The GOP Base And A Rigged Election

As Donald Trump goes all in on the idea that the election is rigged so that he will lose (Trump – “The election is absolutely being rigged by the dishonest and distorted media pushing Crooked Hillary – but also at many polling places – SAD”), his surrogates add to the spurious claim (Giuliani – “I’ve found very few situations where Republicans cheat…They don’t control the inner cities the way Democrats do. Maybe if Republicans controlled the inner cities, they’d do as much cheating as Democrats…I’m sorry. Dead people generally vote for Democrats rather than Republicans.”), and down-ballot Republicans desperately try to distance themselves from those comments without renouncing their support for Trump (Ryan – “Our democracy relies on confidence in election results and the speaker is fully confident the states will carry out this election with integrity.”), it is important to remember a number important facts.

There is not a shred of evidence of any significant in-person voter fraud anywhere. In fact, the only actual evidence of an attempt to “rig”‘ this election is the interference of the Russian government in a clear attempt to get Trump elected. The hacking of Democrat’s email and the slow, drip-drip leaking of those hacked emails at important points earlier in the campaign and the daily releases here at the end of the campaign is clearly designed to defeat Hillary Clinton. Secondly, there is only one party that has committed itself to making it more difficult for legal citizens to vote and that is the Republican party. Massive purges of voter rolls that somehow scrub legal voters, voter ID laws, and restrictive early voting periods are solely designed by Republicans to eliminate Democratic votes. And finally, the only recent election that has ever been “stolen” was the 2000 election when the Supreme Court handed the Presidency to the Republicans in Bush v. Gore, which was probably the worst decision since the Dred Scott decision 150 years ago. And, I might add, Democrats lived with that decision. So the idea that elections are “rigged” against Republicans is simply laughable on its face.

I continue to go back to the theory promulgated by Samuel Goldman, that there is around 30-40% of the country, “whites, generally older, generally less educated, although of course with exemptions for all of those generalization” that is large enough to think of itself as a majority but in actuality is just small enough to be a minority. And the idea that they are not the majority is just unthinkable and leads us to the unwavering support for a seriously flawed candidate (to be kind) like Trump and the belief that his loss has to represent a stolen election.