Američki izbori 2020.

(CNN)President Donald Trump on Wednesday would not commit to providing a peaceful transition of power after Election Day, lending further fuel to concerns he may not relinquish his office should he lose in November.
"Well, we're going to have to see what happens," Trump said when asked whether he'd commit to a peaceful transition, one of the cornerstones of American democracy.
Trump has previously refused to say whether he would accept the election results, echoing his sentiments from 2016. And he has joked -- he says -- about staying in office well past the constitutionally bound two terms.
...https://edition.cnn.com/2020/09/23/politics/trump-election-day-peaceful-transition/index.html

November 3: Donald #Trump loses US election to Joe #Biden.

November 5: Trump flies to Moscow to sign a contract with RT.

This is how his first day goes.

Note: this is parody, using #deepfake technology (but the job is there, Donald). pic.twitter.com/U9MMjC7bgE

— RT (@RT_com) September 22, 2020

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/23/opinion/joe-biden-donald-trump-2020.html

There are at least five reasons Joe Biden’s consistent lead over Donald Trump does not guarantee him a lock on the White House.

First, there are indications that Trump’s base of support — whites without college degrees — is more energized and committed to voting this year than key Democratic constituencies. And there is also evidence that polling does not reflect this.

Second, Latinos, who are key to the outcome in several crucial states — Arizona and Florida, for example — have shown less support for Biden than for past Democratic nominees. Many Hispanic voters seem resistant to any campaign that defines them broadly as “people of color.”

Third, absentee voting is expected to be higher among Democrats than Republicans, subjecting their ballots to a greater risk of rejection, a fate more common to mailed-in votes than to in-person voting.

Fourth, the generic Democratic-Republican vote (“Would you be more willing to vote for a Republican or Democratic candidate for Congress?”) through early July favored Democrats by more than 10 points, but has since narrowed to 6 points.

Fifth, the debates will test Biden’s ability to withstand three 90-minute battles against an opponent known for brutal personal attacks.

There are other factors — such as the possibility that the Republican Party will conduct an effective voter suppression drive, or that Trump and his advisers will contrive new mechanisms to pave the way to victory.

Conversely, over a turbulent year — impeachment, the pandemic, a recession and the emergence of a stronger Black Lives Matter movement — one thing has remained constant: Biden’s lead over Trump. In October 2019, nearly 12 months ago, the NBC/Wall Street Journal poll had Biden 9 points ahead of Trump, 50 to 41; just days ago, on Sept. 20, 2020 the NBC/WSJ poll had Biden 8 points ahead of Trump, 51-43.

The same pattern in national polling has held true in the nation’s suburbs which, by many accounts, are the real 2020 combat zone.
...

In June 2013, when Donald Trump was at best a political afterthought, Sean Trende, the senior elections analyst for RealClearPolitics, wrote a prescient essay, “The Case of the Missing White Voters, Revisited,” that in many ways anticipated the 2016 election.

While the 2013 consensus view, in the wake of Barack Obama’s decisive defeat of Mitt Romney in 2012, was that the Republican Party had to move left and win over minorities, Trende argued that the key factor in the 2012 defeat was a failure to turn out white voters.

“From mid-2008 to mid-2012, the census estimates that the number of whites of voting age increased by 3 million,” which should have translated into 99.1 million votes, when in fact there were only 93.0 million, Trende wrote, noting that “when you account for expected growth, we’d find 6.5 million fewer whites than a population projection would anticipate.” On the assumption that Black turnout would decline without Obama at the top of the ticket, Trende concluded:

The next Republican would win narrowly if he or she can motivate these “missing whites,” even without moving the Hispanic or Asian vote.

This Sept. 17, Trende revisited his argument in “Trump’s Path to Victory,” in which he asked “What’s the best case to be made now for how Trump is re-elected?”

His answer is threefold. First, Trump’s job approval rating has to rise to at least 46 percent. It is currently 45.0 percent:

Presidents tend to get the votes of those who think they are doing a good job, and maybe a hair more.

Second, the economy has to improve. Trump currently has a 50.5 percent approval rating on the economy. Third, “the spate of recent stories suggesting that Biden is having difficulty generating Latino and, to a lesser extent, Black support” has to prove true on Election Day.

On Sept. 18, Politico reported that a Monmouth University Poll showed

Biden at 67 percent support among Black, Latino and Asian voters — far ahead of Trump but below the usual Democratic consolidation of voters of color. Hillary Clinton won the same demographics, 74-21 percent, in 2016.

In the end, Trende wrote.

None of this is to be taken as a prediction as such — this is a race that could go either way, and I still view Biden as the favorite. With that said, the story line sketched out above is perfectly realistic.
...

kapetanm wrote:Dobija Trampara ovo, na guzove i dreku. Da je neko drugi a ne Bajden mozda i ne

[size=32], the debates will test Biden’s ability to withstand three 90-minute battles against an opponent known for brutal personal attacks.[/size]

Јанош Винету wrote:Ја ћу сада мало да клачарим:

Бајден је тамо где јесте зато што је врхунски политички пливач између Сциле и Харибде, између естаблишмента и прогресиваца. 
Он има зрелост и искуство да се правилно позиционира у кљакавим оквирима унутрашње политике Демократске странке.

