As the 2024 race enters its final days, there are more and more signs that the Harris campaign is foundering and knows it. My colleague Nick Arama reported on Trump surging to the lead nationally and in the battleground states; see Happy Birthday, Kamala. Have You Checked the Polls? I prefer FiveThirtyEight.com, even though I know there are a lot of haters on RedState. That polls, as I posted earlier, show Trump making steady progress, and when compared to Biden’s 2020 polling and the election results, it seems that Trump is the favorite to win the national popular vote and key battleground states; see Politico Claims Trump Is in a ‘Media Blackout,’ Objective Reality Called and Demanded a Retraction.
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All indicators say the Harris campaign is on a terminal glide slope — out of altitude, out of airspeed, and out of ideas. The election can always be lost, but right now, I think Trump has to take positive action to lose this election, and Kamala has very little ability to influence it positively.
As the presidency gets further from her grasp, “joyful” Kamala has become “dangerous” Trump. All manner of people, mostly quislings from Trump’s first administration, have surfaced to proclaim Trump a clear and present danger to our democracy.
Today, Politico, following on its improbable claim that Trump is eluding the media by holding rallies and cooking fries at Mcdonald’s (see EPIC: Trump Trolls Kamala in Hilarious Move As He Works Fries, Drive-Thru Window at McDonald’s) by claiming he has a way to seize power even if he loses on Election Day…or whenever Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin finally get around to counting their votes: The Very Real Scenario Where Trump Loses and Takes Power Anyway – POLITICO.
In the words of Donald Rumsfeld, they start with “an illogical premise and proceeding perfectly logically to an illogical conclusion.”
2024 is not 2020. Trump’s path to pulling it off this time is even narrower and more extreme. For one thing, Trump lacks some of the tools he threatened to wield four years ago to upend the transfer of power; today, the military and Justice Department answer to Joe Biden. Trump also needs allies to win elections that would put them in a position to reverse a defeat: Overturning a Kamala Harris victory would require an enormous amount of help from Republican power brokers in statehouses and Congress, some of whom spurned him four years ago.
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So, a Trump who has less power today than he had in 2020 and in a legal environment that has foreclosed some avenues that could have been exploited last time around is more likely to try to overthrow the election results. With this assertion, Donald Trump officially has achieved Super Villain status.
“No one knows exactly what Trump’s attack on the electoral system will be in 2024,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), a member of the Jan. 6 select committee. “What will he do this time?” The answer, according to lawmakers, congressional investigators, party operatives, election officials and constitutional law experts, goes something like this:
— He will deepen distrust in the election results by making unsupported or hyperbolic claims of widespread voter fraud and mounting longshot lawsuits challenging enough ballots to flip the outcome in key states.
— He will lean on friendly county and state officials to resist certifying election results — a futile errand that would nevertheless fuel a campaign to put pressure on elected Republican legislators in statehouses and Congress.
— He will call on allies in GOP-controlled swing-state legislatures to appoint “alternate” presidential electors.
— He will rely on congressional Republicans to endorse these alternate electors — or at least reject Democratic electors — when they convene to certify the outcome.
— He will try to ensure Harris is denied 270 votes in the Electoral College, sending the election to the House, where Republicans are likely to have the numbers to choose Trump as the next president.
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If you want mistrust of the election, Biden’s Department of Justice is doing much more to put the results in doubt than anything Trump can do. It is Merrick Garland’s thugs who are preventing the removal of illegals from the voting rolls and challenging state election procedures to aid Harris.
It’s possible Trump and his allies won’t make a sustained effort to overturn his election defeat. An overwhelming Harris victory would make it harder for Trump to rally Republicans to his side. (If Trump wins, no one expects a comparable effort by Democrats to subvert the election.) But to a person, election observers, elected leaders and some of Trump’s own allies agree on one operating premise: On election night, no matter what the results show, how many votes remain uncounted and how many advisers tell him otherwise, Donald Trump will declare himself the winner.
The article goes on to spin a tale that would make Tom Clancy proud. All of it is predicated on two improbable events. First and foremost, the idea that a twice-defeated Trump has enough clout in state legislatures to convince them to contravene state law and just flip the electoral votes to Trump is, bluntly, both dishonest and quite possibly stupid as well. Second, the idea that a Republican House majority that literally can’t pass a single budget bill has the unity to change the rules of certifying electors requires a level of dimwittery rarely witnessed, even among political journalists.
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They have no concern about Kamala Harris, who serves as the presiding officer for the joint session of Congress that will elect the president, having an unresolvable conflict of interest in both corrupting the process and outcome and engaging in shenanigans of her own.
This is just fear porn that no serious person believes and is designed solely to bolster a narrative laid down by Kamala’s campaign.