I’ve just returned tonight from a quick weekend trip to Prince Edward Island, a delightfully remote corner of Canada, but all the talk while I was there was of the USA.Like Americans, Canadians have been riveted by the incredible destructive power of Hurricane Katrina, and particularly the predictions that New Orleans might finally be wiped out by catastrophic flooding. (Since New Orleans is my favorite place, I was frantic yesterday and today to get the news, and only after sitting through a long CNN feature about the impact on oil refinery capacity at the Charlottetown airport did it become apparent that massive loss of human life did not occur in the Crescent City, though Biloxi was less fortunate).But the news item that competed with Katrina across much of Canada involved America in a far less sympathetic story. Canadians are absolutely livid about a cavalier rejection by the Bush administration of a NAFTA-sponsored arbitration decision declaring U.S. duties on Canadian softwood lumber illegal under the agreement. In fact, under heavy public pressure, Prime Minister Paul Martin is reportedly thinking about calling a special session of Parliament to take retaliatory measures against U.S. exports.This hasn’t exactly been big news in the States, but Canada is America’s biggest trading partner, and the longstanding U.S.-Canada partnership on trade policy is the linchpin not only of NAFTA, but of hemispheric free trade efforts generally. And the long-simmering dispute over Canadian lumber is now leading a variety of voices north of the border to call for a reconsideration of that partnership, and of NAFTA itself.It didn’t help that Bush’s ambassador in Ottawa, David Wilkins, responded to outrage over the U.S. decision to ignore the lumber ruling by lecturing Canadians to eschew “emotional tirades.” Bush himself, of course, is vastly less popular in Canada than his predecessor, and Wilkins’ comments reinforced every available perception about the administration’s general disdain for the opinions of long-time allies.This incident also shines a bright light on the Bush administration’s generally bumbling and inconsistent stewardship of trade policy, which follows few clear principles other than solicitude for domestic business interests with political clout.In any event, it was fascinating to spend a few days among our neighbors whose love-hate relationship with the U.S. was illustrated by their worries over a hot wind from the south roaring into the Gulf Coast, and their willingness to launch a cold wind from the north towards Washington.
TDS Strategy Memos
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Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
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October 18: Understanding Trump’s Heads-He-Wins, Tails-You-Lose Strategy
I’ve been spending a lot of time mulling the high likelihood of another contested presidential election result, and shared some brief thoughts at New York about Trump’s strategy:
It’s been clear for some time that Donald Trump is laying the groundwork to attempt to deny and challenge an election defeat. But Team Trump is also working to ensure that he won’t have to deny the results — and not just by convincing more voters that his policies are better for America. To put it very simply, the Trump campaign, the Republican Party, and its super-PAC allies are devoting a lot of resources to suppressing the Democratic vote in key states. These strategies include:
- Insisting on voter-roll purges to eliminate people who don’t respond quickly to official verification inquiries, whether or not they are appropriate. (In the past, overzealous purges have disqualified hundreds of thousands of eligible voters, most notably in Florida in 2000.)
- Promoting ridiculously strict rules for mail ballots that don’t have anything to do with their integrity (e.g., tossing them out due to extremely minor address or date errors without the possibility of curing them).
- Flooding the polling places with poll watchers trained to challenge individual ballots that might go to Kamala Harris on a variety of sketchy grounds.
- An inside-the-tent effort to place MAGA loyalists in key election-administration positions from the precinct to the county to the state level, where they can not only slow down vote counts but increase the odds of Democratic ballots being thrown out.
In addition to reducing the Harris vote (via a combination of ballot-eligibility challenges or heavy-handed intimidation of voters), all these MAGA boots on the ground can help build the post-election case that a Harris win was tainted with fraud. This time, Team Trump’s legal team will be much more organized than Rudy Giuliani’s Keystone Cops ensemble, which tried to capitalize on scattered election-fraud rumors and social-media claims in 2020. With so many campaign operatives working as election administrators or observers, there will be plenty of election-fraud allegations to fuel Trump lawsuits, with or without merit.
All this activity, along with years of Trump claims that Democrats cannot beat him without cheating, will predispose his MAGA base to accept whatever he chooses to claim about the “integrity” of the election. As the initial votes come in on Election Night, he may repeat his premature victory claim from 2020 and demand that vote counting stop with him slightly ahead (if indeed that “red mirage” reappears before it’s dispelled by the “blue shift” of mail ballots). If he does, we could see on-the-ground Trump operatives and volunteers demand that state- and county-election offices “stop the steal.” He will have another moment of truth if the Associated Press and other major media outlets call the race for Harris, which will be deemed conclusive by most people outside MAGA-land.
Trump will ultimately have to decide whether to concede or remain defiant on December 11, the federal deadline for state certifications of the vote. The Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022 was designed to minimize the odds of any challenge to the results after that date.
But whether or not the 45th president has a workable strategy for turning defeat into victory after Election Day, there’s no question his minions are trying hard to twist the system to maximize the possibility that Trump will win without having to stage another insurrection.