The 2020 Election

Rad · Apr 19, 2020, 04:45 AM

Trump campaign fraudulently claims "˜Democrats are trying to steal the election' as president calls to "˜liberate' blue states

on April 19, 2020
By David Badash, The New Civil Rights Movement

The Trump re-election campaign on Friday accused Democrats of "trying to STEAL THE ELECTION right before our eyes," in an email blast with the subject line that reads "Cheaters."

April 17: Trump accuses Democrats of trying to steal the election. pic.twitter.com/V65E5PWiai

- Rebecca Ballhaus (@rebeccaballhaus) April 17, 2020

The email came to some just minutes after President Donald Trump issued a series of tweets that called on Americans to "LIBERATE" three blue states. At least one of them has been subjected to protests by right wing extremists who oppose the governor's stay-at-home orders. Those orders have worked to slow the spread of the coronavirus pandemic. The protests have been linked to the DeVos family.
Defend democracy. Click to invest in courageous progressive journalism today.

Washington Post columnist and University College London assistant professor of global politics Brian Klass warns Trump is laying the groundwork to get "his supporters to reject results" of the November election "and use violence."

Trump is calling for insurrection with reference to guns at the same time his campaign is falsely claiming that Democrats are trying to "steal" the election. This is what despots do. It's dangerous. He's laying the groundwork for his supporters to reject results and use violence. pic.twitter.com/pNCeqq0Phz

- Brian Klaas (@brianklaas) April 17, 2020

Earlier this week Trump posted this unhinged tweet:

GET RID OF BALLOT HARVESTING, IT IS RAMPANT WITH FRAUD. THE USA MUST HAVE VOTER I.D., THE ONLY WAY TO GET AN HONEST COUNT!

- Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 14, 2020

In fact, the only "ballot harvesting" that has ever been charged was by a Republican in North Carolina.

**************

Former DOJ official: Trump's "˜Liberate' tweets "˜incite insurrection' - and that's "˜illegal'

on April 19, 2020
By David Badash, The New Civil Rights Movement
- Commentary

President Donald Trump may have gotten more than he bargained for Friday, when he posted three tweets, just sixteen words in total, that stunned and infuriated the nation and have legal experts weighing in on just how much trouble he could be in.

One, a former U.S. Dept. of Justice official, suggests possibly a lot.

But first, the tweets:

The average Trump supporter might say, "So?" Or, as Trump has often defended his actions, he has a First Amendment right to say what he wants.

Both are wrong, according to Mary McCord, a former Acting Assistant Attorney General for National Security at the U.S. Department of Justice, and former Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the National Security Division, according to her bio at Georgetown Law, where she is a Visiting Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center.

If all that's not enough, McCord currently serves as the Legal Director at the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection (ICAP).

In other words, she knows what she's talking about. And what she's saying, in a just-published Washington Post op-ed, is Trump's actions meet the definition of inciting insurrection, and inciting insurrection is "illegal."

"President Trump incited insurrection Friday against the duly elected governors of the states of Michigan, Minnesota and Virginia," McCord begins. "Just a day after issuing guidance for re-opening America that clearly deferred decision-making to state officials - as it must under our Constitutional order - the president undercut his own guidance by calling for criminal acts against the governors for not opening fast enough."

The op-ed's subtitle notes: "Federal law bans advocating the overthrow of government."

There's a lot more, but she sets up her argument well.

""˜Liberate' - particularly when it's declared by the chief executive of our republic - isn't some sort of cheeky throwaway," McCord continues. "Its definition is "˜to set at liberty,' specifically "˜to free (something, such as a country) from domination by a foreign power.' We historically associate it with the armed defeat of hostile forces during war, such as the liberation of Western Europe from Nazi Germany's control during World War II. Just over a year ago, Trump himself announced that "˜the United States has liberated all ISIS-controlled territory in Syria and Iraq.'"

In that context, it's not at all unreasonable to consider Trump's tweets about "liberation" as at least tacit encouragement to citizens to take up arms against duly elected state officials of the party opposite his own, in response to sometimes unpopular but legally issued stay-at-home orders.

McCord also says - and this is important for the naysaying MAGA KAGs in the back, "we can't write these tweets off as just hyperbole or political banter."

And that's why these tweets aren't protected free speech. Although generally advocating for the use of force or violation of law is protected (as hard to conceive as that may be when the statements are made by someone in a position of public trust, like the president of the United States), the Supreme Court has previously articulated that where such advocacy is "inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action," it loses its First Amendment protection.

soleil · Apr 19, 2020, 11:02 PM

Hi Rad,

Yes, Trump is absolutely laying the groundwork to get his followers to reject the results of the November election and he is also inciting them to use violence with his ridiculous but dangerous tweets.

These tweets where he basically screams out to certain states that they should liberate themselves and protect their 2nd amendment rights could definitely be interpreted as "fighting words" from a legal perspective, and fighting words are a category of speech that is not protected under the First Amendment. Thing is, no one will hold his feet to the fire on this or on anything else.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/fighting_words

Re the protests that Trump is supporting against stay-at-home orders (funded by right wing Trump donors like Betsy Devos, the Koch brothers and racist groups like the Proud Boys), the timing doesn't seem to be coincidental---they are happening right after data has come out showing that black and brown people are dying from Covid 19 at a much higher rate than white people.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/17/far-right-coronavirus-protests-restrictions

The sooner the stay-at-home orders are lifted, the more that a disproportionately large numbers of black and brown people will die from this virus. A truly sickening agenda of Trump and company, but not a surprising one.

Wishing peace to you and all,

Soleil

Rad · Apr 25, 2020, 04:55 AM

Joe Biden warns that Donald Trump may try to delay November election

"˜I think he is going to try to kick back the election somehow'
Democrat also expect Russia and others to interfere

Amanda Holpuch in New York
Guardian
25 Apr 2020 14.15 BST

Joe Biden said he is concerned Donald Trump will try to delay the November presidential election.

"Mark my words, I think he is going to try to kick back the election somehow, come up with some rationale why it can't be held," Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, said on Thursday night in remarks at an online fundraiser.

Under the law, no president has the power to postpone the presidential election. To change the date, Congress has to intervene.

Trump has not announced plans to delay the 3 November election, but it is a concern both political parties have raised. The president has repeatedly demonstrated a lack of understanding about the limits on executive power, particularly when it comes to his own self-preservation.

The Covid-19 outbreak has also increased concerns about how to conduct in-person voting safely. In response, many are pushing for an expansion of voting by mail.

Trump has used Covid-19 press briefings to make false claims about voting by mail, calling it "corrupt" and "dangerous". Earlier this month, Trump also urged Republicans to fight efforts to expand voting by mail.

"Republicans should fight very hard when it comes to state wide mail-in voting," Trump tweeted. "Democrats are clamoring for it. Tremendous potential for voter fraud, and for whatever reason, doesn't work out well for Republicans."

At the fundraiser, Biden also referenced reporting by the Washington Post which revealed Trump's reluctance to fund the US postal service and efforts to force changes to its financial structure, which could harm voting by mail.

"Imagine threatening not to fund the post office. Now, what in God's name is that about? Other than trying to let the word out that he's going to do all he can to make it very hard for people to vote," Biden said. "That's the only way he thinks he can possibly win."

The Covid-19 outbreak has already reshaped the 2020 campaign. The candidates are campaigning from home and at a stage in the cycle when the election tends to dominate news coverage, reporters are instead focused on Covid-19.

Biden also shared a broader concern about interference in the presidential election by Russia and two unnamed "major actors".

"I promise you the Russians did interfere in our [2016] election and I guarantee you they are doing it again with two other major actors," Biden said. "You can be assured between [Trump] and the Russians there is going to be an attempt to interfere."

In response to Biden's comments, the Trump campaign said in a statement: "Those are the incoherent, conspiracy theory ramblings of a lost candidate who is out of touch with reality. Perhaps he also missed the news that the infamous Steele Dossier, central to the Russian Collusion Hoax, was likely compiled with Russian disinformation. That's the real Russian collusion."

soleil · Apr 25, 2020, 09:06 PM

From:

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/04/24/calling-us-postal-service-joke-trump-demands-four-fold-price-hike-customers-amid

Friday, April 24, 2020

"...Trump...threatened to withhold all future Covid-19 relief funding from the U.S. Postal Service unless the federal agency dramatically raises its shipping prices-a demand that critics say is ludicrous given the economic calamity the American people and the post office are now facing."

"...critics accused Trump of trying to destroy the USPS "to suppress mail-in votes."

"U.S. Mail Not for Sale, a worker-led campaign sponsored by the American Postal Workers Union and the National Association of Letter Carriers, circulated a petition urging Congress to provide USPS with "urgent and ongoing financial support from the federal government during this public health and economic crisis."

