Election Deniers are suddenly facing an unfamiliar landscape that they're not sure how to deal with

[Tom Rinaldo]

The total evaporation of any Red Wave (outside of Florida) has them completely off balance. If election results had been more uneven, with MAGA candidates performing well in some states and not in others, then their play book was simple and straight forward: FRAUD FRAUD FRAUD wherever they lost, and power to the people everywhere else. But their showing was almost uniformly dismal. Trump's high profile picks under performed virtually everywhere, often disastrously so. Even the Florida results are a slap in the face to Trump's most hard core base. Trump's image emerged battered from Tuesday's election. So suddenly, closely identifying with Trump's "the elections are rigged" brand of politics is starting to look like a losing proposition. Who really wants to be the ones hoisting that banner into battle now behind an increasingly discredited leader?

Meanwhile the red mirage ploy that Trump's band used to great effect in 2020 has failed them this time. In PA most notably, Fetterman didn't need days of ballot counting after Election Day to pull off a victory. He won outright on Election Day. Meanwhile in the high profile races in Arizona, Republicans have to pin all of their hopes on votes being counted days after the polls closed to deliver them electoral wins. The favored narrative of election deniers is almost hopefully scrambled. No more cries to stop the counting are being heard.

Of course no one needs facts to be on their side in order to promote a lie. But if the act of promoting a specific lie now seems to work to the disfavor of those who do, the motivation behind pushing those lies starts to vanish. There will no doubt be election deniers out there for many years to come, but the winds have shifted. They no longer are at their back, they now are blowing cold and hard in their face.

[Javaman]

1. this could be the beginning of the end

and the rise of the "good german" (those who will claim to have never supported the orange asshole)

[Better Days Ahoy]

2. Excellent analogy

Just like the "good Germans", let's force these bastards to carry his lifeless body to the mass grave.

[NJCher]

7. See my post 5 downthread

Instead of a mass of lard, a big red plastic “L” worn with a lanyard.

Every photo of them on the internet should show this big red “L.”

[Better Days Ahoy]

10. Thanks for that post. Scarlet letter is apt.

They need to know that we know. And bang it over their heads every damn day.

Glad your town is cool. My NJ hometown is Rumson, NJ. Bunch of self-mastubatory assholes who couldn't hack the world outside their bubble -- Went to school to ski and ran right back. Pretty ReThuglican and entitled. Glad to be FROM there.

[ChazInAz]

16. Fine idea.

We wouldn't have enough albatross to go around.

[murielm99]

15. Exactly right.

I have always thought this would happen. TFG would destroy his party to the point that everyone would deny ever having supported him. I live in a red area of a blue state. I have always told my TFG loving neighbors that someday they would be saying, "Trump Who?"

[certainot]

40. red area of blue state. how much of that is RW radio? and is it endorsed by the local universities a

and pro sports teams.....

[murielm99]

42. This is a rural area with a lot of family farms.

Farmers here are usually republicans. Not us. There are several farmers and farm family members on our Democratic central committee.

[certainot]

45. limbaugh died and it makes a big diff in central messaging, excusing and rationalizing TFG, and hold

holding the lies-based base and alternate realities together

your central committee might want to check the list at fakernewsradio.org to see if your local university has been and will continue to help those republicans elect more republicans

imo once one uni begins a discussion about finding apolitical alternatives to broadcast sports on the scrutiny will scare a lot of advertisers off, and other schools will head for the hills.

georgia is a fantastic opportunity now to use AI to digitize all that radio aimed at warnock and compare and quantify it. it's all free for the cons.

[certainot]

39. "i never believed limbaugh! really! even when he told me smoking doesn't cause cancer and global war

ming is a hoax! really!"

[Better Days Ahoy]

3. Nicely done, Tom.

Succinct and poetic.

[dalton99a]

4. Kick

[NJCher]

5. It will be like a scarlet letter

That any one political party was dumb enough to buy into such an insipid strategy is something that they must wear around their neck for every day they are on the public payroll.

It stands for everything that is anathema to a freedom loving American, to decent human beings. Its dishonest stance precludes:

Independence of thought
Creativity in problem solving
Professionalism
The integrity involved in acting on behalf of one’s fellow human being

And those are just a few.

I realized this on election day, when I took several additional hours to research the candidates for our mayoral and town council races. As I read about the backgrounds of the people running (I live in a very Democratic town, but our candidates are all non-partisan), I was extremely impressed with the backgrounds of our candidates. These people had public service in their hearts. All their lives they have worked to improve the town and the public good. Many of them had high level jobs in addition to families.

I just could not believe the stark contrast between them and people like MTG, Josh Hawley, Donald Trump, Kevin McCarthy, et al.

Does anyone remember the best selling book People of the Lie? I think the author was M. Scott Peck. That is what we have here in people like Kari Lake: people of the lie.

