If Trump were to lose in 2024, would that be the end of his grip on the Republican Party?
08.06.2025 00:21
A short primer on the Trump conspiracy on “voter fraud”. Even old-school anti-Trump conservative outlets like National Review and others and of course all the deranged folks fixed on a particular town — Bedford, Virginia. A clown looking for proof of his delusions looked up a fancy new database the state had, and found that dozens of names who were registered to vote had not identified themselves as US citizens when they renewed their drivers licenses: ah-HA!
The Harris administration will keep busy, trying to solve the nation’s problems or at least make them smaller. But I predict (you heard it here first), that Republicans in Congress will discover after a Trump loss, that they’ve lost all the skills and levers for being an Opposition party in the legislature.
So a couple dozen people who’d lived in Bedford for decades, including several veterans of all kinds (it’s that kinda town) simply checked the wrong box.
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There are really two Trump campaigns this year — the candidate himself, who is undisciplined, lazy, impulsive and unreliable; and the campaign itself, which is laser focused on the only two issues that move votes away from Harris and toward Trump in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada: immigration and inflation.
It doesn't look much like Trump is adding new voters by persuasion that “they’re eating dogs, they’re eating cats”. Harris’ you okay, bro? look after he said it, did.
There is a substantial cohort of younger voters who as always and unreliably, just might show up. Harris being who she is, and not Trump, is a huge advantage.
That kind of voter fraud claim is based on identity theft: if the clown had bothered to test his bullshit (they never do), he’d have recognized that all the folks he claimed were foreigners… er, had somehow sneaked into Bedford 40 years ago to vote in elections… in which they were candidates, neighbors, known to one and all, he just might not have made a fool of himself in public.
Trump dances like everybody’s watching him, because that’s the only reason he dances.
It includes people in nursing homes, in particular: just apartment buildings with hundreds of residents who are registered voters but don’t get out much. I recall 40 years ago there was a state rep who was a jovial sort of king around town and in the SMSA politics, cuz he had 4 big-ass nursing homes in his district. Since this is where he grew up and it was still pretty close to the beginning of the modern industry, with Medicare and Medicaid, most of the people living in those nursing homes were from there and had families nearby.
So it’s not impossible and would definitely be best for the majority rule necessary for American self government if Harris and Walz won not just Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada (not to mention New York and California: you know, the states with the most Americans in ‘em), but Democrats also won majorities in both the House and Senate. (For the latter, Maryland is probably the bellwether. Trump-Hogan won’t win Maryland.)
You can see the rest: every election, including contested primaries, Gabe could tap maybe a thousand votes with whom he’d personally built up trust through family connections, people who would “turn out” to vote (so to speak, since sometimes they couldn’t even turn over), voters who’d helped Gabe and the candidates he endorsed maybe a dozen or twenty times over the years.
Two years prior, the state rolled out a new website to renew your drivers license. As they all do, it included an offer to renew voting registration as well — and it was written by software people. In light of the South Asian origin of many programmers and of our language, we’re talking about at least 3 or 4 peoples divided by a common language — but the truth is, it’s bureaucracy and lawyers, really: instead of something simple, like “If you are a recently naturalized US citizen and would like to register to vote…”, they broke it up into something like 4 prompts on two pages, all ending with a negative question along the lines of “if you don’t need to naturalize as a citizen and would like to renew your license without registering to vote…”
Now there are bomb threats to schools in Springfield, Ohio. Everybody calm the fuck down and use some common sense.
Gabe (the jovial local king’s name) had played a role in getting at least two of the nursing homes built in his district, so his recommendation got people jobs… as well, of course, as jobs with the city and so on.
They are required to fill out their ballots themselves, and to sign it without help. No one else may touch it, until it is sealed in an envelope within an envelope — again, the system was set up for the US Mail.
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From the perspective of damage to the majority rule that is essential to American self-government, the worst case would be a situation like Y2K, when partisan Republicans on the Supreme Court intervened in a lawful state procedure over a disputed election to make W President of the United States. It doesn’t have to be exact (God spare us hanging chads and the Gucci riot again), but it might just be some thousands of votes scattered among Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada, to name the conventional wisdom 7.
A second, more insidious form of damage (brown rolling smoke under the eaves) would be for Trump to lose decisively enough that the Republican Party’s leadership (led by Vance, naturally) will see a way to be rid of him, while Republicans take the House and Senate. A Trump who lost again!, who is tried, convicted and even jailed, is far more valuable and useful to the ambitions of other Republicans than any other future iteration of this guy.
Plus, she’s fun. Trump is not fun. People may not like her, and cultists inexplicably love Trump — but it’s just a fact: she’s fun. He’s not.
And clowns who won’t bother to check their claims. FFS, look at what happened with a Facebook post by somebody who claimed to have heard from someone who knew somebody… about their neighbors and a cat.
Should Democrats retain the White House and control both the House and Senate, the next most important thing will be Trump’s trials.
The registrar knew better — she knew most of these people personally, and certainly recognized names: that’s a Tomjanovich, they live out Falling Creek Road, I remember one who registered with his grandfather, the guy who worked to bring the D-Day memorial to the home of the 29th so she wasn’t fooled for an instant by the clown’s “research”.
