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These two op eds and videos speak for themselves. A simple question regarding fraud, is the racial mix of those in charge of vote counting in Democrat controlled states where the results are questioned like Michigan, Pennsylvanian (mainly Philadelphia), Wisconsin, even Georgia which, until this election was Republican, but where Atlanta's population is the tail that wags the state and is heavily black.
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Mail-in voting was a mess. Trump did better among minority voters. And if Biden prevails, the GOP Senate will check him.
It was a peculiar election. Not, as was often prophesied, the most epochal election. Even while it’s not over in the true Yogi Berra sense, some unanticipated features are coming into focus.
The first is the unholy mess created by the sudden introduction of mail-in voting in state after state. Nevada’s Democratic governor, Steve Sisolak, called a hurried special session of the Legislature at the end of July, which rushed into law provisions for mailing out ballots to every voter registered in the state. The result swamped Nevada’s ability to count, and since the new law provides that ballots count if they’re received as late as a week after the election, the prospect for irregularities is sky-high.Similar problems have plagued vote counts in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan and Pennsylvania (where Philadelphia has had an unhappy history of voter fraud, leading last May to the conviction of an elections judge on federal bribery charges). On the other hand, 20 years after the Florida recount, the Sunshine State sailed through 2020.
Not since the bitterly contested election of 1824—not even in 2000—has so much confusion and accusation over voting hung in the air in so many places. The 1824 election was thrown into the House and ended with the victory of John Quincy Adams, even though Andrew Jackson had a plurality of both popular and electoral votes. That result instantly became stigmatized as “the corrupt bargain” and doomed Adams’s presidency to four years of futility. The election of 2020 is already taking on the profile of “the stolen election,” with the losing side, regardless of the outcome, ready to accuse the other. If Mr. Biden emerges the winner, there will probably be demands in statehouse after statehouse to erase any tarnish from the result by making mail-in balloting the new normal.
There have been other surprises. Scandals and accusations, which hurt candidates in 2016, no longer seemed to bother voters in 2020. Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign was seriously damaged by FBI inquiries into her handling of classified emails while secretary of state. This time voters didn’t seem to care about either the president’s impeachment or the Biden family’s links to Chinese and Ukrainian financial interests.
Despite Mr. Trump’s being cast as racist, and race-related protests and riots across the country this summer, he managed to outperform his 2016 showing with minorities. His share of black voters in exit polls rose from 8% to 12%. A September Democracy Fund survey found the president with 21% support among black voters under 45. Mr. Trump’s share of Hispanic men rose from 32% to 36% and Hispanic women from 25% to 28%. But only 58% of white men voted for him, down from 62% four years ago.
The shift in minority voting was nowhere near enough to boost Republican candidates to success in black-majority districts. Baltimore’s Kimberley Klacik, who drew national attention for her two eye-popping campaign videos, has so far recorded only 29% of her district’s vote, an 8-point improvement over the Republican nominee in 2018 against the late Rep. Elijah Cummings. But one black Republican—Byron Donalds in Florida—won a GOP seat, and another, Burgess Owens, is in a tight, yet-to-be-called contest in Utah. John James, in his second race for a Michigan U.S. Senate seat, appears to have lost narrowly to the Democratic incumbent. All told, 24 of 26 black Republicans have lost races for Congress.
Other Republicans did better. Democrats, who picked up 41 House seats and the majority in 2018, predicted 15 more gains in 2020. Instead, by the time the votes are sorted out, they are likely to give back at least 10 seats to Republicans and set up a push for the GOP to regain the House in 2022. This, even though Democratic political-action committees and advocacy groups outspent Republicans by nearly $100 million, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
In the Senate, South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham, one of Mr. Trump’s most ardent defenders, easily turned back a challenge from Jaime Harrison, despite Democrats’ lavishing $109 million on Mr. Harrison’s campaign. And despite losses for Sens. Cory Gardner in Colorado and Martha McSally in Arizona, Republicans defeated Alabama Sen. Doug Jones and are on track to hold their other seats, pending at least one January runoff in Georgia, all but guaranteeing they will continue to hold a majority.
Mr. Biden, assuming he emerges as the victor, would no doubt resort to executive actions to promote elements of House legislation. But like Mr. Trump, he would face challenges in persuading courts to uphold them. The frustration of winning the presidency but being able to do so little with it may tempt Democrats into incessant investigations of Trump officeholders by House committees or a Biden Justice Department. But not even Mr. Trump, after his 2016 victory over Mrs. Clinton, made a serious effort to “lock her up.”
A Biden presidency would have more-pressing issues to deal with anyway. The first would surely be the coronavirus pandemic. Mr. Biden has promised an executive order mandating face masks on federal property, and his warning in the second presidential debate of a “dark winter” of resurgent Covid-19 has stoked fears that he might attempt to impose some sort of national lockdown. But that would incite public anger and involve privacy invasions—and litigation—on a nightmarish scale.