Aaron Sorkin reveals how he would write election night, 2020: "Trump does what we all assume he will do, which is not concede defeat… For the first time, his Republican enablers march up to the White House and say 'Donald, it’s time to go'" https://t.co/pGjFqoeJaR

— Variety (@Variety) September 25, 2020

We are accustomed to choosing electors by popular vote, but nothing in the Constitution says it has to be that way. Article II  provides that each state shall appoint electors “in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.” Since the late 19th century, every state has ceded the decision to its voters. Even so, the Supreme Court affirmed in Bush v. Gore that a state “can take back the power to appoint electors.” How and when a state might do so has not been tested for well over a century.

https://twitter.com/SethCotlar/status/1310085852068945926
Seth Cotlar
@SethCotlar
I think the SCOTUS/2020 election scenario that's far more likely than them handing Trump the election on sketchy grounds, is one where Trump tries to get them to do that but they slap it down, thus buying themselves a ton of legitimacy, allowing them to stave off packing...
7:16 AM · Sep 27, 2020·Twitter Web App

...and also clearing the ground for them to do what the GOP long game has long hoped the federal judiciary will do....to strike down as unconstitutional any progressive legislation, no matter how big of a majority it passes by and is supported by.

I should say that at this point it seems like the more likely scenario is that Biden wins by a significant, unchallengeable majority. It seems unlikely (tho not impossible) that Trump will get in plausible spitting distance to justify a viable court challenge.

I don't think Roberts is the sort of judge who wants to be engaged in patently shady shenanigans. His whole career has been geared toward the moment when the SCOTUS can be a GOP-friendly check on an emergent, Demo majority flowing from the inexorable logic of demographic change.

Trump and his most rabid fans seem to be fantasizing about America becoming a failed state, but the conservatives on the SCOTUS are smart enough to recognize that this would not serve the interests of the constituency they're most concerned for.

I think Roberts is far more interested in protecting the legitimacy of the SCOTUS so it can play it's allotted, anti-democratic role in a future American politics where the GOP, until it can win more votes from non-whites, is a permanent minority party.

Anyway, this is just future tripping speculation. I do think, however, that the conservatives on the court are playing the long game & see Trump's efforts at institutional sabotage as ultimately self-defeating. And 2 be clear, I don't think this is a happy scenario for democracy.

I also worry that all of the attention people are putting on the idea that ACB is going to be the judge who hands Trump an illegitimate victory is underestimating the savvy of the Federalist Society and its judges.

They don't want to make the US a failed state. Their entire judicial philosophy revolves around the Scalia-like idea that it is the judiciary's role to make the federal government as small as possible, to be a negative check on majoritarian efforts to use the state to do good.

From the get go, this has been the historical mission of the SCOTUS (with the exception of the small window of the Warren/Thurgood Marshall court)...to be an anti-democratic check on ambitious majorities.

Trump and his minions have no conception of that historical context, but you can sure bet Roberts, Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, Alito, Thomas, and Barrett do. A right wing SCOTUS with legitimacy is the best the GOP can hope for looking ahead a decade or two. The smart ones know that.

The GOP has almost no positive legislative agenda anyway. Their entire ideology is almost pure negation. Once they lose the power to do that in the legislative and executive branch, they'll need a judiciary with popular legitimacy to continue that work of negation.

They know gun control bills, bills protecting access to reproductive choice, bills addressing climate change, and bills expanding health care are coming down the pike. But they needn't be too worried about them if they've got a 6-3 SCOTUS that can strike them down.

Don't forget that the primary conservative argument against many of Warren's plans (including the Never Trump conservatives) was that Warren can say whatever she wants, but what she wants is unconstitutional and the SCOTUS will say as much.

And while I dislike Mitch McConnell as much as 87% of my fellow Americans, he's no dummy. There's a reason why he's been minting new right wing judges in lieu of doing anything else. He's doin it like it's going out of style, cause he knows GOP legislators are going out of style.

And holy cow, can you imagine the headlines: CONSERVATIVE SCOTUS REJECTS TRUMP'S EFFORTS TO STEAL THE ELECTION. They could plausibly believe that this would buy them enough political capital to bat down anything remotely ambitious that a Biden administration might try to do.

Trump has now bought the GOP establishment everything they could have ever wanted in the form of a stacked federal judiciary. Why on earth should we think they'd risk undermining the legitimacy of the state just to give someone they know is a buffoon another 4 years?

From the perspective of GOP elites, the past 4 years have been gravy. They thought for sure they'd lose in 2016. And now they know they're going to lose, but it doesn't matter because Trump & McConnell bought them something far more valuable, a judicial Trump card, if you will.

This could all be completely misguided...but this nightmare scenario came to me as I was drifting off to sleep so I figured I'd toss it out there to see what folks thought.