name of Donald Trump to have more clout in the mouths of national Republicans than the man himself.)

This is the perennial pragmatism vs purity. Biden's pick is a solid one for trying to get minorities and as many "law and order" types from the middle as humanly possible. They are the ones which are required to win elections.

I imagine that there are some Democrats who wanted Bernie to team up with AOC and the rest of The Squad who can then all snipe at Trump from Twitter for the next four years as he does further damage. But Bernie and AOC is the wonderfully "pureist" choice of proper Left wing politics which is quite some way from the "average" voter and would probably galvanise a nasty mix of money, racists and xenophobes to ensure that the Useful Idiots stay in power.

As a reminder, Harris was for the elimination of private health insurance before she was against it, and post-California her record has been one of the most liberal for national Democrats (including working with AOC on climate policy and Sanders on economic relief). There is not a useful dichotomy between pragmatism and purity when what's really going on is fundamentally a difference in policy preferences and political priors, one that shifts over time. Few speak of the ideological purity of the hard-right Republican politicians (functionally the whole party), who are far more ideologically rigid than almost any national Democrat, including Sanders. (For example, in the categorical rejection of more government spending on pandemic relief.) But I've never even heard of a putatively non-partisan discourse of a tension between Republican "purity" and pragmatism, perhaps because it is widely assumed that only liberals have the agency or desire to seek to accomplish things, and therefore only liberals can be held to account for their aspirations and performance.

Most candidates run to the center in the general election. Biden is moving left.

Admittedly, it may be an advantage that Biden has over Trump that polling has evinced a perception among the electorate of Biden being more moderate. Whereas in 2016 similar polling reported that Clinton was seen as more extreme than Trump. This comes despite Biden's platform being well to the left of where Clinton's started or ended. The electorate is malinformed, underinformed, and full of idiots. Politics should be understood in terms of mechanically manipulating these tendencies to maximal advantage, rather than allowing them to manifest as disadvantage. The chief example of a Sandersite "purist" illusion/handicap is the heartfelt belief that top-down persuasion is an available and useful component of organization (contrasted with mobilization) in electoral politics.

I'm not super-enthused in the context of the Democratic VP pick being the presumptive nominee in 2024 or 2028, but Harris has time to grow. As usual, Eric Levitz does very good syllogistic analysis (though this one is a rehash).

(It occurs to me that in a scenario of long-term single-party governance, the presidential field would become narrower than it ever has. Not that we're yet at the point of anticipating a Democratic lock on national politics, and a Republican single-party state would have the oligarchic politics of Putin's Russia, I'm just saying that given the current norms around the VP position a baton relay is what would naturally emerge in any long period of single-party rule).

[rory_20_uk]

I have suspicion that many Republicans want the low taxes / high corporate profits and are prepared to voice the gay bashing, bible thumping gun shooting rhetoric to keep in line. I don't even think that Trump really gives a damn about most of the stuff he pretends to be the leader of - and as long as he helps big business / places conservative judges and ensures no gun laws it all sort of all stays together.

In essence, they are collectively held together with their hatred of the "Left" with the views that differing not really conflicting.

[CrossLOPER]

I have suspicion that many Republicans want the low taxes / high corporate profits and are prepared to voice the gay bashing, bible thumping gun shooting rhetoric to keep in line. I don't even think that Trump really gives a damn about most of the stuff he pretends to be the leader of - and as long as he helps big business / places conservative judges and ensures no gun laws it all sort of all stays together.

In essence, they are collectively held together with their hatred of the "Left" with the views that differing not really conflicting.

I am somewhat taken aback by the fact that this seems new to you.

The man is trapped in his own world. Anything he does is of benefit to him alone. I don't think the Republicans have any ideas or new concepts for anything. The world is changing and the country is dealing with difficult problems, and half of the Republican senators think that if they sit back and do nothing, that everything will sort itself out. If only they extended this concept to their own campaigns.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

Redpilled. Based.

As a Boomer, I had to have the latter term explained to me by my son. He suggested it is (started as?) some kind of alt-right code language. I will assume you meant it, given the Matrix reference, in the context of me finally having "seen the light" in my vehemence in opposing the current President of the USA. I will note, however, that I am in no way, shape, or form a proponent of the alt-right agenda. They are anathema to a conservative such as myself.

As you are no doubt aware, the underpinnings of my disdain for the current occupant of 1600 PA Ave are quite different than your own, though we have come to share a short term political objective for reasons of our own -- some similar, others I suspect not so.

[CrossLOPER]

As a Boomer, I had to have the latter term explained to me by my son.

I actually happened to look into this a while ago. It's a Matrix reference, obviously. It's supposed to mean taking a close look at the world and its wrongs around you, instead of burying your head in the sand. With incels and the alt-right, it means that all women are gold-digging whores because they don't want to have sex with you, blacks just want to steal your TV, and some other nonsense that takes minimal brainpower to think of. Mostly I remember the stuff about women. It's amazing how much people build their identity around being socially inept.