If you don't want your mail delivery to get FOUR TIMES more expensive, take action now. #SaveThePostOffice #SaveTheUSPS https://t.co/Vy2XNx7K4t

From:

https://www.axios.com/trump-postal-service-squeeze-f08faad5-c1ec-43f9-b851-04c88ab3b6bb.html
Apr 24, 2020

"A spokesman for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi also told Axios that, while the first stimulus bill included roughly $10 billion for USPS, the White House refused her request to add even more funding - but it continues to be a top priority in negotiations over the next package."

Rad · Apr 26, 2020, 06:39 AM

A Candidate in Isolation: Inside Joe Biden's Cloistered Campaign

Walled off from voters in a distinctive kind of lockdown, Mr. Biden has developed a routine, of sorts, as he seeks the presidency from his basement.

By Alexander Burns, Shane Goldmacher and Katie Glueck
NY Times
April 26, 2020

Joseph R. Biden Jr. usually rises before 8 a.m. at his home in Wilmington, Del., and starts his day with a workout in an upstairs gym that contains a Peloton bike, weights and a treadmill. He often enjoys a protein shake for breakfast and puts on a suit or blazer much of the time. In the evenings, he and his wife, Jill, sit down together for dinner, a ritual that was absent for much of the last frenzied year on the campaign trail.

In the intervening hours, Mr. Biden attempts to win the presidency without leaving his house.

With the coronavirus outbreak freezing the country's public life, Mr. Biden has been forced to adapt to a cloistered mode of campaigning never before seen in modern American politics. He was unable to embark on a victory tour after the Democratic primaries or hold unity rallies with onetime rivals like Senators Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. Instead, the former vice president is in a distinctive kind of lockdown, walled off from voters, separated from his top strategists and yet leading in the polls.

For a famous backslapper like Mr. Biden, this open-ended period of captivity has tested both his patience and his political imagination. He has lamented being deprived of human contact, and he has expressed exasperation with media coverage critiquing his limited visibility compared with President Trump's daily performances in the White House briefing room. He does not make a habit of watching the president's briefings in full; he is said to be fixated mainly on the eventual challenge - if he wins - of governing amid a pandemic.

Interviews with dozens of people in touch with the presumptive Democratic nominee and his advisers revealed a newly detailed picture of Mr. Biden's life in seclusion, one spent in long-distance consultation with a wide array of coalition leaders helping him map out the fall campaign and a potential administration.

Mr. Biden has revived many of the rituals of the vice presidency, including similarly formatted briefing memos and tour d'horizon-style updates from aides on the virus and the economy - all aimed at giving him the information he would need to make the weighty decisions at hand if he were in charge, except that he is not.

Fran Person, who served for years as a Biden aide and speaks with him regularly, said the detached lifestyle was unnatural for Mr. Biden, an extrovert who spent virtually his entire adult life in government.

"I can imagine, for him, you're watching this play out, you know what needs to get done," Mr. Person said. "You want to be right in the middle of it."

As the temperature of the campaign rises in public, increasingly featuring caustic attacks on Mr. Biden from Mr. Trump and his allies and blunt rebuttals from Mr. Biden's aides, the former vice president has not attempted to match Mr. Trump blow for blow on television.

For the most part, Mr. Biden is seeking to run a campaign based on something like digital-age fireside chats, offering himself as a calmly authoritative figure rather than a brawler like his opponent. In private, he voices a combination of optimism about American resilience and recognition that the country is likely to be in a bleak state on Inauguration Day.

It remains to be seen whether that approach will come to be viewed as appropriately sober or perilously passive against a tenacious and unpredictable opponent. Many Democrats remain anxious about the limitations of Mr. Biden's position, even though Mr. Trump has slipped markedly in the polls and faces growing disapproval of his response to the pandemic.

Only a few people have seen Mr. Biden, 77, in the flesh in recent weeks. He is guarded by the Secret Service, and a pair of trusted staffers assist with his daily activities. The rare outside visitors don masks and gloves as a safety measure.

Like many professionals these days, the former vice president fills his time with conference calls. There are at least four standing calls on his daily schedule, including one with Jennifer O'Malley Dillon, his new campaign manager. There are daily briefings on the economy, public health and electoral strategy, and a less frequent session on national security.

Mr. Biden has used a television-quality video uplink from his refurbished rec room for interviews and online campaign events. But for private conversations, he prefers conferring by telephone, usually on speakerphone in his study. At times, callers deduce from rowdy background noise that Mr. Biden is working beside his German shepherds, Major and Champ.

The former vice president also places calls to mayors and governors; congressional leaders like Representative James E. Clyburn of South Carolina; elder statesmen like Al Gore; potential running mates; donors; and former rivals like Mr. Sanders and Ms. Warren. A few governors have become favorite points of contact, including Andrew M. Cuomo of New York, Jay Inslee of Washington and Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan.

At his request, Mr. Biden talks at least once daily to a voter or campaign volunteer - the kind of people he would meet constantly on the trail. And he regularly phones allies to express sympathy or support, including a call to Ms. Warren when he learned that one of her brothers had died of the coronavirus.

Ms. Whitmer, a potential running mate for Mr. Biden, said the former vice president had been deeply engaged with the details of the outbreak in her state. He had offered advice and commiserated over the isolation brought on by the virus, and how it had barred them from performing consoling tasks like visiting mourners and medical workers.

"I think that's why he's calling and reaching out and trying to keep a pulse on what's happening," Ms. Whitmer said. "It's not a great substitute for personal interaction, but it's a way to stay connected."

The Biden campaign declined to make him available for an interview. But the former vice president has at times spoken publicly about his isolation. "I'm chomping at the bit," Mr. Biden told reporters a month ago. "I wish I were still in the Senate, you know, being able to impact on some of these things. But I am where I am.''

For a team that employed a relatively skeletal digital operation throughout the primaries, the sudden shift toward online campaigning has been abrupt. At times, Mr. Biden has appeared out of his comfort zone and he continues to express a kind of chuckling disbelief that his basement has become a makeshift studio. Advisers acknowledge that they have considerable catching up to do on sites like Facebook and YouTube.

Mr. Biden is also facing pressure from donors to ramp up his at-home fund-raising activities, and from leaders in the states who want to see him beaming more often into key battlegrounds. To that end, he has recently conducted a series of interviews with local television stations in markets like Detroit and Pittsburgh, with more planned.

But Mr. Biden is burrowing in for the long haul, telling donors this month he did not anticipate holding traditional public events anytime soon.

"It's going to be this way," he said, "for a little while."

An Extrovert in Lockdown

The estate on which Mr. Biden is functionally trapped has long been a personal refuge. Nestled along a lake and recessed from the road by a long private drive, the 6,800-square-foot home took more than two years to build and Mr. Biden has said he designed it himself.

It is a home the Bidens had talked about bequeathing to his son, Beau, and that Mr. Biden later considered mortgaging or selling to help support Beau's family as he suffered from cancer. It was at this home where Mr. Biden worked to refine the 2016 presidential announcement speech he never delivered.

Today, the house has become an almost sealed containment zone. Two political aides regularly enter and leave the house, according to people briefed on the safety restrictions put in place: Annie Tomasini, Mr. Biden's traveling chief of staff, and Anthony Bernal, Jill Biden's chief of staff, both of whom have worked for the Bidens on and off for more than a decade.

But several people familiar with their roles said they are not staffing the Bidens around the clock and it is not clear whether any other aides assist the candidate at home. Much of the time Mr. Biden answers his own telephone, and he frequently falls behind his limited public schedule.

The campaign has consulted physicians and health experts about safeguarding Mr. Biden, who at 77 falls squarely into a high-risk group for the coronavirus. Irwin Redlener, a clinical professor at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health, said he had spoken with the campaign about health precautions, including how to handle the possibility that members of Mr. Biden's traveling staff had been exposed.

"In terms of the safety of the staff, the candidate, what did they need to know?" said Dr. Redlener, who previously served on Mr. Biden's public health advisory committee.

Mr. Biden has embraced the safety guidelines: He has described in interviews a careful protocol that allows him to interact with some of his grandchildren, who live nearby. They come over to play on his lawn, allowing Mr. Biden and Jill Biden to talk to them and sometimes throw them candy or ice cream from a short distance.

To interact with voters, his campaign has experimented with virtual town halls and round tables, but Democrats in the states are anxious to see more of the candidate.

Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, who recently endorsed Mr. Biden, said he had prodded the campaign to do more to put him directly in front of Wisconsin voters.

"It is so critically important for him to have a presence here," Mr. Barrett said. "I think, in some ways, Zoom and FaceTime - they're the 2020 counterpart to what President Trump used effectively for his base, which is Twitter."

