Walking Right into 2020 Chaos
It’s still September, but we can see what’s coming a mile away, so we might as well start talking about it. Fifty-one days from today, we already know that Donald Trump is going to call the election results fraudulent and lean as hard as he can into delegitimizing the electoral process.
I hate to sound so cynical. But if you’re standing on the train tracks, and they suddenly start to vibrate at exactly the same time a train whistle blasts in the distance, hopefully people can forgive you for stating the obvious.
A train is coming.
And, unfortunately, there’s really not much more Trump could do to tell us what’s in store. And it doesn’t really matter what happens between now and then. A Biden blowout, a narrow Biden win, a 2016-style Trump electoral win with a popular vote loss, etc. — it doesn’t matter. He’s going to yell “FRAUD!” and try to undermine confidence in the voting process.
Here’s what we already know:
The Inevitable “Blue Shift”
Because of the Covid-19 pandemic, more people than usual are voting by mail. And every poll on the topic shows that Democrats are much more likely to do so. (It correlates, among other things, with the likelihood of believing that the pandemic is a problem and not a hoax. Go figure). So, what will inevitably happen is the Election Day votes will skew more Republican and the mail-in votes will skew more Democratic. We can talk about it now, two months in advance, because it’s utterly predictable. It won’t be surprising or even the slightest bit unexpected — in fact, a term for this already exists. Political scientists refer to the commonly observed Democratic gains as all the remaining ballots (i.g. provisional ballots, absentee ballots, etc.) are counted as the “blue shift.” The large partisan divide in this year’s vote-by-mail versus vote-in-person ratio is poised to make the Democratic gains even more pronounced, as all the votes are eventually counted.
And here’s why it’s dangerous: This means Trump’s Election Day numbers will deteriorate (regardless of the final result) as the disproportionately large number of mail-in votes get counted in the subsequent days and weeks after November 3rd. And if you’ve been paying attention for 8 seconds over the last four years, you know he’s going to be screaming FRAUD at the top of his lungs as his numbers tick downward — when all that’s really happening is that votes are being counted as absentee ballots stream in. (Update: Trump has now made it more or less explicit that this is his plan.)
A similar scenario played out in Florida and Arizona in the 2018 congressional races. As the Republican lead in Florida narrowed as various areas finished their count, Trump and his Republican acolytes — with absolutely zero supporting evidence— cried fraud. The same thing happened as the Democratic candidate gained ground in Arizona — Trump and the Republicans cried fraud, despite having zero supporting evidence. In the end, the GOP won the Florida Senate seat and narrowly lost in Arizona. But the post-election-day strategy was clear: If the numbers shift in a way you don’t like, whether it’s predictable or not, the only plausible explanation is fraud, and election must have been a sham.
Declaring Premature Victory
He’s going to claim victory in various states (and probably in the election outright) before the votes are even close to fully counted. With so many mail-in ballots, it’s very unlikely that we will know the winner on Election Day — but if you think he’s going to patiently wait as his Election Day vote margin tumbles across numerous states, you’re out of your mind. Despite the GOP getting walloped in 2018, despite Trump having historically putrid approval ratings during his entire presidency, and despite being a consistent and substantial polling underdog to Biden (yes, much more than he ever was to Clinton in 2016, to whom he lost the popular vote), Trump’s already told us that “the only way [I’m] going to lose this election is if the election is rigged” by Democrats.
So count on him claiming victories before the votes are counted — why would the numbers shift away from him as the full vote gets counted unless it’s rigged?
Baseless Conspiracy Theories to Undermine the outcome
He’s going to blast out evidence-free conspiracy theories about busloads of illegal voters flooding the polls, evidence-free conspiracy theories about mail-in ballot fraud, evidence-free theories about any and everything he can label a rigged-hoax-witch-hunt-conspiracy.
If this could possibly be in doubt, set aside his current conspiracy mongering about voter fraud and rigged ballots. After the 2016 election, the president touted conspiracy theories to undermine the vote count in an election that he won. If his reelection prospects are in trouble in 2020, these dangerous claims will reach a fever pitch and get lapped up by credulous supporters.
Help from the usual suspects
He’s going to count on everything above getting repeated and pushed by know-better-but-don’t-care allies with an agenda (e.g. AG Barr, Tucker Carlson, Ted Cruz) in Congress, in the press, and and heaps of followers.
In my expert opinion: This is really going to suck, and all of it is way too predictable.
