POTUS/General Election Thread 2020 + Aftermath

[Montmorency]

We will get a smarter Trump, but even a smarter Trump will be 'less bad' in a practical way. Much of the damage Trump has caused has come at his own incompetence and inability to achieve his goals in a productive manner.

A smart fascist would have seen the pandemic for the PR opportunity it was and jumped on it. Democracy would have been for the worse, but we wouldn't have 170,000 dead at this point.

Right-wing leaders have not had a good record on pandemic response this year. The classic fascists themselves actually ran their countries awfully - they were incompetent administrators. I think a fascist who has what it takes to gain and hold control of a nation cannot achieve technocratic success by the nature of the attributes that delivered him to power. One factor is that authoritarianism in itself is incompatible with the observance or iteration of scientific or evidence-based policymaking.

Trump is a particularly harsh case because he is both a narcissist and a lackwit, but you see the same sorts of impulses in less psychologically-deviant rulers.

[Pannonian]

Right-wing leaders have not had a good record on pandemic response this year. The classic fascists themselves actually ran their countries awfully - they were incompetent administrators. I think a fascist who has what it takes to gain and hold control of a nation cannot achieve technocratic success by the nature of the attributes that delivered him to power. One factor is that authoritarianism in itself is incompatible with the observance or iteration of scientific or evidence-based policymaking.

Trump is a particularly harsh case because he is both a narcissist and a lackwit, but you see the same sorts of impulses in less psychologically-deviant rulers.

The alt right puppet masters are experts at peddling dreams. They understand the system. Then when they're elected, they run all sorts under the umbrella of democracy. Unfortunately, democracy doesn't solve everything. For instance, when reality has to be faced, no amount of appealing to a democratic mandate will change reality.

However, you lot have at least woken up and look set to turf out your set of alt righters. Over on our side of the water, our alt righters are still going strong.

[Montmorency]

However, you lot have at least woken up and look set to turf out your set of alt righters.

On net hardly anyone's woken up in this sense, though in the sense of the Great Awokening many people who were already liberals... many Republicans have admittedly been swayed to a degree by the tide of social liberalism, but that doesn't seem to affect their preferences in Republican politicians.

George W. Bush's approval rating moved in a range from ~90% to ~25% (65). Obama's range was within ~60% to ~40% (20). Trump's range has been within 46% to 36% (10). Trump has basically never been below 40% since the Republicans passed their tax bill at the end of 2017. His current approval rating is about where he was a year ago - despite, you know, everything.

It is possible that Trump as a personality commands uniquely stronger loyalty from the Republican base than a generic Republican would even now, but that's not testable for a long time, and the fact remains that around 40% of the electorate are unshakable partisans of a death cult, and these people will still exist come January. There is no reason to think they won't continue to degenerate, indeed, along the same monotonic trend of many years.

[Hooahguy]

If anyone hasn't watched Biden's acceptance speech from tonight, I'd highly recommend people watch it. Its really superb. Even Republicans are saying its a great speech.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

As far as I know, this was Biden's best ever.

[Crandar]

Firstly, I just wanted to say that the level of the discussion here is probably one of the highest in the Internet sphere. The difference in quality becomes even starker, when compared to the usual alt-right troll fests that some of the forums (including TWC's mudpit) have devolved into.

Secondly, just my personal thoughts on the possible implications of mail voting, time delays, legal challenges, polarisation and the rest. I don't think that the republican institutions are at any risk, despite the recent decline of the political discourse, social cohesion and income equality. They are rooted deeply enough to easily resist the relatively minor crisis the pandemic, the unbalanced recovery since 2008 and Donald represent.

In my opinion, what Trump and his staff are trying to achieve is the construction of a post-election narrative that will keep safe the myth of his invincibility. We didn't lose the approval of the absolute majority, no, we were defeated, because the establishment, media, Chinese and the rest conspired against us. He had tried something similar in 2016, although in the end Hillary managed to get stomped by one of the most unpopular candidates in history, which rendered Trump's strategy redundant.

Thirdly, the paranoid part: If he loses the 2020 elections, provided he establishes a convincing stab-at-the-back myth, he could use it to nominate himself successfully in 2024. After all, given the solidity of his base, his presidential past and his vulgar rhetoric, he can easily dominate the Republican primaries. So, focusing on 2020 but aiming at 2024?