Mr. Biden is working to adapt to those platforms; this past week he spent half an hour on a Zoom call with a nurse in Wisconsin and then contacted other members of her family by phone. But targeted video-chatting offers Mr. Biden only so many opportunities to hear from voters directly about their struggles and needs.

Ashley Ruiz, a voter in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., who recently participated in a "virtual rope line" with Mr. Biden, said she had found him eager to share his ideas about education and child care. But Mr. Biden grew most animated when he detected the presence of her two sons - ages 10 and 7 - along with her red-nose pit bull, Kacie.

Mr. Biden, she said, was determined to communicate with her 7-year-old son, who has autism and, like Mr. Biden, a stutter. "He said to my son, "˜I want you to know you can do anything,'" Ms. Ruiz said, recalling that Mr. Biden had told her, "When I'm president, I will care for your family like they're my family."

Defining the substance behind that promise is what mainly occupies Mr. Biden's time.

Seeking Bigger Ideas

Even before Mr. Biden entered his state of near-quarantine, he was telling associates that he feared the onset of a national catastrophe. In mid-March, Mr. Biden told one confidant that he was concerned that the country could face another Great Depression, sharing that he had discussed the possibility with Lawrence H. Summers, the former treasury secretary.

That dark contingency now looks more plausible than ever. In the daily briefings he receives about public health and the economy, Mr. Biden seeks the kind of minute information he would need to make important policy decisions - if only he were in a position to do so.

Several participants in the briefings said Mr. Biden probes extensively about the mechanics of how money and medical resources are being distributed around the country. Spurred by beleaguered governors, he regularly presses his team about the steps Washington might take to shore up shattered state budgets.

"There is that sort of suspended quality to things in that you're not making a decision that's urgent and that people have to carry out today," said Senator Chris Coons of Delaware, a close Biden ally. Still, he described "a real sense of imminence" because the aides briefing Mr. Biden in lockdown today could well be managing the government response in 10 months.

"It's like the relief pitcher warming up in the bullpen, knowing you only get a couple more pitches and then you're going out on the mound," Mr. Coons said.

One of those advisers, Vivek Murthy, the former surgeon general, said Mr. Biden wanted to stay on top of both the large-scale policies aimed at containing the virus and on the precise efforts of local governments and medical facilities. Though most people on the calls are former government officials, a view from the front lines of medicine comes from a member of the Biden family: Howard Krein, the former vice president's son-in-law, who is a doctor in Philadelphia.

In one briefing, Dr. Murthy said it hit Mr. Biden hard to learn that hospitals were barring people from visiting dying family members. "He knows what it's like to lose people and to have your life turned upside down," Dr. Murthy said.

A daily call on the economy and a somewhat less frequent briefing on national security are stocked with veterans of the Obama administration, including Ben Harris and Jared Bernstein, who served as economic advisers to Mr. Biden in the vice presidency, and Antony J. Blinken and Jake Sullivan, his former national security advisers. Murmurs about Mr. Summers's quiet role advising Mr. Biden have alarmed some progressives, who saw the former Harvard president as closely aligned with Wall Street during the last recession.

It is not clear, however, that any ideological camp has a full claim on Mr. Biden's ear right now: On the economic calls, Mr. Biden regularly seeks insight into the thinking of his party's populist wing, inquiring by name about Ms. Warren, Mr. Sanders and a third liberal, Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio.

So far, Mr. Biden's policy huddles have yielded proposals to contain the immediate damage of the pandemic. But his allies expect he will soon go substantially further with a national-emergency agenda, likely to include huge new promises on economic stimulus, infrastructure, climate change and student debt.

The test ahead for him, however, is not just defining a bold agenda, but also communicating it from a desk in his house as Mr. Trump makes ruthless use of his bully pulpit.

Mr. Inslee, who endorsed Mr. Biden on Wednesday after conferring with him privately about broadening his climate agenda, said he urged Mr. Biden to put safety first. Democrats, he said, "understand that we're not going to hear from our candidate as much as we would if we didn't have a pandemic."

"It's really important that he take care of his health right now," Mr. Inslee said. "It's important for all of us."

soleil · Apr 26, 2020, 01:43 PM

From:

Biden's invisible campaign is winning
Harry Enten, CNN
April 26, 2020

https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/26/politics/joe-biden-polling-media-exposure/index.html

"A new Fox News poll from Michigan finds former Vice President Joe Biden leading President Donald Trump by a 49% to 41% margin. Other Fox News polls from Florida and Pennsylvania also showed Biden clearly ahead.

"Biden's proving that the less media he receives, the better it is for his electoral prospects."

From:

President Trump faces a major hurdle with swing state voters
Douglas Schoen
The Hill
04/26/20

https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/494718-president-trump-faces-a-major-hurdle-with-swing-state-voters

"In Michigan...Trump trails Biden by 8 points, according to two statewide polls".

"In Wisconsin...the Ipsos poll shows Biden slightly leads the president 43 percent to 40 percent."

"In Pennsylvania...the Ipsos poll shows Biden leads 46 percent to 40 percent."

"In Florida...Biden leads 46 percent to 42 percent, a new Quinnipiac University poll found last week."

"While swing state polling is indicative of the prospects of Trump, national polling reveals that his federal response has taken a toll on his chances in the election in November. A Wall Street Journal poll shows Biden leads the president 49 percent to 42 percent. A Harvard Harris poll shows him with a similar advantage and leads Trump 53 percent to 47 percent nationally."

Rad · May 09, 2020, 03:58 AM

Election doomsday 2020: Here's how scholars fear the Trump-Biden race could go terribly wrong

on May9, 2020
Raw Story
By Bob Brigham

With six months to go until November's 2020 election, dozens of America's top legal minds convened to consider what would have been unthinkable before Donald Trump's presidency. They gathered to brainstorm what could be done to prevent the country from descending into a "civil war-like scenario," as one participant put it, if Trump and Joe Biden both claim that they won the presidency-and won't back down.

Their May 4 teleconference parsed a series of nightmare scenarios in the aftermath of the November 3 election that would lead to competing Electoral College results being sent to Congress from battleground states-one issued by a Republican legislature backing Trump, and another issued by the Democratic governor backing Biden.

The scenarios continued onto January 6, 2021, where, in a joint congressional session to ratify the Electoral College votes presided over by Vice President Mike Pence, the House and Senate were sent to their chambers to debate for two hours. When they reconvened, the Senate backed the Trump electors while the House backed the Biden slate.

The question put before the scholars was what could stop the 2020 election from spiraling that far out of control or going even further downhill, as occurred in the 1876 presidential election when two candidates claimed to win, waged relentless partisan battles, and were both planning separate inaugurations-with Samuel Tilden backing down only 48 hours before Rutherford B. Hayes was sworn in as president.

"My big fear, as a country, is that we don't know our history well enough to know that we came within 48 hours of inauguration day with two people claiming to be president, and the incumbent thinking about martial law-that was Ulysses Grant because he was worried that there were going to be two simultaneous inauguration sessions," said Edward B. Foley, director of Moritz College of Law's election law program at Ohio State University and a national authority on disputed presidential elections. He organized the brainstorming session with Steven F. Huefner, a Moritz senior fellow and former U.S. Senate counsel who also is an expert on vote-counting disputes.

"To replicate that kind of thing [a cascading crisis] on January 18, 2021, in an era with nuclear codes, seems to me an altogether more problematic scenario than even the dire circumstances of March 1, 1877," Foley continued, referring to the date Congress convened in the Hayes-Tilden dispute. "So it may be a Don Quixote quixotic effort to try to wrestle these legal problems into the ground. But I feel some responsibility to say that we have actually been there as a country once before, and it was not pretty. There might be no avoiding a calamity if we go down that road again."

Never before in recent history have the nation's top constitutional and election scholars convened six months ahead of a presidential election to ward off what they fear could be a constitutional meltdown if an incumbent president and his most strident partisan allies seek to disrupt or disregard counting votes and the transfer of presidential power.

Lighting the Fuse

Three nightmarish scenarios were put before the legal and electoral scholars:

In Pennsylvania, an outcry emerges after thousands of Philadelphia voters have not received absentee ballots. Civil rights activists sue, and the Pennsylvania Supreme Court extends the election for these voters-and anyone else in the state not getting their ballot. Pennsylvania's Republican-majority legislature countersues in federal court to block the extended voting, but it doesn't stop there. The legislature uses the extension as an excuse to certify a pro-Trump Electoral College slate and submits that result to Congress.
In Michigan, the crisis begins when early but incomplete election night returns show Trump ahead. But as the counting continues and the momentum starts to shift to Biden, Trump tweets that he won and declares that enough votes have been counted. Michigan's Republican-majority legislature follows Trump's tweets and certifies a pro-Trump slate of presidential electors. That unilateral move prompts the Michigan Democratic Party to sue in federal court, using an argument that's similar to what Republicans cited in the Pennsylvania scenario: pre-existing election rules cannot be ignored.

