Quote Originally Posted by Hooahguy View Post
I agree with your post completely. The delay for counting mail-in ballots is part of the reason why I think Trump has a good chance of winning re-election. Wouldnt matter who was the Dem candidate- Biden, Bernie, Kamala, Yang, whoever. All would have this same fundamental issue. If he does win due to stopping counting ballots, there will be violence like we have never seen. I just cant see it ending in any other way. With early voting beginning in just a couple weeks or so in some places, the Biden campaign absolutely needs to start emphasizing to go out and vote in person early. And I dont mean putting out little ads on Instagram or Facebook posts, I mean concentrated tv and radio ads plastering the airwaves in all 50 states, or at least the battleground states. Or, and this is harsh, we just have to take the risk and encourage people to stand in the voting lines on election day. Take that risk for the sake of our democracy.

Edit: Boris Shcherbina's speech to the Chernobyl workers in the HBO miniseries is surprisingly relevant.

Except instead of going into that water, its standing in line to vote for potentially hours during a pandemic.
In February one would have had to be a freaking visionary to see this whole scenario playing out like it has. Even on Super Tuesday I still had some latent expectation that we would kind of, you know, handle the pandemic. And without a raging pandemic, mail voting isn't a flashpoint or major factor.

The Obamas and IIRC other DNC speakers did mention voting early.


An addendum to my post on the election and mail voting: I can't believe I overlooked this earlier, but due to the strict and complicated rules of the process, mail ballots are frequently invalidated even in the best of times (unrelated to delivery time)! Granted that nullifying a million votes in New York and California wouldn't affect the presidential race (it could matter a lot in House or local races upstate!), but for the swing states the baseline attrition rate alone on mail ballots would be of major concern even if electoral administration were on the level and the postal service were up to the task.

That alone is bad, but of course it gets worse. A massive partisan imbalance in mail voting just when mail voting becomes a major, if not majority, component of a national election, is an unmitigated disaster-in-waiting regardless of the circumstances surrounding it. But the circumstances make this the most important election of our lives (so far)! Promoting the absentee alternative seemed to make sense in the spring, but logistics and bureaucratic hurdles AND partisan imbalance make it a fool's errand. This is where the hard-left critiques of the Democratic establishment's constitutional mildness and understatement may prove meritorious, if Dem leaders don't go apeshit on this point right about now. Like this sort of thing, but much more:



I'm not going to bother with mail voting again until we transition to proper all-mail elections like some of the Western states. My polling place is a damn 15-minute walk from my home. Why go to *extra* trouble and delay just to have the opportunity of doing something wrong or the administrators doing something wrong and having your vote rubbished (like mine probably was in July)? Having time to review and research the ballot is nice, but you can usually get the full slate for your locality ahead of time on various resource websites. If a normal person needs a nerd reviewing their ballot and envelope to guarantee they're up to standard, just vote in-person. If you do vote by mail, you can do so early and you can torture your county officials into looking up whether your ballot was received, but they can't divine beforehand if your ballot has any defects that will lead to its nullification.

And I also forgot to mention that the baseline of voter suppression in states under Republicans, that old standby, is going to be elevated as well. Voter rolls, polling locations... forget about access or early voting for AAs in North Carolina or Georgia.

We're facing a lot of problems.

The Republican Embrace of QAnon Goes Far Beyond Trump

Late last month, as the Texas Republican Party was shifting into campaign mode, it unveiled a new slogan, lifting a rallying cry straight from a once-unthinkable source: the internet-driven conspiracy theory known as QAnon. The new catchphrase, “We Are the Storm,” is an unsubtle cue to a group that the F.B.I. has labeled a potential domestic terrorist threat. It is instantly recognizable among QAnon adherents, signaling what they claim is a coming conflagration between President Trump and what they allege, falsely, is a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophile Democrats who seek to dominate America and the world. The slogan can be found all over social media posts by QAnon followers, and now, too, in emails from the Texas Republican Party and on the T-shirts, hats and sweatshirts that it sells. It has even worked its way into the party’s text message system — a recent email from the party urged readers to “Text STORM2020” for updates. The Texas Republicans are an unusually visible example of the Republican Party’s dalliance with QAnon, but they are hardly unique. A small but growing number of Republicans — including a heavily favored Republican congressional candidate in Georgia — are donning the QAnon mantle, ushering its adherents in from the troll-infested fringes of the internet and potentially transforming the wild conspiracy theory into an offline political movement, with supporters running for Congress and flexing their political muscle at the state and local levels.
[...]
Fearful of inviting similar blowback, few other elected Republicans have been willing to speak out publicly. Mostly, they avoid questions about it, demonstrating the thin line some officials are trying to walk between extreme elements among their base who adore Mr. Trump and the moderate voters they need to win over.
According to CNN, "Over four days, roughly 122 million people watched the [Democratic National] convention – including 85.1 million on television and 35.5 million livestream views." That's more than I expected. But it doesn't matter. Over the past year my greatest misfire of political analysis was in watching the Democratic primaries. I overlooked the fundamentals of the electorate as apparent from the outset, and focused too much on the weft and slew of the process over time. Biden beat Sanders because his floor of support was similarly high but his ceiling was higher, and the number of people who preferred Sanders was always less than the number of people who preferred someone other than Sanders. Knock together any sort of optimality model with these facts, and to the extent they don't change significantly - they didn't - then the model would announce a Biden victory over all other competitors was always the most plausible outcome from April 2019. Personalistic speculation has to justify itself against fundamentals. (Though on that count, many on the left overlooked that while Biden isn't a good leader, he's a good politician.)

By the same tokens, Trump almost always loses on paper because the fundamentals are stacked against him; more people are always against him than are for him, and he's only ever bled support on net. But in this race the process takes on a hardly-imaginable importance. That it would come to matter so much is... I'm just slow to put pieces together, though I'm far from alone. I didn't think the confluence of terribles could get this bad!