[Hooahguy]

I'm a bit skeptical that Trump would try to run again if he loses in November. I just dont see what he would gain from putting himself out there again when he can run his own news channel and be able to rant all day every day. Probably super lucrative too. I could definitely imagine that he could become the new "party boss" that anoints the next GOP nominee by the virtue of endorsing candidates. Assuming he loses in November and doesnt run in 2024 (and is still alive), there is no way that the nominee becomes the nominee without the approval of Trump himself.

[a completely inoffensive name]

Firstly, I just wanted to say that the level of the discussion here is probably one of the highest in the Internet sphere. The difference in quality becomes even starker, when compared to the usual alt-right troll fests that some of the forums (including TWC's mudpit) have devolved into.

Secondly, just my personal thoughts on the possible implications of mail voting, time delays, legal challenges, polarisation and the rest. I don't think that the republican institutions are at any risk, despite the recent decline of the political discourse, social cohesion and income equality. They are rooted deeply enough to easily resist the relatively minor crisis the pandemic, the unbalanced recovery since 2008 and Donald represent.

In my opinion, what Trump and his staff are trying to achieve is the construction of a post-election narrative that will keep safe the myth of his invincibility. We didn't lose the approval of the absolute majority, no, we were defeated, because the establishment, media, Chinese and the rest conspired against us. He had tried something similar in 2016, although in the end Hillary managed to get stomped by one of the most unpopular candidates in history, which rendered Trump's strategy redundant.

Thirdly, the paranoid part: If he loses the 2020 elections, provided he establishes a convincing stab-at-the-back myth, he could use it to nominate himself successfully in 2024. After all, given the solidity of his base, his presidential past and his vulgar rhetoric, he can easily dominate the Republican primaries. So, focusing on 2020 but aiming at 2024?

He's done once he is no longer president, too many enemies in New York. This is a total fight for his survival. If he loses, watch him attempt to pardon himself sometime Jan 2021 so that he doesn't have to fight off Biden's DOJ.

[Montmorency]

Re: Biden speech, in Eric Levitz' words, "Joe Biden is a normal human who knows what he’s doing. This was the core message of the final night of the Democratic National Convention... [T]he Democratic nominee has now set a standard that his rival can’t possibly meet."

Secondly, just my personal thoughts on the possible implications of mail voting, time delays, legal challenges, polarisation and the rest. I don't think that the republican institutions are at any risk, despite the recent decline of the political discourse, social cohesion and income equality. They are rooted deeply enough to easily resist the relatively minor crisis the pandemic, the unbalanced recovery since 2008 and Donald represent.

In my opinion, what Trump and his staff are trying to achieve is the construction of a post-election narrative that will keep safe the myth of his invincibility. We didn't lose the approval of the absolute majority, no, we were defeated, because the establishment, media, Chinese and the rest conspired against us. He had tried something similar in 2016, although in the end Hillary managed to get stomped by one of the most unpopular candidates in history, which rendered Trump's strategy redundant.

Preface: Much of the functioning and integrity of institutions is psychological and normative. A president spending years attacking their legitimacy and taking steps to degrade their administration and operation is always injurious to these aspects, even if their total usurpation or subversion has not yet been achieved. It makes it harder for individuals who actually constitute these institutions as organizations to have a sense of 'doing the right thing' and following the rules, especially if they are punished for doing so. Our institutions are almost certainly more resilient and better-developed than those in Belarus or Mali, for example, but the damage sustained is already deep and durable. Much of Biden's task will be trying to start cleaning up Trump's mess within the government, re-recruiting/replacing thousands purged or driven away by Trump, purging hundreds emplaced by Trump, and trying to restore a measure of accountability and legitimacy to the civil service. If Trump remains in power, then the institutions we have already observed not to be exceptionalistic or invincible will continue to be corroded in both measurable and intangible ways. As Bernie Sanders said in his DNC address this week, "the price of failure is too high to imagine."

Prologue: Almost all states do not begin counting mail ballots until at least the day after election day, in general not for days after, and they take longer to complete. Mail ballots are therefore not reflected in the ongoing vote counts we have always been familiar with. Usually this is not a problem because mail ballots have not typically been decisive to the outcome of elections at any level (see the 2019 New York District Attorney race for an election that hinged on mail ballots). The 2020 election promises to be one in which the number of mail ballots submitted is at least an order of magnitude higher than ever before due to the expansion of eligibility and the incentives of a human environment conditioned by high disease risk. It will not be possible to certify results for many states accurately without having these counted, which could take weeks (see the debacle of the New York 2020 Democratic primary, which occurred June 23 but was not certified until August). The President has relentlessly eroded public confidence in the legitimacy of the election in general, and in the particulars of the mail voting method (though he insists on a distinction between the bad fraudulent mail voting and the good absentee voting, by mail, that has sometimes been favored by Republican voters.) Polling is strongly suggestive as to a bifurcation in expected voting behavior (see my earlier post):

The majority of Democrats will vote by mail and the majority of Republicans will vote in-person.* There is a significant chance that the vote count opens with a Lukashenko-sized lead for Trump over Biden that will diminish and eventually flip in a stepwise manner under normal circumstances.