In these two scenarios, both states' Democratic governors end up sending a separate certificate to Congress declaring their state's Electoral College votes should be awarded to Biden. Thus, two sets of Electoral College results from the same state are presented for Congress to sort out. These developments spark an explosion of political posturing, partisan threats and disinformation, and more litigation.

In the final scenario, in Florida, a state with a GOP governor and legislative majority, the governor cancels the election due to a major hurricane. It cannot be rescheduled before December 14, 2020, when the national deadline falls for all of the presidential electors to cast their ballots. Emergency legislation ensues, and Republicans authorize a pro-Trump Electoral College slate-citing pre-election polling. The Florida Democratic Party sues in federal court, claiming that Florida's GOP cannot nullify a popular vote election.

What would, could or should happen, Foley asked as the process wound its way through expected and unexpected twists and turns that comprise the presidential election's final stages. The scholars were asked to identify where legal lines in the sand could be drawn, so that the 2020 election would not disintegrate: where laws lost their meaning, could not be enforced, and what they called "politics not law" could emerge to seize the presidency.

The academics were some of the nation's most respected constitutional law scholars, election law experts and political scientists. Apart from the U.S. Constitution, the only federal law laying out how to resolve a disputed presidential election was the Electoral Count Act of 1887 (ECA).

That little-known law took 14 years to craft, with debates going back even before the 1876 presidential election debacle. According to a scholarly article by DePaul University's Stephen Siegel-said by some teleconference participants to be the most authoritative modern exposition on the ECA-the law was "turgid," "repetitious," and "contradictory," and it had been incorrectly interpreted by the U.S. Supreme Court when it stopped Florida's presidential recount in 2000, elevating George W. Bush to the White House.

These nightmare scenarios and the prospect of an obscure 133-year-old law deciding a post-election battle between Trump and Biden led the scholars to say that even with its flaws, some principles or norms in the ECA had to be clarified before November.

"In the context we're imagining, any kind of rule structure that can be put on the table in any greater clarity to the focal point that we have with the Electoral Count Act is desirable because you're basically in a civil war context at this point-or very close to it," said New York University Law School constitutional law professor Rick Pildes. "I think that is as much as you can hope for. It may be meaningless at the end of the day. It may become a focal point in the midst of this civil war-like scenario."

Scenario One: Philadelphia Disenfranchisement

The scenarios presented by Foley and Huefner all start on or around Election Day with easily imaginable developments, but escalate unpredictably.

The first scenario starts with voting rights groups suing on behalf of Philadelphia voters who did not get absentee ballots in time to vote. That delay triggered legal battles, first in state court, seeking to extend the election so that Philadelphians and any other similarly affected Pennsylvanian could vote. (In 2018, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, citing the state Constitution's protection of voting rights, overturned an extreme gerrymander by the Republican-majority legislature in 2011. That case's ruling suggests that the court might be open to extending voting in November.)

But the Republican Party of Pennsylvania does not sit idly by. It filed a federal lawsuit to stop that extension of voting, creating what New York University Law School's Samuel Issacharoff said was a key feature of this scenario: "a turf war" between federal and state courts. (In Wisconsin's April 7 primary, the Wisconsin Supreme Court, federal district court and U.S. Supreme Court issued contradictory rulings concerning absentee ballots. The U.S. Supreme Court ordered the election to continue-including not extending the deadline for voters not receiving absentee ballots.)

Richard Hasen, a University of California, Irvine, law and political science professor, found the scenario disturbing on many levels. He initially focused on the pragmatic task of extending a vote-by-mail election in a state that did not have a history of widespread absentee voting (which is occurring in many states in response to the pandemic).

"I would hope that if the state court is going to order relief like this, it is going to do what some courts have done in the past, which is bring in election officials and ask them if this is actually doable," he said. "I'm not confident that Philadelphia election officials would be able to handle thousands of these ballots and be able to process them in a way that wouldn't raise yet another lawsuit about the due process concerns-about the actual counting of those ballots."

Court orders can prompt unintended consequences, Hasen said. "We saw it in the Wisconsin case, where the Supreme Court went to the postmark [date on the ballot as a deadline for it to count]. That turned out to create a whole bunch of new issues because there was not consistency in how the local election boards dealt with non-postmarked ballots."

Teasing out these scenarios left Hasen and others with an uneasy dÃ©jÃ -vu feeling.

"I was having nightmare flashbacks to Bush v. Gore-actually back to Bush v. Palm Beach County Canvassing Board, the first case," he said, where there were questions about whether a state constitution could legitimize "changing rules for presidential elections"¦ without the state legislature affirmatively agreeing to those changes."

"If that question arose [in November], I expect that we would see exactly the same ideological partisan division between conservatives and liberals, between Republican-appointed justices and liberal-appointed justices, should it get to the Supreme Court," Hasen said. "I don't think that we have made any progress in 20 years"¦ You can hear the arguments being made here, the echoes of exactly what we heard in Bush v. Gore."

The Pennsylvania scenario is not without a factual basis. Problems with delivering and counting large volumes of absentee ballots occurred in the first two statewide elections held since the pandemic broke in mid-March: Wisconsin's presidential primary on April 7 and Ohio's primary on April 28. In Wisconsin, more than 150,000 absentee ballots were not returned on time or were disqualified for other reasons, according to an April 30 court filing by the Democratic National Committee and state Democratic Party.

As of May 7, more than a week after Ohio's primary, the state's 88 county election boards had yet to account for 199,693 "outstanding absentee" and 44,368 "outstanding provisional" ballots, according to the Ohio secretary of state's website. These are not small numbers from either state. The volume of Wisconsin's rejected ballots in its low-turnout April 2020 primary was more than six times the size of Trump's 2016 margin over Hillary Clinton in that state.

Later in the nearly five-hour discussion, Michael Morley, a Florida State University law professor, made a telling point that suggested that the Democrats' intention to protect the vote in the Pennsylvania scenario could backfire. Any major last-minute voting extension was likely not only to be rejected by federal courts-following the U.S. Supreme Court's Wisconsin primary ruling, he said. But that last-minute change also could give the GOP-led legislature a legal excuse and argument to act on its own to certify a pro-Trump slate of electors-and send it to Congress without the Democratic governor's signature.

"You could imagine situations where the legislature is stepping in to say"¦ "˜We are appointing a slate of electors reflecting what we perceive to be the accurate outcome based on the election as it was conducted in accordance with state statute-not with what appears to be this judicial deviation from state statute,'" Morley said.

Scenario Two: Overriding the Popular Vote

In the Michigan scenario, Trump declared victory before the vote counting was finished and officially certified. Following his cues on Twitter, its Republican-majority legislature certified a pro-Trump Electoral College slate and sent it to Congress-ignoring the state's Democratic governor, secretary of state and attorney general. In response, the Michigan Democratic Party sued in federal court, citing much the same legal argument that the GOP used in the Pennsylvania scenario: you can't change the rules in midstream.

"This scenario is built on the concept of the so-called "˜blue shift' or late-counted ballot scholarship that some of us have been involved in," explained Foley, "which is a phenomenon where, with nothing going wrong, but just because of the way in which we have done changes to voting since 2000 and the Help America Vote Act of 2002, it's just much more likely that ballots are going to be counted, not on election night, but subsequently during the post-Election Day canvassing process."

"This [scenario] also builds on what was observed in Arizona and Florida in 2018," he continued, citing real-life precedents. "The fear is that we can imagine, for example, President Trump, winning, as it were, or, at least ahead on election night in the count of votes in a pivotal state-let's say Michigan-and yet that lead disappearing over the next week as additional ballots get counted. And President Trump tweeting, as he did with respect to the Florida election in 2018, saying, "˜No"¦ The initial count is good. Let's stop counting ballots because we've got an accurate count.' Whereas the election officials say, "˜No, these are valid ballots. They need to be counted.' And then you have a certified final result after canvassing the official post-Election Day reconciliation of all votes cast that puts the Democrats on top, and yet Trump is still protesting that outcome."

What happens next is a mix of disinformation and bullying that ignores the law and raises yet more demons, namely the old trope that the process is corrupt if your side loses.

"Again, this is all hypothetical," Foley said. "But what if the Michigan legislature says, "˜You know what? We just don't trust late-counted ballots. And so we are going to assert our authority under the federal constitutional Article II to appoint electors directly.' So now we have this conflict between the certified result from the secretary of state that said that Biden won Michigan, but we have the legislature in Michigan saying, "˜No"¦ We don't trust that result. We are going to appoint the Republican electors.' So now, the Democrats are going to federal court invoking the same concept of due process-"˜hey, don't change the rules'-as the Republicans cited in the scenario from Pennsylvania."

