• Welcome to the new Internet Infidels Discussion Board, formerly Talk Freethought.

At what margin of electoral defeat will Trump be forced to admit defeat?

Elixir said:
SLD said:
Wall Street will collapse...
Click to expand...

It is already showing signs of a slow, halting collapse. But I don't know of any safe harbor - if it really tanks, it's going to drag down bonds, real estate and virtually everything else with it, due to four years of the weakening of our economy's underpinnings. Consumer confidence won't recover overnight, regardless of electoral results. There will be food shortages, major bankruptcies, soup lines and riots. America will have finally arrived at its well-earned position as a true shithole.
Click to expand...

MAGA!
 
I've seen serious speculation of how Trump and his campaigners could keep in power even if they lose the electoral vote to Joe Biden.

Full article: What If Trump Refuses to Concede? - The Atlantic - "If the vote is close, Donald Trump could easily throw the election into chaos and subvert the result. Who will stop him?"

Summary: Trump Campaign Is Reportedly Plotting to “Bypass” a Biden Win | Vanity Fair - "How Republican-controlled state legislatures could be used to circumvent the results of the election and ensure a Trump victory."
Donald Trump has been throwing everything he’s got at the 2020 election to ensure a favorable result or otherwise undermine the outcome: Sowing doubt in the legitimacy of mail-in ballots. Screwing with the Postal Service that will handle them. Trying to recruit “law enforcement” as poll watchers. Flirting with delaying the election and openly stating that he won’t accept any results he doesn’t like.

Now the Trump campaign is said to be considering another, even more outrageous approach: In a thorough and deeply disconcerting piece about the constitutional crisis that may await us between November 3 and the inauguration in January, the Atlantic’s Barton Gellman reports that the Trump campaign has been discussing “contingency plans to bypass the election results and appoint local electors in battleground states where Republicans hold the legislative majority.” Citing the president’s baseless claims of fraud, Team Trump could ask GOP-controlled state governments to choose electors, completely ignoring an unfavorable or uncertain popular vote, state and national Republican sources told Gellman.
Click to expand...
 
lpetrich said:
I've seen serious speculation of how Trump and his campaigners could keep in power even if they lose the electoral vote to Joe Biden.

Full article: What If Trump Refuses to Concede? - The Atlantic - "If the vote is close, Donald Trump could easily throw the election into chaos and subvert the result. Who will stop him?"

Summary: Trump Campaign Is Reportedly Plotting to “Bypass” a Biden Win | Vanity Fair - "How Republican-controlled state legislatures could be used to circumvent the results of the election and ensure a Trump victory."
Donald Trump has been throwing everything he’s got at the 2020 election to ensure a favorable result or otherwise undermine the outcome: Sowing doubt in the legitimacy of mail-in ballots. Screwing with the Postal Service that will handle them. Trying to recruit “law enforcement” as poll watchers. Flirting with delaying the election and openly stating that he won’t accept any results he doesn’t like.

Now the Trump campaign is said to be considering another, even more outrageous approach: In a thorough and deeply disconcerting piece about the constitutional crisis that may await us between November 3 and the inauguration in January, the Atlantic’s Barton Gellman reports that the Trump campaign has been discussing “contingency plans to bypass the election results and appoint local electors in battleground states where Republicans hold the legislative majority.” Citing the president’s baseless claims of fraud, Team Trump could ask GOP-controlled state governments to choose electors, completely ignoring an unfavorable or uncertain popular vote, state and national Republican sources told Gellman.
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
Electoral-vote.com goes into this. GOP governors only control three states Biden needs to win. And they are Maryland, Vermont, and Massachusetts. Needless to say, Maryland's Governor probably wouldn't do it. Vermont and Massachusetts would have a Salem Witch trial if tried in their states. I suppose the good news is that this chart really does look good in Biden's favor, if the vote counts.

Trump's path to victory through defeat is knock PA, AZ, WI, and MI out of the counting. Declare the states unviable to determine a winner and Trump wins the election in Congress. After all, 7 ballots were found in the trash in Luzerne County, PA (no question as to whether those were practice for a red county to stack the vote), so the vote is corrupted!
 