So. Trump is by his own admission, and with years of his own priming, attempting to potentiate rejection of an outcome where he loses, that much is indisputable and well-known among political observers. There is a certain sense in which your intuition about our institutions's resilience is narrowly correct, or presumably so. We can identify the relevant institutions here to start:

Electoral - tabulating, assembling, counting, votes. These systems are unique for all the states and is subject to minimal/nonexistent central control and oversight. Because there are so many battleground states, many of which have put their electoral infrastructure under the control of Democrats, it's still a somewhat sound assumption that the process will not be outright subverted in any of the battleground states (although in the midterms Republicans in one House district in North Carolina, currently a battleground state, were formally found to have engaged in the electoral fraud of misappropriating mail ballots; the election was court-ordered to be redone!). NOTE: Due to hundreds of billions in 2020 budget shortfalls, states and counties will have a harder time ensuring the timely administration of electoral functions even absent criminal interference. Aid to states and municipalities is one of the impasses preventing the implementation of a new pandemic relief program; Republicans don't want it.

Postal - facilitates movement of mail applications and mail ballots between voters and election officials. Due to billions in budgetary shortfalls and statutory liabilities, the postal service is already having a hard time carrying out its normal operations even absent criminal interference, 2 months before the election. Funding for the post office is one of the impasses preventing the implementation of a new pandemic relief program; Republicans don't want it. But there is interference on top of this, as the Trump-loyalist administration of the postal service has been limiting its operations in a way that is apt to produce delays, especially in such a high-volume situation as the presidential election. Delays in the timely delivery of mail ballots to election officials will result in the invalidation of many, perhaps millions, of ballots. AFAIK none of the battleground states accept the delivery of ballots past election day, even if the ballots are postmarked.

Supreme Court - mediates legal and constitutional disputes predicated on harm. On November 4th, the day after the election, if Trump maintains large but inconclusive majorities in many states, and the counting of mail ballots threatens this status, then by all presentation he would be prepared to sue for their counting to be declared improper or fraudulent, or at least delayed fatally. There could be a Supreme Court case as to whether real or imagined irregularities should prompt states to halt or discard their counts. And if that means a critical number of states are certified for Trump, well...

So the crux of the election comes down to this: will the Republican-controlled Supreme Court seize an opportunity to extra-legally hand deliver the presidency to Donald Trump? There is precedent for this in the notorious case of the 2000 election, where the Republican-controlled Supreme Court halted vote tallying in Florida and gave Bush the state, tipping him into victory. That decision was explicitly rendered as somehow being non-precedential (which didn't stop the Trump admin from citing it in their case against Nevada voting laws this month, see my earlier post), but the very fact that it happened at all and the polity accepted it as valid means the only question of whether or not it could happen again is one of power.

The current Supreme Court is stocked with 5 reactionaries, all of whom have a record of being hostile to voting rights and friendly to Republican interests. Chief Justice John Roberts is the more moderate of the group, making him the likeliest candidate for swing vote toward the 4 liberal justices. Roberts' jurisprudence is marked by, besides hostility to voting rights and market regulation, a concern for the legitimacy of the SCOTUS in public image (see his negotiation with liberal justices in 2013 over which provisions of Obamacare to spare and which to declare unconstitutional), and a tendency to be more considerate of long-term consequences and peripheral matters than his copartisans (see his spate of centrist major decisions this summer, joining the liberals in the midst of unprecedented national protests). He has been known to reject at least some Trump administration arguments that are nakedly pretextual power grabs, such as when Trump illegally attempted to impose a citizenship question onto the census last year for the purpose of driving immigrants into hiding and reducing the formal representation of the Democratic states in national government.

