If you want to stump one of your conservative friends, you can ask them this question: do you still believe that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump?
I asked one of my conservative friends that question.
Haven’t heard a peep back.
Probably she thinks it’s a trap.
Because it is a trap.
What can they say about a “stolen election” when the mechanisms used for Trump’s victory in 2024 were virtually identical to those used for Trump’s 2020 loss.
In any case, on Monday, January 6th, Vice President Kamala Harris bravely went before a Joint Session of the House and Senate and oversaw the certification of Donald Trump’s election victory. And also her own defeat.
As we know by now, with conservatives, virtually every accusation is a confession. One could make the argument that if there were any stolen elections in the last several decades, it was Republicans stealing elections from Democrats. Arguably four of them.
Jimmy Carter in 1980
With the passing this week of the 39th President of the United States, it’s a good time to look back at the Iran Hostage Crisis and the “October Surprise Theory” of how the 1980 election played out.
First of all, let’s acknowledge that the 1980 Presidential Election was not close. Although, as it happens, Reagan barely got more than 50% of the vote. Independent candidate John Anderson got over 6% of the vote. Second, Carter wasn’t all that popular before the Iran Hostage Crisis, what with high inflation and the energy crisis, which led Carter to lower the national speed limit to 55 mph. All of that notwithstanding, there is now good evidence that the Reagan people were negotiating with Iran before Reagan became President — an activity which is strictly verboten under American law — and which led to the hostages being released literally just minutes after Ronald Reagan was sworn in as president.
If the hostages had been released earlier, would that have changed the outcome of the election?
Hard to know. Those 444 days we heard every night from Ted Koppel, in the program that eventually became Nighline, about how the hostages were still stuck in Iran, surely did not help Carter. But it’s a more plausible case of a stolen election than Trump’s allegations about 2020.
Al Gore in 2000
In 2000 we had, of course, the “hanging chads” and the Bush v. Gore case. The issue was who had won Florida. The vote there was very, very close.
Initially, the Florida Supreme Court had ordered a statewide recount of all undervotes, over 61,000 ballots that the vote tabulation machines had missed. On the next day, the five conservative justices on the Court granted a stay, and shortly thereafter, decided in a 5-4 decision that the recount be stopped. The Court’s reasoning was complicated and involved equal protection issues, and we’re not going to review it all here (that would be a post onto itself). Bottom line is that it allowed Katherine Harris, Florida’s Secretary of State to certify the vote in favor of Bush, giving him Florida’s 25 electoral votes, just enough to exceed the required 270 threshold by one vote.
One bloody vote.
This was also the first of a series of elections in which the losing Democratic candidate won more of the popular vote than the victorious Republican candidate.
Would Gore have won if the “undervote” in Florida had been counted. Hard to know. The available evidence suggests that he probably would have. But since that count was never completed, we’ll never know for sure.
Hillary Clinton in 2016
Well, in 2016 Hillary won the popular vote by 2,868,686 votes, there was interference from Russia, and there was, of course, the October Surprise. Russian interference was richly documented in the Mueller Report, even though it did not lead to any indictments. That was, of course, mostly because of the Department of Justice’s interpretation that a sitting president cannot be prosecuted. That doesn’t mean there weren’t any prosecutions; they were just of people other than President Trump.
Then the October Surprise: on October 28, FBI Director James Comey announced that he would review additional emails related to Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server, which had been newly discovered on a computer that was seized by the FBI during an investigation of former congressman Anthony Weiner. Weiner was married at the time to top Clinton aide Huma Abedin. This was, of course, an entirely unnecessary exercise that led to absolutely nothing, except that it might have led to the very slim victories that Trump had in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, which ultimately led to his victory in the electoral college. Comey should have known that there was no way that this empty exercise was not going to be prejudicial to Hillary’s campaign.
Did it make the difference in 2016? Who knows? It’s certainly more convincing than Trump’s claim that he won in 2020.
Kamala Harris in 2024
No one here is suggesting that Trump engaged in “voter fraud” as that term is normally defined. Certainly I’m not claiming that. But there is good reason to believe that Republicans engaged in voter suppression sufficient to make a difference.
The Australian publication Crikey conveniently identified nine different ways that Republicans had been trying to suppress the votes of Democrats, and in particular minorities and young people. These included:
- Preventing voter registration
- Purging voter rolls
- Gerrymandering districts
- Requiring voter IDs
- Closing polling places
- Making it harder to vote
- Preventing early and mail voting
- Making it easier for officials to deny election results
- Preventing registration by felons
Did voter suppression make the difference in 2024?
Hard to know.
However, what we can tell is that fewer people voted in 2024 than in 2020 by a noticeable amount.
- In 2020 74,223,975 voted for Trump and 81,283,501 for Biden, totaling 155,507,476 votes.
- In 2024 77,303,573 voted for Trump and only 75,019,257 for Harris, totaling 152,322,830 votes.
That means that 3,184,646 fewer citizens voted for either candidate in 2024 rather than in 2020. That’s about a 2% reduction in total voters, and that would be enough to have swung the election for Harris.
Now, obviously one cannot say that all the people who failed to vote in 2024 would have voted for Harris. But if just 2/3rds of them had voted for Harris, she would have beaten Trump in the popular vote count by almost 1 million votes.
In any case, it’s much more likely that voter suppression swung the 2024 election for Trump rather than that the 2020 election — which was examined and litigated extensively — was stolen from Trump.
The 2020 Presidential Election
If there was one election that clearly was not stolen, then it was the 2020 presidential election. No, in that one, 81,283,500 voters showed up to vote against the Orange Cheato. Actually, I did as well. So make that 81,283,501 voters (the official count).
In the aftermath there were court cases (63 of them), audits, investigations, false accusations, and (of course) an attempted insurrection. In none of these actions was there any indication of systematic voter fraud, and certainly not enough to change the outcome of the election.
And yet, there we had Pam Bondi, Trump’s nominee for Attorney General, STILL being able to admit, simply and clearly, that the 2020 election was not stolen.
And Republicans wonder why we’re jaded at this point.