I started this thread because of the derision I received when I first asserted that Trump would dispute any electoral result that did not favor him.
At this point it is telling that those same voices of derision - which once assured the world that given a clear enough result, Trump would concede (albeit perhaps not very graciously), have now fallen completely silent on the question. Some even resort to creationist-style stupidity, contending that they have addressed the question of the OP when in fact that have done no such thing.

This makes me wonder ... they obviously know that they were wrong to assert that Trump would ever acknowledge defeat. Did they know it all along? Was it all a totally dishonest charade, and all along they were misrepresenting their what they knew to be true? Or did they actually learn something about Trump's depravity over the last couple of years?

I would hope it's the latter. But even in that case, which would be the most charitable reading of their character, it is hard to reconcile with the fact that they have yet to admit any error.
I think it's that kind of character flaw that got us into this mess. And it will be that same character flaw that allows the mess to continue and fester, should Trump's coup attempt succeed.
 
Elixir said:
I started this thread because of the derision I received when I first asserted that Trump would dispute any electoral result that did not favor him.
At this point it is telling that those same voices of derision - which once assured the world that given a clear enough result, Trump would concede (albeit perhaps not very graciously), have now fallen completely silent on the question. Some even resort to creationist-style stupidity, contending that they have addressed the question of the OP when in fact that have done no such thing.

This makes me wonder ... they obviously know that they were wrong to assert that Trump would ever acknowledge defeat. Did they know it all along? Was it all a totally dishonest charade, and all along they were misrepresenting their what they knew to be true? Or did they actually learn something about Trump's depravity over the last couple of years?

I would hope it's the latter. But even in that case, which would be the most charitable reading of their character, it is hard to reconcile with the fact that they have yet to admit any error.
I think it's that kind of character flaw that got us into this mess. And it will be that same character flaw that allows the mess to continue and fester, should Trump's coup attempt succeed.
Click to expand...

To my knowledge, Trump has NEVER admitted failure - ever. The closest he ever comes is to blame failure on someone else.
 
crazyfingers said:
Elixir said:
I started this thread because of the derision I received when I first asserted that Trump would dispute any electoral result that did not favor him.
At this point it is telling that those same voices of derision - which once assured the world that given a clear enough result, Trump would concede (albeit perhaps not very graciously), have now fallen completely silent on the question. Some even resort to creationist-style stupidity, contending that they have addressed the question of the OP when in fact that have done no such thing.

This makes me wonder ... they obviously know that they were wrong to assert that Trump would ever acknowledge defeat. Did they know it all along? Was it all a totally dishonest charade, and all along they were misrepresenting their what they knew to be true? Or did they actually learn something about Trump's depravity over the last couple of years?

I would hope it's the latter. But even in that case, which would be the most charitable reading of their character, it is hard to reconcile with the fact that they have yet to admit any error.
I think it's that kind of character flaw that got us into this mess. And it will be that same character flaw that allows the mess to continue and fester, should Trump's coup attempt succeed.
Click to expand...

To my knowledge, Trump has NEVER admitted failure - ever. The closest he ever comes is to blame failure on someone else.
Click to expand...

He did, once.

Trump: I moved on her, actually. You know, she was down on Palm Beach. I moved on her, and I failed. I’ll admit it.

Unknown: Whoa.

Trump: I did try and fuck her. She was married.

Unknown: That’s huge news.

Trump: No, no, Nancy. No, this was [unintelligible] — and I moved on her very heavily. In fact, I took her out furniture shopping.

She wanted to get some furniture. I said, “I’ll show you where they have some nice furniture.” I took her out furniture —

I moved on her like a bitch. But I couldn’t get there. And she was married. Then all of a sudden I see her, she’s now got the big phony tits and everything. She’s totally changed her look.
Click to expand...
 