This scenario also is not merely theoretical. The battleground states of Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and North Carolina all have Democratic governors and Republican-majority legislatures. Whether the most partisan legislative leaders would ignore vote-counting law and procedure, trash election officials and resurrect voter-fraud tropes is an open question that can only be assessed state by state.

In Wisconsin, the GOP-led legislature forced the state to hold its April primary in a pandemic to try to secure a swing vote on the state supreme court-which backfired. Also in April, North Carolina's top-ranking Republican, Senate Majority Leader Phil Berger, slammed suggestions by the North Carolina State Board of Elections to expedite absentee voting in the pandemic, saying that the procedural reforms came from "progressive, liberal Democratic groups." Berger further said that he did not trust North Carolina Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper to oversee the 2020 election.

The Michigan scenario raised the question of whether a state legislature has the authority to override the popular vote in a presidential election. The third scenario, in Florida, where a hurricane forced the election to be canceled and it could not be rescheduled before the Electoral College met on December 14, was a variation of this question.

A Line in the Sand-or Not?

The core issue here was whether or not legislatures could act independently-either ignoring the popular vote result and/or bypassing their governor. Later in the discussion, the question came up of whether governors could do the same. (It turned out that the 1887 Electoral Count Act gave governors more authority than legislators.) But for now, restricting renegade legislatures seemed to be a place where scholars could draw a line in the sand, some said.

"I actually think that this may be one of the most important places to seek consensus," said Justin Levitt, Loyola Law School associate dean for research and professor. "Because of the procedural problems that other people have noted: Who do you sue? Can you enjoin stop anything? Is this something that Congress should decide about what to do with different slates of electors? I think if you were looking for a robust consensus from a group of people across partisan boundaries who study this issue to weigh in, this would be a place"¦ particularly because the federal courts might not be ideally empowered to make that assessment."

Levitt was responding to the challenge that Foley and Huefner laid out: Was there a baseline that nationally known experts in constitutional law, election administration and presidential succession could agree on? Was it plainly unconstitutional for legislatures to independently appoint presidential electors to benefit their party?

But the legal answer was not clear. Some conservative scholars on the teleconference said that Congress should take up the issue of competing slates of electors, as it did in 1960 when Hawaii submitted three slates in the photo-finish race between Democrat John F. Kennedy and Republican Richard Nixon. They said it might even be desirable for Congress to openly debate that clash. But could there be an open debate, Foley asked, when in the joint session of Congress on January 6, 2021 (to ratify the 2020 Electoral College results), the presiding officer is the vice president, Mike Pence, a candidate seeking re-election? Some noted that Al Gore had the role after the 2000 election.

As the discussion kept going, the severity of the possible constitutional crisis and lack of clear boundaries sunk in and alarmed some participants.

"This is one of the real nightmare scenarios that could very well take place," said Norman Ornstein, a historian and resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. "We could easily imagine state legislatures in a number of places deciding that they didn't like the outcome of the election, and trying to shift it to Congress-knowing or believing at that point that we might get the House and Senate disagreeing over which slates of electors to accept, and leaving it to the House of Representatives to decide who would become the president. Then leaving it in a situation where we would not have anybody getting the requisite 270 Electoral College]votes."

If the selection of the next president ended up in the House, under the 12th Amendment each state delegation gets one vote. Currently, there are 26 delegations with a majority of Republican members, 22 with a majority of Democratic members, and two states with equal members from both parties-Pennsylvania and Michigan. But before that eleventh-hour process would kick in, Foley said that other steps and legal interventions would likely occur. Meanwhile, could scholars draw a line much closer to Election Day, he asked, by affirming the state's official presidential election results?

"As long as independently and objectively the election officials, [and] the election administrators, are correct that the popular vote is an accurate count"¦ [is] there a true legal answer to which certificate Congress should adopt?" Foley asked. "If that's true, then maybe the legal community can rally around that point."

"Because what I fear is if there has been political pressure that's going to cause the Michigan legislature to want to supersede the popular vote, there's going to be political pressure in Congress, for one chamber at least, to try to do that too," he continued. "Is there any point where legal intervention [can happen]? Not necessarily by a court, but by academics who can say, "˜Wait a second. There's actually a right answer to this question that Congress should follow.'"

But not every scholar present agreed that the official election results could be trusted.

Conservative Skepticism

"Ned, could I jump in here," said John C. Fortier, director of governmental studies at the Bipartisan Policy Center. "There's a distinction between, "˜I think"¦ the facts don't really support that there's anything [that] was particularly wrong here,' versus a decision of an election administrator. That decision might be something you find very objectionable. I can bring up election administrators on either side of the aisle about whom people would have said, "˜Well, they did that for bad purposes. They made the wrong decision.'"

At this point the discussion entered the constitutional danger zone, where respect for laws and enforcing rules as the underpinning of elections begins to disintegrate.

The scholars wanted to respect precedent and institutional authority. But there were likely to be problems in administering November's elections in a pandemic, especially as states were poised to make unprecedented shifts to voting by mail. There were little-known and untested ambiguities in the Electoral Count Act, whose rules were written 133 years ago. The longer a presidential election dispute went on, including what might happen if it went before Congress, the more dangerous it became, some scholars said.

"This is a very difficult set of questions," said NYU Law School's Issacharoff. "One question is what can be done ahead of time to try to forestall this"¦ I don't think that the Electoral Count Act is well-settled law. It has been on the books for a long time. It has never been applied. The closest we came to it was its spiritual invocation in Bush v. Gore. It is hardly a blueprint for how institutional actors can settle themselves."

But some conservative scholars disagreed, noting that the ECA has been used recently.

"In 2001, members of Congress repeatedly on the floor tried to object to counting Florida's electoral votes, and [then-Vice President] Al Gore said [it was], "˜improper under the Electoral Count Act,'" said Derek Muller, professor of law at Pepperdine University's Caruso School of Law. "In 2005, they challenged Ohio's electors-Democrats in both the House and Senate. They debated for two hours. They came back. They counted Ohio's votes. In 2017, it was a parade of objections on the floor of Congress with [presiding Vice President] Joe Biden saying, "˜It's over. It's over under the Electoral Count Act.' I agree: the two-slate [of electors] question is sort of an open, highly debatable contest. But I do think the Electoral Count Act has served its function the last three times the Republicans have been elected, where Democrats have been contesting the election [result] on the floor of Congress."

"I think there's always a question about what one says rhetorically and what actually is driving the result," replied Issacharoff. "The overriding of the seemingly expressed popular will, by legislative fiat either at the state or congressional level, is, thus far, a radical departure from American norms"¦ I doubt if a single member of Congress had any idea what the Electoral Count Act was or what its provisions might say."

Politics or Law?

The notion that "politics, not law" could determine the 2020 presidential election outcome began to hover over the discussion's closing hours. Scholars asked if non-legal factors, such as public opinion after the popular vote was seen as being ignored by partisans, might pressure or sway congressional actions.

"It may make sense to, in the same way that you'd advise a client, [say,] "˜Look, you need to win beyond the margin of litigation.' You can also say to the people who are involved, "˜Look, you need to win beyond the margin for intransigence,'" said Lisa Manheim, a University of Washington law professor. "What exactly does that mean? Well, we have been talking for hours about all of the different places where we can have these problems. One of the things that we can do perhaps is to flag those-say those are the problems. We need to avoid those. The truth of the matter is there is not a clear legal answer."

These kinds of thresholds would likely be where the U.S. Supreme Court would weigh in, several scholars said.

"The question of whether law applies or doesn't apply is itself a legal question," said Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the Brennan Center for Justice's liberty and national security program. "In the sense [that] a lot of what we are asking is whether Congress can be bound by the Electoral Count Act, that itself is a legal question: Whether Congress can be bound by it; whether it is enforceable. Which is not to say that if the Supreme Court were to resolve that question that Congress would necessarily abide by it, and then we'd be back in the land of politics."

"I agree with all of this. If we get to this worst-case scenario, with two competing slates and split-party control of the two chambers of Congress, it is almost inconceivable to me that the Supreme Court doesn't decide that question," said Adav Noti, senior director of trial litigation and chief of staff at the Campaign Legal Center. He added that Chief Justice "John Roberts, for all his reluctance to get involved in political disputes, the reason he doesn't like that is to build credibility for exactly situations like this."