As for Trump’s Supremes? Recall the wisdom of Mr. Dooley — the Constitution may follow the Flag, but the Supreme Court follows election returns.
The same is true of identify theft claims of voter fraud more generally: it’s simply not common, cuz it’s completely inefficient, easily-detected and unwieldy.
The best reasonable case possible that I can think of, anyway, would be the genuine landslide that seems possible.
Depends.
Just look at all the baggage that he drags around like a 21st century Marley, wearing the chain he literally banged out over decades: marking rental applications with a C for “colored”, the parties with Epstein, multiple bankruptcies, the serial wives, “grab ’em by the pussy, if you're a star they let you get away with it”, paying off a porn star he’d hired as a hooker, sucking up to Putin, offering Putin a bribe, offering Putin Ukraine or even NATO, calling COVID “their new hoax”, bleach, January 6…
There have been so many bad faith challenges to procedures already, the worst damage to the majority rule that is essential to American self-government would be from genuine disputes in (pick a few, add some) Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada whether these votes or those votes will count.
Immigration (which was my career) has become a wedge issue in a very specific way: when KellyAnne Conway was working for Pataki, before Trump hired her, she realized that immigration was a magic word to tap into economic anxiety. There is always an irreducible cultural element to it — people speaking Spanish in public! — but for the issue to have traction for creating a national majority, it has to be connected to the rule of law (that is, to favor legal immigration) and to national values, like Ellis Island.
Harris is 20 years younger than her peers on the national political stage — being Biden and Trump himself. She’s a woman of color.
Unless it’s close while they’re still winning. Then they stop the count.
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So I speak not from naïveté: Absentee ballot fraud is never big enough to decide national elections. It’s simply scale, if nothing else — Gabe’s thousand votes only mattered within walking distance. (Which ain’t nothing.) Beyond the municipal level, with all those millions of voters in suburbs and stretched across what in the 19th century would have been understood to be fully populated regions, which we now call “rural” as if they’re all cornstalks, the nursing home vote (living people, mind) isn’t that important. It’s not that big.
And even as a majority, Republicans couldn’t have stopped Trump’s prosecution. In a legislative minority, any attempt to gin up scandals will fail — and worse, be dwarfed by the clear probability that Trump will be convicted several more times, and quite possibly be sent to jail.
They have no alternatives — “concepts of a plan” can’t improve, much less replace the ACA. But the truth is, the first year of a Harris administration will also be the year of Trump’s reckoning in court.
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After all, he never called her.
Inflation first — this was always a bogus charge: it’s not that bad under Biden and it’s getting better. Saying inflation is a vehicle for the economic resentment that always motivates a substantial number of voters. Yet in general, the nation’s mood on economics doesn’t indicate it’s breaking Trump’s way — not enough gas in this tank.
Postmarked yesterday, it’s good. Postmarked tomorrow, it’s not. No hanging chads — no judgment: because with judgment calls you get mistakes and you get bias.
Trump has managed to identify the idea with high-school rumors about Chinese restaurants serving cats in the chow mein. Explain that you saw ‘somebody say it on TV’ in the cafeteria so you believed it, people legit remember you were weird.
The ordinary, proper way for absentee ballots to be used is convenience: someone on military duty abroad, for example, can vote not just for President but against that asshole running for dog-catcher in their hometown where they are registered. The system was set up for the US mail.
As it happened, I’d just been to Bedford, Virginia to see the D-Day Memorial there. It didn’t look like a place that had voter fraud. (I’m from Bridgeport, Connecticut: ‘nuff said.) So I called the registrar — which the clown hadn’t done — and spoke to a firmly polite woman, who’d had the job for something like 20 years.
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So just like that, she’s been introduced to the nation as “new” (cuz she is, to most of us), and therefore, a step foward: “new and improved” is an American reflex.
But — I’m from Bridgeport, which is infamous for absentee ballots. So, a primer within a primer:
If Trump loses — and unmistakably so, if he loses in the historic landslide that’s not impossible — future historians of politics will marvel at how Trump managed to mangle the only issues on which he could have won.
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And yet — in the legal and political confusion surrounding the Florida recount, Joe Lieberman decided to express his public opinion that it didn’t matter whether military ballots had been properly handled and mailed; they should all count. Set aside the principle or even the substance of the dispute, whatever it was — this sorta thing should be automatic, without judgment of any kind.
Without that campaign managers fingerprints, so he beat the rap. (If you want to keep up with the politics of PT Barnum’s hometown, google.)
Honest, they ran with this.
Should Trump lose decisively in the national vote and overwhelmingly in the Electoral College (which is part of its effect, turning modest victories into mandates by magic math), what will matter is control of Congress.
In an election with one of Gabe’s political enemies, a state senator I once worked for got a tip. So she waited around the corner with a warrant and a state cop, while the political enemy’s campaign manager (a lawyer who owned a neighborhood grocery; I hung out with his son for a year or two) strolled up to a mailbox with a big brown bag. When he’d dumped it into the mail, the cop flipped his lights on: there were 48 pieces of mail in the box — payment for a phone bill and 47 absentee ballots signed with the same hand.
Self-governing politics is reliably more successful through addition, not division.