[MLAA]

20. +1

[Genki Hikari]

46. Peck ripped off intellectual betters like

Hervey Cleckley, Lee Robins, and Robert Hare, groundbreaking researchers of psychopaths and sociopaths.

Skip the Peck drivel and read some real authorities on the horrible people amongst us.

[NJCher]

47. don't recall that

it's been a long time since I read it. Robert Hare has made an original contribution to the field of criminology.

[VWolf]

6. We got lucky in that respect

Can you imagine if Oz and Lake and all the others were all ahead on Tuesday night? It would have been mayhem.

[Aviation Pro]

8. Florida 'red waved' only because the state has been siphoning off

The Bloated Tick cultists from other states. Go ahead, Guv. Man Bewbs, live in your bubble, it's a bigger, badder world out there outside of the flaccid penis state, you fucking moron.

[Beetwasher.]

18. Or There's Real Fraud In FL

Just a thought. Maybe it's completely gamed for the GOP. If they could they would. That's why they accuse us of rigging.

[Pacifist Patriot]

22. There is so much wrong here and it feels like the Democrats have written us off as a lost cause.

So many softballs our flawed candidates didn't even swing at.

The gerrymandering is real for one thing. A solid well-respected three-term Democratic state rep lost when his district was redrawn this go round. Any guesses on the party and ideology of his opponent?

[jmowreader]

36. You've got a problem like Idaho has

Any Democrat who would do a good job in office doesn’t bother to run here because they know the Republican is gonna win anyway.

Several years ago I worked the Democratic Party booth at the county fair. We always had at least one person who had run for office in it. One of them told me that when she did door knocking she’d always get two questions: what church do you go to? and are you going to ban abortion in Kootenai County when you get elected? That we have never had a clinic in Kootenai County is beside the point.

[Pacifist Patriot]

37. Exactly. When I ran for office in 2018, I had two neighbors ....

refuse to sign my petition to just qualify for the ballot and tell me they didn't think Democrats should even be on the ballot at all. Keep in mind, one of these families had a kid who was good friends with mine when they were growing up. I was gobsmacked. They didn't even want opposition that had no chance of winning on the ballot!!!

[yardwork]

9. I wonder if some of it is lack of propaganda.

I've noted the almost total lack of coordinated "our votes are being stoooooollllleennnnn!" messaging. In the past it was everywhere. I attribute this to a few factors....

Putin is busy elsewhere and not pumping money and trolls into creating and amplifying Q messaging.

Rupert Murdoch seems to be through with Trump. Suddenly we aren't seeing coordinated "stop the steal" messaging on Fox News and his other outlets. The NY Post called him Trumpty Dumpty.

Soon nobody will ever have supported Trump. Nobody will ever have questioned the 2020 election.

[jmbar2]

11. Might also be the mass of "Big Lie" believers recruited to stop the steal saw the truth.

Last edited Thu Nov 10, 2022, 11:04 AM - Edit history (2)

Cleta Mitchell headed up a well-funded "Election Integrity Network" that recruited and trained people all across the US to try to uncover election fraud, "mules", etc. They were posted at every election office in the country.

Elections officials said, "OK.Whatevs..."

Everything was so squeaky clean, transparent, and the election workers so dedicated to doing a good job, it simply destroyed their doubts.

I think they came in prepared to find skullduggery, and left feeling sheepish. There was nothing to see. I doubt we will hear any more from that army of election "observers". They know they were played.

[NJCher]

30. considering what you're saying

You would get a laugh out of this program from Ira Glass's "This American Life."

snip

Prologue
Host Ira Glass looks into what’s going on behind the scenes of this year’s midterm election. He discovers a plot to overhaul the Republican party, from the ground up. (5 minutes)

Act One
Magazona
Washington Post reporter, Isaac Arnsdorf, and producer, Zoe Chace, continue the story about the takeover of the Republican party. Together, they hit the road to document how the presence of the MAGA newbies are changing things on the ground in Arizona.

snip

https://www.thisamericanlife.org/781/watching-the-watchers

You can hear what a pointless maze into which they've been sent. After I listened to it, I said almost exactly what you're saying in your post.

OK, so they wasted their time. What trumpers have done, however, is chase off a lot of very valuable people in our electoral system. Hopefully some will come back. It is a shame for us to lose such valuable human capital just so trump can stage a political stunt to protect his fragile ego from the fact that he's a loser.

[jmbar2]

35. Bwa ha ha - thanks for that link!

Great episode. I love the spy music in the background. I am comforted by the fact that some of the members like the ousted committee chair in the episode are sane.

I spent 12 hours in all watching the Republican ballot processing watchers. We matched every Republican observer with one Democrat. On election nite, I sat with a guy who had put in a total of 80 hours spying on the elections process, complete with a little notebook and voice recorder.