"There is no other mechanism to solve it," Noti continued. "I think the Supreme Court justices will weigh in, even if it's a 5-4 decision, before they will let blood run in the streets. Now maybe they will enforce the ECA. They'll say the governors get to tie-break. Maybe they'll say, "˜No, the ECA is unconstitutional because under the Constitution, state legislatures have plenary power, so they have to have the tie break. Maybe they'll say the president of the Senate decides, unless he's overruled by a majority of senators"¦ But I think they will decide."

But whether partisan Republicans in Congress would follow the Supreme Court-or any legal framework-as opposed to muscling Trump's appointment to a second term, is not a given. Not when, as the Amherst College law professor Lawrence Douglas said, the nation's most fervent partisans seem to be operating under diverging assumptions and principles.

"Maybe the binary that we are drawing between law on one hand and politics on the other doesn't entirely describe the gravity of the situation that we are confronting right now," he said. "Rules presuppose certain presupposed normative understandings. And once these normative understandings erode, I'm not sure that rules are really in the position to solidify or reinforce them."

"This discussion makes me nervous. I assume it makes all of us nervous because it drives home how quickly we can spiral into this dynamic in our current polarized and existential political culture, in which there are no effective legal structures that are going to govern if we get into some of these kinds of disputes," NYU's Pildes said. "This discussion drives home the more uncertainty there is beyond Election Day, the more rules are changed at the last minute, whether by courts that think they are doing things in good faith and are worried about protecting the individual right to vote of a few thousand people who didn't get the ballots they requested for absentee voting and the like; the more that opens up all of the capacity to destabilize the result"¦"

"You can see from this discussion how quickly those kinds of changes can become the excuse for kind of blowing up the whole election. And that's part of what I am taking away from this whole discussion."

Steven Rosenfeld is the editor and chief correspondent of Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He has reported for National Public Radio, Marketplace, and Christian Science Monitor Radio, as well as a wide range of progressive publications including Salon, AlterNet, the American Prospect, and many others.

This article was produced by Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Rad · May 09, 2020, 04:07 AM

Biden's lead over Trump widens - but strain on his virtual campaign grows

Coronavirus has robbed the Democrat of his typical back-slapping approach as he faces growing scrutiny and a third-party challenge

Lauren Gambino in Washington
Guardian
Sat 9 May 2020 10.00 BST

The Tampa, Florida, rally for Joe Biden on Thursday evening began as it normally might have, before a once-in-a-century pandemic transformed all aspects of American life, including the presidential campaign. A local high school student recited the pledge of allegiance, a campaign organizer pleaded with supporters to volunteer and a local DJ spun R&B music between speakers.

But in a sign of how profoundly the coronavirus crisis has reshaped American politics, that was where the similarities ended.

With much of the US still in lockdown, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee has been forced to take his campaign to unseat Donald Trump online. It has not always been easy.

His campaign's first attempt to recreate a traditional rally - part of a virtual swing through the battleground state of Florida - was later described by his opponents as an "unmitigated technological failure". The video stream was glitchy and pixelated. The audio was choppy, rendering some remarks nearly incomprehensible. And there were lengthy delays between speakers and at one point, the feed went dark for several minutes.

"Am I on?" asked Biden, beaming into the telecast from his home in Wilmington, Delaware, where he has been isolated since the middle of March. An off-camera voice replied that he was. Biden removed a pair of aviator sunglasses as he walked toward the camera.

"Good evening, Tampa. Thanks so much for tuning in," he continued, a hint of irritation in his voice. "I wish we could have done this together - and it had gone a little more smoothly."

For nearly two months, Biden has been the test subject in a novel political experiment: running for president in the age of Covid-19.

Social distancing restrictions imposed to stop the spread of the virus have already starved the campaign of a victory tour to mark his ascent to the Democratic nomination. It may well deny Democrats the chance to formally nominate him in person at the party's national convention this summer. Endorsements from former rivals and party leaders occur online to varying degrees of fanfare. . The remote set-up, anathema to Biden's back-slapping, glad-handing approach to politics, has left the candidate walled off from voters and competing for visibility.

Yet, technical difficulties aside, his campaign of confinement seems to be working.
Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton at a virtual town hall during which she endorsed him last month.

In recent weeks, Biden has widened his lead over Trump as the president's support slips amid growing disapproval of his response to the pandemic. Surveys from Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Florida, North Carolina and Arizona - key battlegrounds that Trump won in 2016 - show Biden ahead. At a recent virtual fundraiser last week, Jennifer O'Malley Dillon, his new campaign manager, expressed optimism about Biden's prospects in Florida and Arizona.

"The natural state of this race is to be a referendum on Donald Trump and every time Donald Trump steps to the microphone he hurts himself," said Mark Mellman, a veteran Democratic pollster. "That's a pretty good position for Joe Biden to be in."

Biden initially struggled to adapt to his cloistered reality. In March, the campaign turned a recreation room in the basement of his home into a studio, though not fast enough for his critics, who launched a "Where's Joe" campaign to mark the candidate's relative disappearance from the national stage.

But since then, Biden has been busy. Nearly every day he makes appearances on local TV news channels or national talkshows. He launched a podcast, where he has hosted conversations with prominent Democratic governors and potential vice-presidential candidates. He spends time each day speaking with a voter - a frontline worker, campaign volunteers - and he participated in what the campaign billed as a "virtual rope line".

"So what's up?" he said to Ashley Ruiz of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, one of several voters on the rope line. "Tell me about your situation, Ash."

"¢"¢"¢

Biden's rise in the polls comes as he contends with an allegation from Tara Reade, a former aide in his Senate office who accused him of sexual assault in 1993. In an interview this week with Megyn Kelly, the former Fox News and NBC television host, Reade said he should withdraw from the presidential race.

Biden has forcefully denied the allegation. "It's not true, I am saying unequivocally. It never, never happened," he said last week, in an interview addressing her claim for the first time publicly.

Publicly, Democrats, including prominent #MeToo advocates, have rallied around Biden, though privately some in the party have expressed concern about the continuous drip of reporting on the matter.

So far the allegation appears to have marginally dented his reputation, but not his lead. Most voters - 86% - are aware of the allegation, according to a Monmouth poll, which found the electorate divided over whether they viewed the claim as credible. At the same time, the poll showed Biden nine points ahead of Trump.

Despite Trump's falling electoral fortunes, many Democrats remain anxious about Biden's position - and his strategy.

David Axelrod and David Plouffe, two of Barack Obama's top campaign strategists, implored Biden's campaign to expand its digital footprint in a joint New York Times op-ed that compared the atmospherics of the candidate's home videos to "an astronaut beaming back to earth from the International Space Station".

"Online speeches from his basement won't cut it," they wrote.

Lis Smith, the former top adviser to Pete Buttigieg's presidential campaign, followed with an op-ed on Thursday that offered a blueprint for turning Biden into the "hottest bad boy and disrupter in the media game". She suggested his campaign use TV appearances and digital content to highlight Biden's empathy, a trait even supporters say the president has lacked in response to the rising coronavirus death toll.

Part of the campaign's evolving digital strategy includes partnering with groups that already have an online presence, like JoeMamas2020, a national coalition of "moms, caregivers, moms to be, aunts & all the parental figures in between" with about 27,000 Facebook and 1,200 Twitter followers. The group has helped amplify Biden's appearances and policy proposals while spreading the word about upcoming events.

Julie Zebrak, the group's co-founder, said the online army is growing with women energized to help elect a candidate who would end the Twitter presidency.

"We are all extremely enthusiastic for Joe Biden to beat Donald Trump," she said.

Yet the same traits that endear Biden to a growing coalition of suburban women and Never Trump Republicans have largely failed to excite younger, progressive voters. It's not that they prefer Trump - they don't - but a lack of enthusiasm among those voters could spell trouble in November if they stay home or vote for a third-party candidate.

The campaign has also ramped up its outreach to young people, who overwhelmingly supported Biden's rival Bernie Sanders. On Friday, Biden presented his economic pitch in an appearance on NowThis, a social-media-heavy news outlet with a young, progressive audience.

"This crisis hit harder and will last longer because Donald Trump spent the last three years undermining the core pillars of our economic strength," Biden said in remarks that attacked Trump's stimulus efforts a kind of "cronyism" and corporate welfare. Before he began speaking, Biden removed a face mask, a pointed rebuke of the president who had refused to wear one.

Still, new research conducted on behalf of NextGen America found many young people weren't convinced Biden's policies meet the scale of the challenges bearing down on their generation.

This makes the efforts of groups like Progressive Turnout Project, which endorsed him this week, all the more important. In the coming months, the group is investing more than $52m to turn out low-propensity Democratic voters - including young people and people of color - in 17 key battleground states.

"The best thing we can do is go and knock on doors and have face-to-face conversations with voters," said Alex Morgan, the group's executive director. "We are still looking to do that. But it'll be knocking on that door and then taking a few big steps back and having a more distant conversation."