Trump escalates the signals to his followers: Use lethal violence to help me hold power | Salon.com
After the shootings in Kenosha and Portland, Trump is telling right-wing militias to help him crush the left

Well, that escalated quickly. Only a couple of weeks ago, Donald Trump and his allies were using the term "self-defense" to condone the behavior of armed right-wingers who showed up at Black Lives Matter protests to intimidate demonstrators — and also to justify the alleged murder of two protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin, by 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse.

Now Trump has expanded the universe of excuses for such lethal violence, suggesting that it's acceptable in the name of "retribution."
Click to expand...
More specifically, the shooting of Michael Reinoehl by US marshals after he seemingly confessed to shooting a Patriot Prayer right-wing militiaman. Trump tried to take credit for his death.
"Two and a half days went by and I put out, when are you going to go get him?" Trump bragged to Fox News host Jeanine Pirro. "That's the way it has to be. There has to be retribution when you have crime like this."

Retribution: That's how Trump sees this killing. Not, as law enforcement claims, a necessary self-defense action in the course of trying to apprehend a criminal suspect. Trump seems to understand this this as one faction getting revenge on a rival faction for the murder of one of their own.
Click to expand...
Seems like he wants his own brown-shirted goons while screaming "The left is just like us! The left is just like us!"
 
Right-wing talk about "sedition" and the Insurrection Act has one purpose: Stealing the election | Salon.com
Barr and other Trump allies are lining up excuses to use force against pro-democracy protests after Election Day

There has been a ton of news about Bill Barr — official title, "Attorney General of the United States;" actual job, Donald Trump's capo — crawling across cable news chyrons in recent days, so much so that it's hard to keep track of it all. There's that thing he said about quarantine restrictions being nearly as bad as slavery. And the thing where he whined about the Justice Department staffers that's more interested in enforcing the law than protecting Trump's political power. And where he compared such people to preschool children, for having the temerity to question his decisions.

All that is bad, but probably the worst news this week is a report from the New York Times that "Barr told federal prosecutors in a call last week that they should consider charging rioters and others who had committed violent crimes at protests in recent months with sedition."

He also asked federal prosecutors "to explore whether they could bring criminal charges against Mayor Jenny Durkan of Seattle for allowing some residents to establish a police-free protest zone near the city's downtown for weeks this summer."

This is especially alarming in light of Barr's assertion, in the same speech where he made offensive comments about his own staff and about slavery, that he believes he has "virtually unchecked discretion" in determining what cases to prosecute.
Click to expand...
Barr Told Prosecutors to Consider Sedition Charges for Protest Violence - The New York Times - "Attorney General William P. Barr was also said to have asked prosecutors to explore whether to bring charges against the mayor of Seattle for allowing a police-free protest zone."

Seems like they might be willing to pick fights and then scream bloody murder when the targets fight back.

Something like the Reichstag Fire, a fire that Nazi leaders howled about as evidence that Communist revolutionaries were on the march and that they needed emergency powers for crushing those troublemakers.
 
Donald Trump may kill off democracy — but Mitch McConnell was the real murderer | Salon.com - "Our ongoing constitutional crisis is the result of Mitch McConnell's sinister plot to take over the federal courts"
Ever since Donald Trump's oversized suit-clad carcass first befouled the Oval Office, there's been talk in the media about if and when he would cause a constitutional crisis. The assumption underlying this discourse is that a constitutional crisis would hit us like a thunderbolt and we would collectively realize, all at once, that the very fate of our democracy was on the line. Instead, there's been a series of mini-constitutional crises, from Trump stomping all over our laws against foreign emoluments (an old-timey phrase for being bribed by foreign leaders), obstructing justice during Robert Mueller's investigation into Trump's role in Russian election interference, blackmailing the Ukrainian president to extract dishonest election assistance and about a dozen other instances it would be tedious to list.

The result has been a steady erosion of the political norms and laws that protect our democracy, culminating in Trump's last big push to steal or corrupt the 2020 presidential election.
Click to expand...
Noting Trump has a plan to steal the election — in fact, he has a bunch of them | Salon.com - "Voter suppression, legal dirty tricks and right-wing militias: Trump's list of 2020 tactics is becoming clear"
If Trump successfully does that, it could well be the killing blow for our tattered democracy. But it's important to understand that the credit for orchestrating the demise of our once-great nation should largely go to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a man possessed by the same lust for power and moral turpitude as Trump, but not hobbled by Trump's stupidity or short-sightedness.
Click to expand...
Then describing Mitch McConnell's packing the courts with right-wingers.
 