Over the course of the evening, I teased him a bit. "Seen any mules yet?" "I brought my mule spray".

I knew that he was following the returns. His note-taking slowed down and he seemed to have the wind sucked out. Kind of felt sorry for him.

The group in my small town had even sent teams out to voters' homes to try to verify who lived there, using phony "voter surveys" as cover. Creepy.

[Joe Cool]

23. Right wingers have no originality.

Most of their material from around 2016 came from Russian trolls. They literally just regurgitate whatever nonsense is shoveled right in front of them.

If Russia didn't interfere for Trump in 2016, Hillary would have won in a landslide. 88k in 3 states stupid enough to believe everything they read online gave Russia its Siberian Candidate.

[czarjak]

12. Im STILL pissed about 2000 though!

[AllaN01Bear]

25. hear.hear.

[Algernon Moncrieff]

13. It's very possible that the age of DeSantis as leader of the GOP began last night

That's not great. In many ways he's worse than Trump. But at some point, Trump may decide to throw his support to DeSantis in exchange for pardons on a multitude of Federal charges.

[Crowman2009]

14. The orange slob father will probably be dead by then.

As for death sentence, many people outside of Florida thinks he's a total asshole.

[Pacifist Patriot]

21. I'm relying on people outside of Florida at this point.

Goodness knows, the majority of voters inside my state are fucking morons.

[Joe Cool]

24. Just start calling him man bewbs

Once you notice his man bewbs, you can't unnotice them. It's time to stop playing nice with right wingers. You need to punch Nazis in the face. That's all they understand.

[calimary]

27. Destabilize the enemy.

[Javaman]

33. I don't see DeShithead doing anything like that for the orange asshole.

if TFG gets prison time, his level of communicating to the public will be greatly decreased and I think deShithead would be perfectly fine with that. he would be the only one in the echo machine then.

[Beetwasher.]

17. Actually, The Pattern Suggest There's Probably REAL Fraud in FL

By Desantis. FL is such an outlier? Maybe...maybe not.

[Javaman]

34. like here in texas, gerrymandering is the name of the game.

texas did redistricting in an off year prior to the census, which is illegal, but did anyone do anything about it? crickets.

the only difference with florida is they "followed" the rules but still gerrymandered the districts against what the census told them what reality was.

[MLAA]

19. Excellent post. Well done.

[jaxexpat]

26. Did the federal poll watchers get in position in S Fl?

Or did desantis succeed with his crooked ploy to prevent their presence?

The Florida vote was ramrodded through. That Gen-Z hero was engineered to win by cynical gerrymandering. Funny how if you pull as many blue voters into a single district as possible, adjacent districts are almost certain to go red.

[pandr32]

28. I would like to know the answer to your questions as well.

Something was up.
It seems wrong that federal voting monitors were denied access during a federal election.

[NoMoreRepugs]

29. Florida was a manufactured red wave. Gerrymandering at its finest.

[PCIntern]

31. Excellent. K and r

[Johnny2X2X]

32. GOP made a mistake telling their cult members to get involved in the elections

So they did, a ton of MAGAs across the country volunteered, not just to be election observers, but to be election workers. This backfired big time. Because these people didn't come back with horror stories about how "it's all rigged I tell ya." They got to see with their own eyes how fair, secure, and well run voting sites and vote processing sites are. So thousands of wingnut election deniers went to work at polling sites this cycle, and each one of them probably came away with a new respect for the entire process. They got to see how organized it all is, how hard people are working to help execute the democratic process. How the rules prevent fraud and prevent tampering.

I am certain there were masses of people waiting for them to report back the horrors they saw only to never hear back, or hear back, "it was fair and secure at the location I was at."

There's a sense of purpose at these polling places that inspires some awe. It's generally people from all walks of life, mostly older, but varying ages too, that are giving up a ton of their time to execute our elections. Election workers are selfless and they are patriotic.

[Mr.Mystery]

38. And what ever happened to "stop counting the vote!"

Don't hear anybody saying that in AZ where the Dems are ahead.

Odd, isn't it.

[Deminpenn]

41. They ran into the wall of reality outside their little

bubble of like-mindedness.

[Buckeyeblue]

43. I think we definitely stopped their momentum but the fight isn't over

2024 will be interesting and crucial. The fascists have played their hand. They can no longer bluff us into thinking they are something else. They are like cancer. They go into remission. But can re-emerge at any point.

We must be diligent.

And we need to continue to focus at the state and local level.

Democratic governors, Democratic Secretary of States and Democratic state legislatures are key to beating back the fascists.

[lindysalsagal]

44. Their unfamiliar landscape is something I like to call reality.

And when you run on a single cause, delusion, you suddenly find you have no purpose whatsoever.