If Donald Trump comes to the Supreme Court demanding that they stay or order halted counting in key states - say, with the effect of freezing counts such that Trump is ahead of Biden - would he have 5 votes for his argument? Based on what is relayed above on John Roberts' mentality and record, I do not believe he will side with Trump. If he does not side with Trump, the counts will go on, with the overwhelming eventual likelihood of a Biden majority or plurality in enough states to award him with an Electoral College majority - and thus the presidency. For Roberts to do otherwise would genuinely push the country to the brink of civil rupture, as Republicans would have no choice but to ride full steam ahead on the fascism train, Joe Biden would reject the decision and absolutely refuse to concede, tens of millions would flood the streets of American cities, the paramilitaries would be emboldened in response, and this country would look a lot like Lebanon, Belarus, Mali have this summer. Whereas if Roberts declines to rescue Trump (in the short-term), a contentious election would galvanize the Republican electorate, demoralize Democrats and centrists, and hopefully (from Republicans' perspective) sufficiently weaken or cripple the Biden government/Congress to the point where they cannot govern effectively, with the result that a neutered Democratic government would be rejected by feckless voters in 2022 and 2024 without Trump as a locus of popular rage.

It all comes down to the character of John Roberts, and I think we know enough about him to come to a prospective conclusion.

So my perspective ultimately aligns with yours, or runs into the same direction, but I think it's clear that there will be a lot of institutional and social damage along the way. There will be physical violence here and there. The chaos will be protracted over weeks at least. There is even a possibility that the election will be thrown to the House, who are empowered constitutionally to select the President if the Electoral College cannot produce one; this might occur if counts are so protracted that the deadline for convening the Electoral College (in late November) is passed and no one has been assigned a majority of EC votes. This election is set to be the most institutionally and constitutionally challenging in our entire history, even if hypothetically crazier shit has happened at other times in other countries. Moreover, millions of ballots lost or invalidated through shenanigans and delays could have consequences in down-ballot races, reducing the size of Biden's ultimate working majorities in Congress, even if he himself skirts by. If Biden doesn't have strong working majorities, he will deliver no results on his progressive manifesto or even on basic pandemic relief (overly-conservative economic stimulus in 2009 is one of the things that, among other effects, damaged Democrats electorally all through 2016). If Biden cannot govern in 2021, the Republicans will have their revenge in 2022 and 2024, this time even more unified against liberal democracy and multiculturalism, and even more rabidly unhinged in their epistemology.

But yes, unless the entire Republican Party decides to unify around Trump as the front of a coup against the Republic, he will ultimately leave office in January 2021.


*I expect whatever cohort of late-deciding voters there are to swing heavily Democratic, and to the extent these are voting by mail, their ballots are at a very elevated risk of being discarded consequent to aforementioned issues of timing and delivery.

Thirdly, the paranoid part: If he loses the 2020 elections, provided he establishes a convincing stab-at-the-back myth, he could use it to nominate himself successfully in 2024. After all, given the solidity of his base, his presidential past and his vulgar rhetoric, he can easily dominate the Republican primaries. So, focusing on 2020 but aiming at 2024?

We've touched upon this in the thread as a potentially-overdetermined consequence of this cycle and his character, but if Trump is planning for it he's been doing a very bad job in developing a political base of patronage among the constantly-rotating pool of lackeys in the White House he always betrays, or a convincing link between himself and the Republican elites he can never seem to coordinate well with (e.g. almost all productive negotiations on pandemic response since March have been between Congressional Democrats and the White House, bypassing McConnell's Senate majority). It's unclear what he can count on from any allies in the context of a private citizen being hunted by state and federal justice after his term. Now, just because he's bad at something doesn't have to mean he isn't planning it, but it's hard to imagine because Trump never seems to plan anything ahead of time. The simplest explanation is that he reacts impulsively to assuage the blows to his ego (e.g. tweeting in all-caps about Biden and Obama during Obama's DNC speech condemning Trump) and since he's a narcissist he will always have the inclination to devalue anything that doesn't further his own self-importance or personalistic authority. "Planning" also implies he's either been planning to destroy his chances of winning this election, or his behavior now is somehow rational but it wasn't in the past, he having acquired some peculiar rationality only in the past months. He really kind of just does the same shit all the time and pushes it further when he sees his base likes it; it's a conditioning loop. The strongest argument against a Trump in cognitive decline, really, is that Trump in 2020 is the same as Trump 2016, just intensified to be more egregious, entitled, and paranoid.

It will certainly be interesting, however, to see how the reception of Trump the man evolves among the Republican base, and to what extent his supporters may have only rallied around him while he has been the formal standard bearer of their movement and in an actual position to deliver them the psychological wages they demand. Trump is a whiny loser, but it's a lot easier to see him that way even if you like him if he's been pushed out of office by "Sleepy Joe."