"¢"¢"¢

Biden's campaign also faces another looming threat. The Michigan congressman Justin Amash, who left the Republican party last year after voting to impeach Trump, recently announced that he would seek the Libertarian party nomination.

His entrance has alarmed Democrats, who fear he could siphon off Never Trump voters who might otherwise back Biden, particularly in Amash's home state of Michigan, where third-party candidates pulled away a combined 5% of the vote share in 2016. Hillary Clinton lost the state by just 10,704 votes, less than 0.25%.

Many Democrats believe Biden's fate may well rest on his ability to persuade their own side to vote.

"Trump has shown no desire or ability to moderate for those swing voters in this election," said Addisu Demissie, who served as Cory Booker's presidential campaign manager. "So those voters are now likely going to end up either Biden voters or non-voters or third-party voters, and that's the competition."

This week, Trump traveled to the battleground state of Arizona, where he toured a medical mask facility without wearing one himself. The visit was a symbolic show of his administration's push to reopen the US economy but there were unmistakable elements of his signature campaign rallies, including the music that played when Trump finished his remarks (the Rolling Stones' You Can't Always Get What You Want).

Trump's cross-country venture stood in striking contrast to Biden's virtual swing through Florida - which included a rally, a roundtable in Jacksonville and an appearance on the local news in Tampa. The technical glitches only further highlighted the limitations of his confinement.

But the coronavirus has also upended Trump's strategy, erasing the booming economy he has made a centerpiece of his re-election campaign. In recent weeks, his campaign has all but abandoned championing the president's leadership, instead focusing its efforts on diminishing Biden.

Trump's campaign manager, Brad Parscale, previewed the onslaught on Twitter this week, comparing the Trump re-election juggernaut to the Death Star from the Star Wars movies. "In a few days we start pressing FIRE for the first time," he wrote.

As Trump prepares to make even greater use of the advantages of incumbency, Biden faces his biggest test yet. Can he really lead a Rebel Alliance from his basement?

soleil · May 09, 2020, 06:14 PM

Hi Rad,

Thanks for posting those articles---I share those concerns.

Am also concerned about when and how Trump is going to cheat again. Maybe with some kind of October surprise against Joe Biden through the Russians, Bill Barr or whoever the head of the FBI is at the time?

Still, no matter what happens, Trump's poll numbers don't shift. Doesn't seem to matter that he clearly doesn't care if people die from Covid 19, or that he tells people to inject themselves with disinfectant. He's obviously insane, incompetent, moronic, immature and sociopathic, yet he still has huge support among Republicans.

Do you think the economy tanking between now and election day is the thing that may finally affect his poll numbers or do you think his crowd is just so brainwashed/racist/greedy/power-hungry/anti-abortion etc. that nothing will change his numbers?

All the best,

Soleil

Rad · May 10, 2020, 05:02 AM

Hi Soleil,

Given that Trump has made a contract with Evil, his Faustian deal, he is as you know capable of anything that serves his own perception of self-interest. His malignant narcissism will try to destroy anything relative to that self interest, and destroy anything that his evil soul perceives to be destroying him including the entire country of the USA.

From what I have been reading ( https://www.rawstory.com/2020/05/trump-glum-and-shell-shocked-as-coronavirus-pandemic-cripples-his-re-election-efforts-report/ ) he is now going steadily down in the polls in general. However, his core supporters are exactly like himself: humans that need to be victims who can not accept any responsibility in their own lives for that which they are responsible for, and who live in an utterly delusional reality. And, like Trump. need to validate that delusional reality by attempting to force others to 'believe' in their own delusions so that they can then prove to themselves that the delusions themselves are ACTUAL REALITY.

Within that they have no actual principles, like Trump, and who need absolute power to prove to themselves and others that their delusional 'beliefs' are actually real. These types of humans will not change for to change at all is to admit they have been wrong. To admit that will equal an absolute state where they lives become utterly meaninglessness. Utterly emotionally and psychologically insecure. They would have no idea what to do with their delusional lives as a result. This sort of inner panic then manifests as an intensified need to force anyone who is not like themselves to 'believe' in their delusional reality.

God Bless, Rad

soleil · May 10, 2020, 12:42 PM

Hi Rad,

Thank you. What you said is so true. Trump's core supporters are just like him---they're delusional (I don't think I've ever seen someone as insecure and delusional as Trump) and they're pathologically unable to admit they're wrong because of how insecure they feel and how weak their inner core is.

They're also driven by racism, cruelty, and a desire to hold onto power (autocratic/monarchical/total power) at the expense of all else. Add to the list: "owning the libs", which is a bizarre, self-defeating form of revenge.

As part of natural law, (I'm reminded of the quote "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice") I keep thinking there has to be some sort of cosmic justice system---some may call it karma---that eventually balances the scales, but in Trump's case, I don't see it in operation. I see him getting away with more and more outrageous evil acts and no one is willing or able to stop him.

Somehow, it feels like he will find a way to spin the coronavirus disaster and economic collapse in a way that satisfies his base and cons people into continuing to support him.

In the case of someone like Trump, who has made a contract with Evil, does this cosmic justice system cease to operate as it normally does?

Do you think karma is about to bite him or do you think he will continue to teflon his way through everything?

Thanks for your feedback.

Regards,

Soleil

Rad · May 10, 2020, 01:12 PM

Hi Soleil,

Given he has made that contract which creates it's own evil 'superpower' the law of karma still exists but can warded off because of the nature and power of Evil, Lucifer, itself. Yet, in the end, there is what we call God which is more powerful that Evil/ Lucifer. So, in the end, even that evil 'protection' can stand up to God Itself. It can take a lot longer than 'normal' but it will catch up. Consider the case of Hitler: it did catch up.

God Bless, Rad

soleil · May 10, 2020, 03:15 PM

Hi Rad,

Thank you. Good reminder that in the case of Hitler, it eventually did catch up.

Am praying it catches up to Trump soon...this guy is a toxic force affecting the entire planet.

Peace + blessings to you and to all,

Soleil

Rad · May 12, 2020, 03:56 AM

Red states expand voting by mail - ignoring Trump and right-wing think tanks

on May 12, 2020
By Pro Publica

On April 23, during the same week that Kentucky's Republican secretary of state said he was contemplating a "significant expansion" of vote by mail, the Public Interest Legal Foundation emailed one of his employees under the subject line "28 MILLION ballots lost."

"Putting the election in the hands of the United States Postal Service would be a catastrophe," wrote J. Christian Adams, president of PILF, a conservative organization that has long complained about voter fraud. His missive contended, with scant evidence, that "twice as many" mailed ballots "disappeared" in the 2016 presidential election than made up the margin of votes between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

The state worker forwarded the message to his supervisor, who ignored it, according to emails obtained through a public records request. Only days later, Kentucky finalized its plan for the biggest increase in vote by mail in the state's history. Secretary of State Mike Adams (no relation to J. Christian) said he had little trouble persuading legislators to pass the measure. "I've been pleasantly surprised on social media and elsewhere," he said. "Republicans and Democrats both have been supportive of what we did."
Defend democracy. Click to invest in courageous progressive journalism today.

Not long ago, such a rebuff in a reliably red state to a conservative outlet's warnings of voter fraud would have been unusual. Think tanks like PILF and the Heritage Foundation; advocacy groups like True the Vote; and politicians like Kris Kobach, Kansas' former secretary of state, have effectively lobbied Republicans for decades for voter ID laws and stricter registration rules. They generally favor measures that would reduce turnout and oppose those, like vote by mail, that could make it easier to vote. The Heritage Foundation has hosted confidential meetings with like-minded secretaries of state "to strategize on advancing their shared goal of ensuring the integrity of the elections they administer in their home states," records show.

But now, even as Trump has joined these advocates in denouncing vote by mail, Republican election administrators are rejecting their concerns. In Georgia, Idaho, Kentucky, Nebraska, Ohio, South Dakota and West Virginia, GOP officials are expanding vote by mail. Even in Alabama, where Secretary of State John Merrill has long spoken out against vote by mail, the state has added the coronavirus to the reasons for which voters can request an absentee ballot.

Election officials in these states say they have confidence in their ballot security practices. Kentucky's expansion of vote by mail included "ballot integrity safeguards, such as an application requiring personally identifiable information in order to obtain an absentee ballot, a barcode tracking system for all outgoing and incoming absentee ballots, and proactive maintenance of the voter rolls," said Miranda Combs, Mike Adams' spokeswoman. Also, because they don't see an alternative if the pandemic persists into November, many Republican officials who would otherwise oppose widening vote by mail are showing they are open to it. And they're aware that Americans support voting by mail by a 2 to 1 margin.