Trump and the GOP don't care about 200,000 dead — only about power | Salon.com - "Trump and McConnell are too busy subverting our democracy to care about the lives being lost or ruined"
On Tuesday, the official death count from the coronavirus pandemic in the United States passed 200,000. A memorial was placed in front of the Washington Monument to mark this grim milestone, and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi there not just to share the grief, but in anger.

"This was preventable. Not all of it, but much of it," Pelosi said, citing a failure to "embrace science over politics" in leadership, a not-so-oblique reference to the way that Donald Trump has, at every turn, either been incompetent or actively undermined efforts to slow the spread of the virus.
Click to expand...
Aaron Rupar on Twitter: "Q: Why haven't you said anything about the US hitting 200,000 coronavirus deaths?

TRUMP: "Go ahead. Uhhhhh. Anybody else?" https://t.co/gUv1kgG9OT" / Twitter

Very short on words by Trump standards.
Always playing his role as the corny movie villain who gives his evil scheme away in dialogue, Trump wanted instead to talk about the Supreme Court and how he plans to use it to steal the election.

"We need nine justices" on the court, Trump said, to deal with what he characterized as "the unsolicited millions of ballots that they're sending."

That was garbled Trump-speak for his hope that, by shoving a right-wing loyalist onto the bench before Nov. 3, he can get the Supreme Court to rule millions of absentee ballots inadmissible and steal the election.

Within the span of a few minutes, Trump managed, despite being barely coherent at the best of times, to encapsulate the entire GOP outlook on our current situation: They're simply too busy crushing our democracy to give a crap about the 200,000 people who have died, the 6.9 million infected or the 13.6 million unemployed.
Click to expand...
 
Trump just can't keep a secret — especially when it comes to his plans to stage a coup | Salon.com - "President Stable Genius tells lots of lies — but keeps telling us the truth about his evil election schemes"
Donald Trump is escalating. Wednesday afternoon, under questioning by Brian Karem of Playboy, Trump offered what the mainstream news outlets are calling a "failure to commit" to a "peaceful transfer of power." One might also call it "threatening a coup".

The first time Karem asked Trump whether he would commit to a peaceful transfer of power if he loses the election, Trump pulled his usual move, pretending that the fate of our democracy is like a reality-show cliffhanger: "Well, we're going to have to see what happens."

But Karem was dogged and asked him again: "Do you commit to making sure that there's a peaceful transferral of power?"

That's when Trump let the cat out of the bag: "Get rid of the ballots, and you'll have a very — we'll have a very peaceful, there won't be a transfer, frankly. There'll be a continuation."

"The ballots are out of control," Trump continued, making crystal clear that he resents those gosh-darn ballots and the way they allow American citizens the (theoretical) right to choose their own leaders.

...
It's no secret that Trump plans to do whatever he can to steal the election. But by openly demanding that ballots be thrown out, Trump confirmed publicly what many activists, historians and legal experts have been warning may be coming: An actual attempted coup against democracy.

Trump has created a heads-I-win, tails-you-lose proposition: Either he wins the election, or the election was fraudulent. He refuses to accept the third (and likeliest) option, which is that his Democratic rival, former Vice President Joe Biden, wins outright, which is the outcome the polls are currently pointing toward.
Click to expand...
 
Author Amanda Marcotte then noted that Trump did not do what most authoritarian coup plotters do: keep his plans a secret. It's a classic plan in wars and competitions in general, to keep one's opponents in the dark about one's plans until it is too late for them to do much about them. When asked how he was going to defeat the Iraqi Army in the Gulf War, General Colin Powell said "Our strategy to go after this army is very, very simple. First we're going to cut it off, and then we're going to kill it," and other things in this vein. IMO, he should have said "It's best that we don't talk about how we are going to do it. We want our opponents to find out what we are going to do to them only when it's too late for them to do anything about it. It's like what a football team does. They don't talk about what plays that the plan, because they want their opponents to discover them only when it's too late."
"Typically power grabs are organized in secret and launched suddenly," explains the website Choose Democracy. "It's rare for any country leader to publicly admit they might not respect the results of an election."