That, in turn, would exacerbate the economic challenges Mr. Biden would face, since a new administration would arrive in the Oval Office to face a Himalayan federal debt thanks to the Covid-19 bailouts. Mr. Biden would have little choice but to resort to draconian tax policies. Yet, at the same time, he would be expected to execute a dramatic about-face on Trump’s America-first trade policies, starting with a re-engagement with the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Linked to that would be reversals on tariff policy with China and, touchiest of all, immigration. Those, too, will surely generate a significant populist backlash, not to mention instability in American financial markets.
Mr. Biden would probably face his greatest challenges from within his own party rather than from Republicans. He is the mask of “normalcy” on a party which has moved increasingly and impatiently to the left. Once in office, Mr. Biden would be under pressure from his onetime competitors for the nomination—Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and even his vice president, Kamala Harris—to take restrictive steps on gun ownership, “hate speech” and religious freedom, all the while urging a national health plan and the end of fossil fuels. Mr. Biden is clearly sympathetic to some parts of that agenda, but the costs of implementing them all, and at a pace that will satisfy his progressive legions, would be sure to generate conflict. That conflict could easily find a center around Ms. Harris, thus setting up an uneasy tension between the president and vice president.
The great coastal cities remain vital economic entrepôts. But as Joel Kotkin writes in American Affairs, they have been ebbing population ever since the Great Recession of 2008-09—some 40,000 annually from New York City—and that trend has accelerated since the pandemic. America’s fastest-growing metropolitan areas include Dallas-Fort Worth; Nashville, Tenn.; Indianapolis; and Des Moines, Iowa, but not Seattle or Philadelphia. The fast-growing areas are also the youngest, in terms of birth rates and age demography.
Economically, the continental core produced some $5 trillion in goods and services in 2016 and created a much more equal spread of wealth than the far coasts. Even software writers live better in San Antonio than in San Francisco. “While overall GDP has grown at a roughly equal rate for the coasts and the western heartland, the two regions have experienced success in different ways,” economist Edward Glaude writes in City Journal. “When Texas succeeds, its economy provides moderate prosperity to many. When Silicon Valley succeeds, its economy provides extreme prosperity to a few.”
Recognizing that reality was at the heart of Mr. Trump’s winning campaign in 2016; it very nearly delivered the same result in 2020, despite the incessant backbiting of a hostile political class and media and the unprecedented blow of the coronavirus pandemic. It is a reality that has transformed the Republican Party from the overstuffed patricians’ club of the Eisenhower and Reagan decades to what Frank Buckley calls “the Republican Workers Party.” And it is a reality that Mr. Biden and his party will ignore at their peril.
Mr. Guelzo is director of the Initiative on Politics and Statesmanship at Princeton’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions.
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The Presidential Endgame
Trump has the right to fight in court, but he needs evidence to prove voter fraud.
Perhaps it was inevitable that Donald Trump’s re-election campaign would end as his Presidency began: with the President claiming victory and his frenzied antagonists denouncing him as a would-be fascist. The reality is that the U.S. can and probably will have a normal election outcome regardless of the shouting between now and then.
Mr. Biden is leading in enough states to win the Presidency, and if those votes survive recounts and legal challenges, he will be the next President. But whoever wins needs the other to concede to be able to govern. The result Americans on both political sides should want is one that most people think was decided fairly.
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Mr. Trump has every right to demand recounts if state votes are close, and to go to the courts for relief if there is evidence of fraud. Joe Biden’s lawyers are also in court, and they were for weeks before the election trying to ease mail-in ballot rules. Mr. Biden should also want the recounts and legal process to play out for the sake of his call to heal political rancor.
As for fraud, the Trump campaign will have to prove it to prevail in court. It won’t be enough to charge that Philadelphia is historically corrupt, though it is, or that state election officials are partisan. The Georgia secretary of state is a Republican, by the way, contrary to Mr. Trump’s remarks Thursday night. The vote counting in Arizona and Georgia has seemed professional and transparent
The same can’t be said of Philadelphia, where the Trump campaign had to go to court so its poll-watchers could observe vote counting. Incredibly, Democratic lawyers opposed that Trump request. This is exactly the wrong way for Democrats to behave, feeding GOP suspicions. The vote-counting standard should be transparency for both sides to ensure public confidence.
The Democratic Pennsylvania Supreme Court also contributed to the mistrust by rewriting state election law to let mailed ballots be counted until Nov. 6. We warned multiple times that this mess could happen, and the U.S. Supreme Court could have helped by intervening. Chief Justice John Roberts refused.
But it’s also important to note that Pat Toomey, the GOP Senator from the Keystone State, says he has seen no evidence of fraud in his state’s counting. We’ve also seen no concrete evidence. The delivery of a batch of votes all for Mr. Biden at one time can be explained by the practice of some jurisdictions to divide and report the votes of each candidate at different times.
The Trump campaign has made a substantive claim that thousands of votes in Nevada failed to meet the state’s residency requirement. That ought to be provable one way or another. If the campaign has other evidence, bring it on and test it in court.
The suspicions of Trump supporters about all this are fed by the behavior of his opponents over the last four years. Democrats still spread the voter suppression myth about Stacey Abrams’s defeat in Georgia in 2018. Democrats never accepted Mr. Trump’s victory in 2016, and Hillary Clinton still prattles on that the Russians did it.
So do the media partisans who promoted the Steele dossier and served as an echo chamber for the Russia collusion farce. The FBI’s abuses in 2016 were a genuine scandal that the media would have called out had it been aimed at a Democrat. Instead they treated Rep. Adam Schiff’s lies as gospel. And then New York Times sages puzzle in public about why 70 million Americans again voted for Donald Trump? Look in the mirror, folks.
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If Mr. Biden has 270 Electoral College votes at the end of the counting and litigation, President Trump will have a decision to make. We hope in that event he would concede gracefully. He has accomplished a great deal since descending on that Trump Tower escalator in 2015, including his historic first victory and a strong re-election performance when he was supposed to lose in a rout. We’d hate to see that legacy ruined by a refusal to accept the normal transfer of power.
Mr. Trump can rightly say that he helped the GOP save its Senate majority, gain seats in the House, and save the country from a radical progressive agenda. The election results show he has also broadened the GOP appeal to minorities and across middle-class America. His policies broadened prosperity to a forgotten group of Americans, and his willingness to buck conventional wisdom led to a diplomatic breakthrough in the Middle East. His judicial appointments have reshaped the federal courts and will echo through the law for years.
This is a considerable achievement, and it may look even better once Mr. Biden attempts to govern with an angry, impatient left. But Mr. Trump’s legacy will be diminished greatly if his final act is a bitter refusal to accept a legitimate defeat. Republican officials will turn away, and eventually so will the American public that wants to see the election resolved.
Mr. Trump hates to lose, and no doubt he will fight to the end. But if defeat comes, he will serve himself and his country best by honoring America’s democratic traditions and leaving office with dignity
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One of the greatest, most articulate Rabbis has passed away:
Rabbi Lord SacksThe death of the former British chief rabbi, Lord Sacks, is a heavy blow not just to his family and not just to the Jewish community but also to the wider world. The greatest of his stellar gifts lay not just in his learning but in the way he was able to draw upon this to convey moral and religious truths to Jews and non-Jews alike. His personal shyness made all the more remarkable his ability to communicate the most profound of messages in the most accessible way. While he sometimes blundered as chief rabbi in a world of community politics where he was visibly uncomfortable, his outstanding achievements which will be his enduring memorial lay in his writing. For the Jewish world, his great legacy is the body of prayer books he edited containing his unmatched commentaries on the liturgy. These furnished a profound and illuminating insight into the texts in a historical, literary and philosophical context, all written in luminous and accessible prose. His emailed commentaries on the Torah portion of the week have similarly sustained many with their creative, original and deeply human interpretation of a text whose often obscure or elliptical meaning suddenly emerged as a result into sharp and clear focus. What blazed out from this great and hitherto unstoppable body of work was his deep love for Judaism and the Jewish people, and the overwhelming lesson of hope that he drew from Jewish teaching and Jewish history and offered to everyone. And what gave him such unusual authority was something which conversely gave him the most trouble from ultra-conservative rabbis. This was that he straddled two worlds. While these conservative rabbis viewed with unassuageable suspicion anyone who had not been educated solely within orthodox Jewish institutions, the ultra-British Sacks had been educated in non- Jewish schools in London and read philosophy at Cambridge. Having travelled, as he put it, “through philosophy and out the other side,” this background gave him the invaluable ability to show how reason and faith, science and religion were not antagonists but two sides of the same human coin. In his ability to set out religious ideas in words which spoke to the hearts even of those who had no religious faith, Sacks had no rival. Indeed, while he was chief rabbi it was common to hear people who weren’t Jews wistfully sigh: “If only he was the Archbishop of Canterbury”. This combination within himself of “Athens and Jerusalem” also enabled him to grasp earlier than most that western societies were under unprecedented assault from the moral and cultural relativism that they had unthinkingly allowed to permeate their universities and other cultural institutions. He saw in the consequent erosion of the traditional family, above all else, the seeds of the destruction of morality and the consequent fragmentation of western society. First in his 1990 BBC Reith Lectures entitled The Persistence of Faith and then in successive books and other writings, Sacks urgently addressed this fundamental challenge by a post-Biblical orthodoxy intent on destroying the core moral precepts of the west based on the Bible. In the early nineties, when I was myself trying to make sense of the onslaught I was seeing on core western values and institutions, Rabbi Sacks taught me a very great deal in a very short space of time as he set out for me the historical and philosophical explanation for what was happening. He had flaws, like the rest of us; but his gifts set him apart from the rest of us. I owe him a very great deal, and I shall miss him. May his memory be a blessing. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ |
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