"While the Washington politicians may not agree, our polling shows 70% of Georgia voters approve of the absentee ballot application process and plan on voting by mail due to the COVID-19 crisis," said Jordan Fuchs, a Republican and Georgia's deputy secretary of state. "As a result, Georgia has seen more than 1 million absentee ballot requests, with more than 900,000 ballots dropped into the mail system."

David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, said he isn't surprised that the attacks on vote by mail have failed to sway state officials. "The facts simply don't support" the claims, said Becker, who works directly with states to improve their election systems. "Election officials know what they are doing, and they know that mail voting has proper safeguards and that fraud is extremely rare in elections."

Spokespeople for Trump, Heritage and PILF did not respond to requests for comment.

National election officials have noticed the states' adoption of vote by mail. "When it comes to information on how best to administer elections, I rely on state and local election officials," said Ben Hovland, a Republican and chairman of the Election Assistance Commission, a national clearinghouse that offers guidance on voting procedures. "I have repeatedly heard from officials of both parties that absentee and mail ballots will be an integral part of their 2020 election response to the COVID-19 pandemic."

The wide public support and the relatively smooth expansion of vote by mail on the state level contrast with the opposition of Trump and many Republicans in Congress. Trump used his formerly daily press briefings on the pandemic to cast doubt on vote by mail, often parroting the talking points used by J. Christian Adams and the Heritage Foundation's Hans von Spakovsky, both of whom served on his now-disbanded voter fraud commission. Trump has called vote by mail "horrible" and "corrupt." With universal vote by mail, "you'd never have a Republican elected in this country again," he said.

"Mail ballots are a very dangerous thing for this country, because they're cheaters," Trump said at a briefing in early April. He recently tweeted about vote by mail in connection with Tuesday's special congressional election in California, writing: "Turn your Ballots in now and track them, watching for dishonesty. Report to Law Enforcement."

But states that backed Trump in the 2016 presidential election are largely disregarding his warnings. In the largest expansion of vote by mail in Georgia's history, its Republican secretary of state sent applications to every active voter, despite protests from the speaker of the Georgia house, David Ralston. There are "a multitude of reasons why vote by mail in my view is not acceptable," Ralston said in a recent interview. "The president said it best, this will be extremely devastating to Republicans and conservatives in Georgia."

Ohio went all absentee for its April 28 primary with limited in-person voting for individuals with disabilities. Ballots needed to be postmarked before Election Day but could be received through May 5. Nearly 2 million Ohioans requested absentee ballots, overwhelming clerks with requests.

Kobach, Kansas' former secretary of state, became prominent by promoting unsupported claims of rampant voter fraud. Yet parts of Kansas, where he is now running for U.S. Senate, are encouraging vote by mail. Johnson County, the state's largest county, where Kobach personally appointed the current clerk in charge of elections, will mail absentee ballot applications to all active voters ahead of the June primary. The state has allowed citizens to vote by mail up to 20 days before an election since the late 1960s, and it has in recent decades refined that process to enable voters to track their ballots online.

In an April column for Breitbart, Kobach told readers that fraud occurs "in the vast majority of states" that vote by mail. "All except Kansas, that is," he wrote, where most problems "have been solved by the security reforms that I drafted and the Kansas Legislature enacted in 2011." Kobach was referring to voter identification requirements, signature verification and prevention of ballot harvesting, in which political operatives round up and cast absentee ballots. These measures, though, aren't unique to Kansas; 31 states have signature verification, and nearly a dozen others require a witness or a notary. Several states require ID verification to vote by mail, and all but 13 states have laws to deter ballot harvesting.

Kobach did not respond to requests for comment.

In Louisiana, the Republican secretary of state, Kyle Ardoin, worked with the Democratic governor on a plan to let anyone worried about health risks vote by mail. After Republican legislators rejected the proposal, saying it increased the risk of fraud, a scaled-down version passed a few days later. It enables voters to seek absentee ballots if they are at higher risk for the coronavirus.

"This is a great result for Louisiana's voters and election workers, especially those most susceptible to the COVID-19 virus," Ardoin said in a statement. "Our plan serves as a temporary and pragmatic response to the COVID-19 pandemic ravaging our nation."

Texas is responding to the pandemic by lengthening the early voting period, rather than by expanding vote by mail. On Monday night, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott announced that early voting for a state special election on July 14 would begin on June 29 instead of July 6. Still, a federal court may impose an incremental extension of vote by mail in Texas. Over the objections of the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, who threatened "criminal sanctions" for voters who apply for an absentee ballot for fear of COVID-19, a U.S. district court issued a temporary injunction expanding the definition of "disability" for purposes of voting by mail to include voters concerned about contracting the disease. Across the state, election administrators say they are prepared to allow people to seek absentee ballots for this reason. "It will make everything so much easier," said one, who declined to be named.

As in Texas, courts in other states have generally been unsympathetic to allegations that vote by mail increases fraud. Last Tuesday, a federal court in Virginia rejected arguments by the state Republican Party and PILF that removing a requirement that absentee ballots be notarized would increase fraud. The governor had waived the requirement for those who did not feel safe obtaining a notary signature because of the pandemic.

Similarly, a federal judge in Reno, Nevada, in April rejected True the Vote's lawsuit challenging the state's plan to hold its June primary largely by mail. "Their claim of voter fraud is without any factual basis," the judge wrote. "Plaintiffs cannot demonstrate a burden upon their voting rights, only an imposition upon their preference for in-person voting."

Some red states remain holdouts. In Missouri, Republican Gov. Mike Parson has declined to expand vote by mail, calling it "inappropriate" to change election procedures. The secretary of state has stayed largely silent on the practice.

Von Spakovsky and J. Christian Adams have been pushing voter fraud claims since they both served in the U.S. Department of Justice's civil rights division during the administration of President George W. Bush. As early as 2010, von Spakovsky called universal vote by mail "a terrible idea whose time should never come," and he predicted an array of bad outcomes: rampant fraud, voter intimidation, even that the secret ballot would be "under siege." He has made a habit of calling mailed ballots the "vote thieves' tool of choice."

To back up his claims, the Heritage Foundation has compiled a database of vote by mail fraud. But Amber McReynolds, chief executive of Vote at Home, and Charles Stewart, an MIT political scientist who studies election administration, contend that the database actually shows how rare fraud is. In late April, the pair wrote for The Hill that, of the 1,200 cases in the database, "204 involved the fraudulent use of absentee ballots; 143 resulted in criminal convictions."

"One hundred forty-three cases of fraud using mailed ballots over the course of 20 years comes out to seven to eight cases per year, nationally. It also means that across the 50 states, there has been an average of three cases per state over the 20-year span. That is just one case per state every six or seven years. We are talking about an occurrence that translates to about 0.00006 percent of total votes cast," they wrote.

For the last three years, von Spakovsky has pressed Republican election officials on election security and voter fraud in private, off-the-record meetings. These get-togethers take place during the National Association of Secretaries of State conferences twice a year, in January in Washington, D.C., and in the summer at a rotating location.

The half-day meetings gather secretaries and election officials on an invitation-only basis. Correspondence obtained by ProPublica through public records requests shows that the meetings' purpose has been "to have in-depth discussions of these issues and to share strategy and tactics on achieving long-term goals and objectives shared by the secretaries." Guest speakers, such as Ed Meese, attorney general under President Ronald Reagan, occasionally make appearances.

"I mean, you always know when the meetings are happening, because all of the most conservative secretaries are just gone" from the regular conference events, said one secretary of state whom the Heritage Foundation has not invited. "What would actually be helpful is if these secretaries were present" at the NASS trainings and briefings.

As the pandemic has raged, and states have rejected their attacks on vote by mail, von Spakovsky and Adams have slightly modified their position. Like Kobach, von Spakovsky has touted his home state as an island of responsible practices. He, Adams and Cleta Mitchell wrote on Fox News' website that Georgia - where von Spakovsky lives and speaks frequently with the secretary of state's staff, according to email records - will "cut down" on fraud by sending absentee ballot applications only to registered and active voters.

The authors didn't point out that similar procedures have become the norm in other states. Instead, they warned, "No one should forget that absentee-ballot voting is vulnerable to intimidation, fraud and chaos as all-mail elections move behind closed doors beyond the oversight of election officials."

dollydaydream · May 12, 2020, 06:10 AM

Hi all, today the Supreme Court will consider whether the House of Representatives and a New York prosecutor can subpoena Donald Trump's accounting firm and banks for his financial documents. There will be oral arguments today and a decision towards summer. At a very basic level this will be a decision on whether Trump is above the law. Let's see which of the justices are willing to go against the spirit of the law by parsing the wording of the law in order to prop up this impostor in the white house. DDD