Winter Solstice
I’m very, very concerned that if you solicit votes from typically non-voters, that you will affect and change the outcome. – United States Senator Rand Paul, 12/17
Republican Corruption: Timothy Noah asks: “How can you tell that the GOP has accepted Biden is the duly elected president?” His answer: “They’re trying to destroy the economy.” These thugs in black suits have squeezed what they could out of the economy for their corporate masters, and now they are shifting their focus to sabotaging the transition, prolonging the recession and convincing the base that Biden will be responsible.
And more statistics have arisen showing what that base is composed of, what color they are and why Trumpus came so close (in the Electoral College) to winning. I take these numbers with a grain of salt, because no one really knows the opinions of those who voted by mail; but clearly it’s all about race, as Dan Siegal summarizes:
The election was close only because Trump won overwhelmingly among white voters, who cast two-thirds of the votes nationally…(White evangelicals) made up 28%of the electorate, and Trump won 76% of their votes, his largest bloc by far. Biden won among all other voters by a margin of 62-36. In other words, Trump’s near victory was the result of his support by white evangelicals…Trump won a majority of the votes in 15 of the 17 states where evangelicals make up 21 percent or more of the population…
Sixty-nine percent of voters say that racism is an important problem in the U.S. These voters supported Biden, 68-30. The voters who believe that racism is a minor problem supported Trump 84-14. Voters with favorable and unfavorable attitudes about Black Lives Matter split along almost identical lines. The most accurate predictors of who would vote for Trump were (1) identifying as White; (2) membership in evangelical churches; (3) residence in the South or Midwest; and (4) attitudes about the importance of racism.
How close did Trumpus come? The Wisconsin Supreme Court rejected his lawsuit, bogus as it was, by a margin of only 4-3, with the swing vote coming from a right-wing judge suffering from a rare case of cojones.
And let us not forget that Trumpus’ attempts to steal back the election – incompetent and laughable as they are – have been entirely about race. As Elie Mystal writes,
This election witnessed new and destructive attempts by the GOP to win: Instead of merely trying to suppress the votes of Black people, the party tried to nullify those votes altogether. In predominately Black city after predominately Black city, Republicans urged courts, state boards of elections, and secretaries of state to throw away ballots cast by legitimately registered voters on the basis of “voter fraud.” They offered no evidence for these allegations but expected officials to throw out literally hundreds of thousands of votes anyway.
And it almost worked. In Michigan, for instance, the two GOP members of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers…initially refused to certify the results in their county, which includes Detroit. Palmer indicated she’d be willing to certify results everywhere in her jurisdiction except for precincts in that predominately Black city.
But it’s much weirder than that. We need to address an even deeper level of rot. I predicted all through the election cycle that the Repubs would corrupt the voting machines and flip votes in all or most of the 26 states where they control the counting process, and that individual Democratic candidates would need at least a 5% lead in the polls in order to offset the vote theft. By October it was clear that the vast numbers of people voting by mail would make comparisons between official results and exit polls useless, and that’s what happened. Exit polls only tell us so much.
But now we have the first analysis of actual vote patterns, not exit polls, showing that electronic election theft is precisely what happened, and it happened on a massive scale just as it did four years ago. This article by Alternet – Busted? Why the numbers behind Mitch McConnell’s re-election don’t add up – goes into deep detail:
In Kentucky, McConnell, with under 40% approval on election day, beat Amy McGrath by 19 points. “Hidden Trumper” votes? I’ve already debunked that theory, but even if they existed, in 119 of 120 counties, McGrath got more votes than Biden. Evidently, one in five Kentuckians voted for both her and the pussy-grabber Trumpus! It also appears that McConnell won easily in Democratic strongholds, including counties that he had never before carried, some of which had voted overwhelmingly for Democrats as recently as last year. For example, in his six previous Senate elections, Elliott and Wolfe counties had never voted for McConnell. Yet in November, McConnell won 64% of the votes in Wolfe and 66% in Elliott. Or so we are told.
Landslide winner in Democratic countiesIn one of the looniest and most incompetent post-election lawsuits, the Trumpus team may have intended to accuse Dems of election fraud, but in describing a possible plot, they actually attributed the cheating to themselves and inadvertently revealed their own con game. In a Dec. 4 filing in Georgia, they referred to a “machine-controlled algorithm deliberately run” by a voting machine vendor that “generally took more than 2.5% of the votes from Mr. Biden and flipped them to Mr. Trump.”
The article goes on to generalize to the entire political map. It would appear that the electronic culprit was not Dominion, as Trumpus has been claiming, but another company, ES&S.
McConnell had his biggest percentage of registered Democrats voting Republican in counties using ES&S machines…Other Republican incumbents, whom polls indicated would have close races, had similar luck to their majority leader on election day…Lindsey Graham’s race in South Carolina was so tight that he infamously begged for money, yet he won with a comfortable 10% lead—tabulated on ES&S machines throughout the state. In Susan Collins’s Maine, where she never had a lead in a poll after July 2, almost every ballot was fed through ES&S machines. Kentucky, South Carolina, Maine, Texas, Iowa and Florida are all states that use ES&S machines…when Trump calls this the most fraudulent election in our history, maybe he knows of what he speaks.
The Democrats: A tale of two appointments — Pete Buttigieg (who has never administered anything larger than a city with a population of 100,000) received Biden’s nomination to run the Department of Transportation (with a $73 billion budget and 55,000 employees). First gay cabinet member? Great! Payback for entering the presidential race with the sole intention of helping defeat Bernie Sanders? Bet on it.
Biden also nominated Congresswoman Deb Haaland as Interior Secretary. First Native American cabinet member? Great! She could be his most progressive choice so far – and there’s the rub. This decision could be just what it appears to be, the right choice at the right time. But Biden is nothing if not a politician, and this will be a win-win (maybe a rare one) for him. If the Dems win both Georgia races, he gets his way with all his nominations, including his atrocious war hawk foreign policy picks. If they don’t – consider the quote in Part Eighteen of this series about Neera Tanden. If the Repubs consider this person a “leftist” who “stands zero chance of being confirmed,”then Haaland shouldn’t even bother attending her confirmation hearing. But Biden will receive mucho acclaim for having nominated her.
