Denying the outcome of elections has become alarmingly popular these days.
In one corner, Democrats are claiming that gerrymandering has made our elections illegitimate, that the Senate is anti-Democratic and so is the Supreme Court. The White House Press Secretary has claimed that Trump stole the 2016 election from Hillary Clinton.
In the other corner, a majority or close to a majority of Republicans (depending on what polls you look at) believe that Trump was cheated out of a fair election in 2020. Here’s how the Texas GOP put it last month: “We hold that acting President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was not legitimately elected by the people of the United States.”
Today, a roundtable about how worried we should be about the state—and future—of American democracy. With guests: Jonah Goldberg (founder of The Dispatch and author of Suicide of the West); Jeremy Peters (New York Times reporter and author of Insurgency) and Kristen Soltis Anderson (pollster and author of The Selfie Vote).
I was a little confused about this episode. You had a round table of non-republicans trying to figure out what republicans are thinking? Why don’t you ask republicans? Also, the whole table giggling at jokes about how “crazy” or “stupid” a candidate is, by extension, makes the person who voted for them feel that you also think they are both “crazy” and “stupid.” I’m neither D nor R, but I can easily see that. I don’t know why reporters can’t seem to understand why people don’t trust them. Try being kind, you never know, it might work.
There are two general categories of "stolen election" claims, and we do ourselves a disservice by conflating them.
The first is the sort advanced by Democrats in 2000: A claim that vote counting was illegitimate. People voted illegally or legal votes weren't counted, or the counters counted wrong, or ballots were confusing. Something like that.
The second is the sort advanced by Democrats in 2016: That voters were misinformed and voted contrary to how they would have voted if they were better informed.
There are a host of reasons to be concerned about both types of impropriety in 2020. Election laws were changed (often substantially) by illegal processes (not legislative action) in ways that plainly made elections less secure, and afterwards those who approved of the results copy-pasted "Most secure election ever" into their social media feeds even as downtown areas removed the boards from their windows that had been installed over fears of those same people rioting in the event of the opposite result. The thing about wrecking ballot chain-of-custody is that it creates unfalsifiability around legitimacy concerns. There is no evidence that a given ballot is legitimate and no evidence that it is illegitimate, so the question of overall legitimacy depends on who the burden of proof is placed on. Not coincidentally, in the case of the 2020 election, the party that has advanced "guilty until proven innocent" in a host of other areas has decided that "innocent until proven guilty" must still apply to election fraud allegations.
The "misinformation" concern is harder to refute, in that the same people who declared that $40,000 in Facebook ad spend by a handful of Russians swung the entire 2016 election are now insisting that there was nothing wrong with a coordinated institutional suppression of a slew of unflattering stories about Joe Biden, the most prominent of which involved his son Hunter's activities. Institutions also regularly flagrantly lied about news stories and declared true statements by the incumbent president to be lies (for example, "We'll have a vaccine by the end of the year (2020)" was regularly "fact-checked" as false for contradicting the "expert consensus" that there would be no vaccine until late 2021).
What is sad is that those complaining about illegitimate voting process changes, lack of ballot chain-of-custody, and institutional disinformation are all lumped together by Democrats with the most extreme "massive proven ballot fraud" allegations and wrapped in a "JANUARY SIXTH!!!!" bow as part of a politically-understandable but terribly immoral effort to dismiss them all completely. This is going to have serious long-term ramifications.