Democratic Leadership Council bigwigs Al From and Bruce Reed have an article in today’s Wall St. Journal, “Get the Red Out,” that rolls out a couple of fresh ideas for a Democratic resurgence. Along with their more predictable proposals and pot shots at Michael Moore and Joe Trippi, From and Reed propose a “Heartland Project,” which would include “family policies that give parents more time to raise their kids right,” a provocative idea that merits further exploration. They also advocate a new message strategy that gives more emphasis to the Democrats’ outsider status, as they “take up the reform mantle” and become “the party of change, protecting our principles, not our programs.” All Democrats may not be able to unite behind the DLC’s positions on Iraq policy, same-sex marriage and other issues, but Reed and From are thinking creatively about the Party’s future, and their ideas merit thoughtful consideration.
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Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
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May 9: Watch Out! Team Trump Setting Up Another Premature Victory Claim
I got a strong sense of deja vu from a comment by Lara Trump this week, and fired off a warning at New York:
A dark specter hanging over the 2024 presidential election is the possibility that Donald Trump will again declare victory on Election Night based on deliberately false accusations about voting by mail. Lest we forget, that was the foundation for all of Trump’s efforts to reverse Joe Biden’s 2020 victory, up to and including the January 6 insurrection: the idea that it was Democrats who “stole” the election by stuffing the ballot box with fabricated mail ballots counted after Election Day had ended (that wasn’t the only phony “fraud” allegation made by Team Trump, but it was the one made most often).
In the run-up to the Trump-Biden rematch, Republicans and the candidate himself have sent mixed signals about the legitimacy of voting by mail, mostly suggesting it’s inherently fraudulent yet encouraging MAGA voters to use it as a sort of fighting-fire-with-fire strategy. But the crucial if totally counterfactual idea that Democrats will look to see how many votes they need on Election Night and just make up enough mail ballots to reverse a Trump victory is being kept alive by Trump’s daughter-in-law, the new Republican National Committee co-chair Lara Trump, in an interview on Fox News. Per Raw Story:
“Republican National Committee co-chair Lara Trump argued Sunday that ballots should not be counted after elections are over.
“’You cannot have ballots counted, Maria, after elections are over,’ Trump opined. ‘And right now, that is one of the many lawsuits we have out across this country to ensure that just that happens, that we have a free, fair, and transparent election.’
“’So in Nevada, as you pointed out, we are saying we want, on election day, that to be the last day that mail-in ballots can be counted,’ she added. ‘And we’ve been very successful in a lot of lawsuits.’”
Taken literally, this argument is absurd. An election isn’t “over” until the votes are counted. Trump’s 2020 victory claim was based on the candidate arbitrarily declaring the election “over,” conveniently, when he was momentarily ahead. Even in the era before widespread voting-by-mail, close elections often weren’t resolved until days or even weeks after Election Day, as anyone who remembers 2000 (or countless other elections with respect to downballot contests) can tell you. Slow counts are sometimes as attributable to safeguards against election fraud as to any sort of funny business.
Lara Trump’s reference to a lawsuit in Nevada, however, suggests a much narrower issue: Nevada is one of 17 states where mail ballots postmarked by Election Day can be counted if they are received by election officials within a specified time. This practice has sometimes been demonized by Republicans seeking conspiracy-theory legitimization for election defeats (notably in 2018, when early GOP leads in California congressional races melted away once late mail ballots were counted). But it raises a question critics of voting-by-mail never seem to answer: When does voting happen in the first place? When a vote is cast or when it is tabulated? If it’s the former, why isn’t the act of filling out, sealing, and placing a ballot in the hands of the U.S. Postal Service as definitive an act of voting as marking a ballot in a polling booth? Arguably the postmark-rather-than-receipt deadline is fairer and more rational at a time (in 2024 as in 2020) when expedient delivery of mail by a troubled USPS is by no means assured.
Of the 17 postmark-deadline states, only two (Nevada plus North Carolina) are likely presidential battleground states, so it won’t be easy for Team Trump to pin an election defeat on that practice. But complaints about Election Day being extended by larcenous Democrats, however bogus, are part of the pall Republicans are trying to cast over the entire 2024 election. If Trump wins, our election system will retroactively become golden in MAGA-land, or perhaps we will be told Trump’s immense popularity will have overcome Democrat and Establishment efforts to count him out. If he loses, the election was “rigged” and patriots need to to un-rig by any means necessary.
We’ve been warned.
Wrong DemDude. Please go check out Josh Marshall, Atrios and Kos. Let the DLC join the Republican Party where they belong. I know you think that since we only got 49% of the vote we can’t possibly win without them, but the Republicans won because not enough Independents and Swing voters went our way THIS TIME. They decided to stay the course mostly because we’re at war. Four more years of what we all know are politics of disaster will bring those Indies our way NEXT TIME (maybe even in ’06). We almost beat a sitting President in a time of War. That’s remarkable. The corporate owned SCLM keeps pushing the moral values “mandate” that currently sits at 50.62% according to Mr. Teixeira’s post from above, and people like you are buying it. Stop it. I’m with Kos – I’m a Reform Democrat leaning hard left and don’t want to do business with the DLC any longer.
Pounder – That attitude is as misguided as the DLC/CDM bashing of liberal Democrats. Like it or not, they are a sizable portion of the Democratic base. We have to find ways to work together, or we will suffer even greater losses. We need a bigger tent, not a smaller one. Conservative and liberal Democrats have got to stop the sniping at each other.
there is nothing the DLC can offer that I am interested in. We have done it their way and lost, and then lsot soem more. they simply want to preserve whats left of their failed organization.
Real reforms are not going to come from these guys.