Before I get to posting about the political news this week, I have to report that I attended the Georgia-Tennessee football game on Saturday. Until just before the half, Georgia led 24-7, and I sorta wish I had left at that point and gotten ahead of the insane traffic back to Atlanta. Instead, I watched Tennessee outscore the Dawgs 44-9 the rest of the way, as Georgia made a variety of offensive miscues (most notably two deep-in-own-territory INTs and a blocked punt in the end zone) while its vaunted defense looked helpless against Eric Ainge’s relentless short passing game. Maybe it’s a coincidence, but I didn’t see Uga VI leave his doghouse after halftime. I’m guessing he didn’t want to hear Rocky Top played forty times. The season’s only half over, and Georgia can still put itself into the SEC title game by beating Florida and Auburn later in the year and hoping someone else (e.g., LSU or Arkansas) beats the Vols. But it’s a bit unsettling to look at the AP poll today and see Georgia ranked behind the Dirt Daubers of Georgia Tech. Makes you wonder all over again what the Dawgs would be like right now if Calvin Johnson had decided to matriculate in Athens, as he nearly did.
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.