Thinking about the 74 million people who voted for Trump, including quite a number of my friends.
Perhaps my theme is: how to make the pain go away? Two points. First, I want to address the fraud and theft issue. Second, I want to point to Gerald Seib’s excellent analysis in today’s WSJ, December 14, 2020, which is attached.
Fraud and Theft. Way back in the spring, 2020, Donald Trump proclaimed that he could not lose an honest election. Then he spent a great deal of time explaining that statement by drawing attention to any voting that was “not” done at a polling place. Absentee ballots. Mail in votes of just about any kind. Temporary collection points. Am I telling the truth here? From that point on he railed continuously about the horror of such voting processes. He cemented the idea with many of his supporters that he could not win a “rigged” election, defined as any votes not made at a conventional polling place.
Now I have two comments to make about this. First, he had a half a year to do something about this to make sure that such ballots would not be fraudulent. He could have filed suits in states to push back on any adjustments in voting processes they were making because of COVID. He could have made doubly sure that Republican loyalist oversight was present in every major counting area, within the swing states that mattered. (We now know that there was bipartisan inspection in all of these areas but not because Trump made that happen. Rather because that is the way things are done.) He could have had people examine every major point of vulnerability associated with mail in ballots and then done something about it. He had the resources to do all of this. He had the time. If the threat was real, he could have acted. However, so far as we know, he took no actions different from what are normally taken. Why? I do not know. I can surmise a few explanations. One, Trump has always been more about themes than details. Actions such as I am suggesting take real time and effort. Another is that he believed a huge increase in non-polling place voting would probably work against him and was framing an excuse. (We need to await careful analysis before we even know whether mail in ballots defeated him. See Seib piece below.) Third, when it comes to organization and management, sorry, that does not seem to be his game. Just ask Citibank. My point is that Trump could have taken actions to almost guarantee that the election could not have been “stolen” from him and he never really did because he did not want to. Had he done that he would now have the excuse that he has carefully framed. In fact, he was scared to death of those extra votes. (Footnote: no court in the land has found the slightest degree of evidence that widespread voter fraud existed – but you already knew that.)
The second point is directed to my progressive friends, and I am fortunate to have more than a few of them, and it is made by Gerald Seib in the attached. Let me summarize his main points. Current analysis does not support the point that progressives or African American voters or Latino/Latina voters put Biden over the top. In fact, Trump seems to have done better with urban voters and especially black and Latino voters than he did in 2016, the very areas Trump supporters have accused of rampant voter fraud. In fact, he failed with too many people who are center left or center right. No single racial or ethnic group pushed him over the top. No hard left political ideology got Biden elected. In fact, rather normal people, of all races, with very conventional American values – don’t break what’s not broken, quit shouting at us, just get the job done, tell the truth in public at least once in a while (Tom Friedman: “American politicians tell the truth in private and lie in public.”), don’t put all of your eggs in one basket, find a place for facts and science, and just behave yourself – voted largely for Joe Biden. If you are interested in good political analysis, I think you will find Seib’s short writing worth the five minutes it might take to read.
I hope that these words might help a bit with the distrust felt by many Trump supporters and put a lid on the chest thumping from the progressives. It may be time to learn and grow from the middle to the edges.
| As Electors Gather, Cold Numbers Show What Really Happened in 2020 By Gerald F. Seib |
| Voters in the moderate center—not those out on the wings—determined the outcome of the presidential election Read the Article › |