"[P]eople who stop coups rarely have the chance to get training, warning, or preparation," they continue.

Trump's motormouth, however, means that the upcoming coup is being advertised and his strategy is being outlined, bit by bit, in the public eye. He's given up the advantage of surprise.

...
Because Trump keeps talking, he's making it very hard for anyone to ignore the fact that an attempted coup is nearly inevitable — and is already underway, through the Postal Service slowdown and the efforts to keep people from getting mail-in ballots. ...

Trump's big mouth has made it possible for typically cautious but prestigious publications to run articles about the attempted election theft. ...

Still, it's hard to dislodge the instinct among much of the punditry to tell fairy tales about how our institutions will protect us and that a coup is un-possible in America.
Click to expand...
Like Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com
 
ZiprHead said:
Biden Now Predicted to Win 352 Electoral Votes: FiveThirtyEight
Click to expand...

I think the expected value of the electoral college results isn't the greatest metric. They give Trump a 20% chance of winning. That is actually about the same probability they were giving him at this time during the 2016 elections at around the same time. By November, it had narrowed somewhat to 28/29%.


However, these predicted probabilities were way more volatile. This spread for Biden has been way more consistent and has only increased.
 
The other thing is they use "likely voters," but I expect more Republicans to vote in terms of rates. Democrats may be more likely to be afraid to vote in person. Trump has trained Republicans to not wear masks and go vote--to die for him. Also, cities...they already had major fuckups in primaries with long lines and voting machines. It will be twice as bad during votes. Cities more likely vote Democrat so many of those votes won't count because people will wait 12 hours in line and leave. Doing polls without taking these things into account as possible variability isn't adequate.
 
How Trump Could Spark A Full-Blown Election Crisis | FiveThirtyEight - some nightmare scenarios for this coming election. Like Pennsylvania having two rival slates of EC electors, and Congress butting heads on which slate's votes to use.

Trump’s Chances Are Dwindling. That Could Make Him Dangerous. | FiveThirtyEight
President Trump’s quest to win a second term is not in good shape. He entered Tuesday night’s debate with roughly a 7- or 8-point deficit in national polls, putting him further behind at this stage of the race than any other candidate since Bob Dole in 1996.1

If we look at potential tipping-point states, the race is a bit closer, but not that much closer.

... but if Biden’s national lead were to expand to 9 or 10 points, which is consistent with the sorts of polling bounces we’ve seen in the past for candidates who were perceived to win debates — especially challengers debating an incumbent for the first time — Trump’s situation could become quite desperate.

...
We assume that there are reasonable efforts to allow eligible citizens to vote and to count all legal ballots, and that electors are awarded to the popular-vote winner in each state. The model also does not account for the possibility of extraconstitutional shenanigans by Trump or by anyone else, such as trying to prevent mail ballots from being counted.
Click to expand...
The author then got into the three earlier Presidential elections that FiveThirtyEight.com had followed. All three of them were very tight. Including 2016, where Hillary Clinton led by only 1.4% when heading into the first debate.

But this time around, since June 18, Biden has led by at least 6.6% on average. "It’s been an exceptionally stable race."

Yet,
  1. Trump could win the Electoral College despite losing the popular vote by a wide margin.
  2. There could be a large polling error in Trump’s favor.
  3. Trump could somehow steal the election.

... there’s an 11 percent chance that Trump wins the Electoral College but not the popular vote in our forecast (but less than a 1 percent chance the other way around).

... And as you can see, Biden is only truly safe to win the Electoral College once he has a popular vote margin of 5 points or more! But, he’s a fairly heavy favorite with a 3- to 5-point margin, and has roughly break-even odds with a 2- to 3-point margin.
Click to expand...
 
One of the misconceptions I hear about FiveThirtyEight’s forecast is that “it assumes that polls are right.” Actually, in some sense the whole purpose of the forecast is to estimate the chance that the polls are wrong. In 2016, the polls did show Clinton ahead, but between tight margins in tipping-point states and the large number of undecided voters, there was a fairly high probability — around 30 percent, according to our forecast — that Trump was going to win anyway.

So while a polling error is possible — indeed, our forecast assumes there’s likely additional error this year because of an uptick in mail voting — it would still take a bigger error than in 2016 for Trump to win.

...
But there’s no guarantee such an error would favor Trump. Historically, the direction of polling bias has not been predictable from cycle to cycle; the same polls that underestimated Trump in 2016 tended to underestimate Obama and Democrats in 2012, for instance. If anything, to the extent there are polling errors, they sometimes come in the opposite direction of what the conventional wisdom expects.

...
Trump’s comments on respecting the election outcome are deeply worrisome, but it’s hard to estimate his chances of overturning the result

...
Consider that Trump’s convention produced, at best, a very meager bounce in his favor. His attempt to pivot the campaign to a “law and order” theme fell completely flat in polls of the upper Midwest. He’s thrown the kitchen sink at Biden and not really been able to pull down Biden’s favorables. His hopes that we’d turn the corner on COVID-19 before the election are diminishing after cases have begun to rise again in many states. His campaign, somehow, is struggling to hold on to enough cash to run ads in the places it most needs to run them. The New York Times and other news organizations are likely to continue publishing damaging stories on his taxes and personal finances from now until the election. And now he’s seemingly lost the first debate.
Click to expand...
More and more negatives. I don't find Joe Biden very inspiring. I much prefer his running mate.

We’ve Had 56 Statewide Elections During The Pandemic. Here’s What We Learned From Them. | FiveThirtyEight
1. Mail voting is still way up, but more people are voting in person

2. The pandemic isn’t depressing turnout

3. Fewer problems are being reported
Click to expand...
 
Pelosi warns Trump 'ain't no light at the end of the tunnel' should election be decided in House | Fox News - "Contingent elections are rare and have only occurred three times in history, all in the 1800s"

It's a vote for every state's House delegation has one vote. Here is its current partisan composition:

Alabama: R 6 D 1, Alaska: R 1, Arizona: D 5 R 4, Arkansas: R 4, California: D 45 R 7 X 1, Colorado: D 4 R 3, Connecticut: D 5, Delaware: D 1, Florida: R 14 D 13, Georgia: R 9 D 5, Hawaii: D 2, Idaho: R 2, Illinois: D 13 R 5, Indiana: R 7 D 2, Iowa: D 3 R 1, Kansas: R 3 D 1, Kentucky: R 5 D 1, Louisiana: R 5 D 1, Maine: D 2, Maryland: D 7 R 1, Massachusetts: D 9, Michigan: D 7 R 6 L 1, Minnesota: D 5 R 3, Mississippi: R 3 D 1, Missouri: R 6 D 2, Montana: R 1, Nebraska: R 3, Nevada: D 3 R 1, New Hampshire: D 2, New Jersey: D 10 R 2, New Mexico: D 3, New York: D 21 R 6, North Carolina: R 9 D 3 X 1, North Dakota: R 1, Ohio: R 12 D 4, Oklahoma: R 4 D 1, Oregon: D 4 R 1, Pennsylvania: D 9 R 9, Rhode Island: D 2, South Carolina: R 5 D 2, South Dakota: R 1, Tennessee: R 7 D 2, Texas: R 22 D 13 X 1, Utah: R 3 D 1, Vermont: D 1, Virginia: D 7 R 4, Washington: D 7 R 3, West Virginia: R 3, Wisconsin: R 5 D 3, Wyoming: R 1

I'm not going to guess who is likely to win in November, so I'll use that as a reference. D = Democratic, R = Republican, L = Libertarian, X = vacant

The number of delegations with a majority of each party is R 26, D 23, (tied) 1.

If the Democrats get some more seats in the upcoming election, they may also be successful in getting majorities in more delegations. So the House may be a tossup.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom