How to concede an election

Last comment on the US election, for now at least.

Kamala Harris' concession speech drew some major contrasts with the Republicans four years ago. With class and poise, she took the high road, saying, "We must accept the results of this election ... We will engage in a peaceful transfer of power". Imagine Donald Trump saying that!

This was not some pusillanimous capitulation, though. "While I concede this election, I do not concede the fight that fuelled this campaign", she said, possibly setting herself up for another fight (likely not with old man Trump) in four years time. 

I don't believe that she performed poorly in the election. I don't believe any other Democrat candidate would have done any better. It just wasn't to be.

Who's to blame for America's election debacle

As half of America and much of the rest of the world is in mourning after Donald Trump's shocking landslide.presidential election win, the inevitable search for a scapegoat has begun.

Some are blaming Black men, particularly as earlier opinion polls had shown them unconvinced by Kamala Harris, with many of them even drifting towards Trump. But according to exit polls, Black voting at the actual election followed very closely their voting during the 2020 election, i.e. overwhelmingly Democrat (Harris 86% and Trump 12%, compared to Harris 87% and Trump 12% in 2020). As in 2020, Black women were much more strongly Democratic than Black men (women 92%, men 78%, broadly similar to 2020). So, they can't be blamed.

What about the Arab-American vote? I have already railed against the ridiculous idea of Arab-Americans witholding their traditional Democratic vote in order to "punish" Harris and Biden in some way, particularly given that Trump is even more rabidly pro-Israel than either Biden or Harris.

But it looks like many of.those Arab-American single-issue voters DID follow through on their threats. For example, in Arab-majority Dearborn, MI, where Joe Biden won by 17,400 votes in 2020, the city went to Trump by more than 2,600 votes. So, whether they voted for Trump, or for third party Jill Stein of the Greens, or just didn't vote at all, the end result is the same: they helped to hand the election to Trump. And - go figure - they have ended up with a stridently anti-Muslim, pro-Israel President-Elect Senate and House of Representatives. Good job, guys. Who could have seen that coming? Er....

So, yes, some blame does attach to Arab-Americans for the predicament the country (and they themselves) find themselves in. It's hard to feel sympathetic, even if they will likely find themselves in the thick of the first wave of Trump's mass deportations of immigrants. That's what single issue voting gets you. But the Arab-American contingent is not actually that large (although larger than you might have thought). So, just how much blame attaches to them is unclear.

The Latino community is much larger, though, about 20% of the population these days. And, yes, they too abandoned the Democrats for reasons that are also not entirely clear to me, continuing their gradual shift to the right (notwithstanding offensive jokes about Puerto Rico at Trump rallies).

But clearly something else happened too - other, that is, than young, testosterone-fuelled rural guys voting for an octogenarian would-be dictator (almost the definition of an urban elite, despite what he says).

The big one, from exit poll data, is white women. Yes, those blowsy, bottle-blonde, slightly overweight, middle-aged women in inappropriate tight clothing you see holding signs behind Trump in all those televised rallies. White women make up 37% of the entire electorate, and I think we CAN legitimately blame them. Yes, Kamala Harris is a woman, and she made a point of campaigning on women's issues. Yet, she actually polled worse with women than her Democratic predecessors. Even younger women flocked to the old lecher. It makes no sense to me.

The bottom line is: I am severely disaapointed with the American public, pretty much all of them.

How do you tell when Trump "jumps the shark"?

It's hard to tell when Donald Trump is "jumping the shark", the guy is in an almost permanent state of shark-jumping. But maybe this was it.

Here's video of Trump at a rally in Milwaukee, masturbating and fellating a microphone. I kid you not. Maybe there was some context, you say? Nope. This was just Trump complaining (again) about the incompetent and "stupid" guys who set up his microphones. I mean, who wouldn't resort to similated sex acts if their microphone didn't work?

I'm sure the Trump faithful are lapping it up [sic]. Trump supporters are not big on policy announcements, empthy, that sort of thing. They are just there for some entertainment, preferably low-brow and not too intellectually taxing [sic], and Mr. Trump is happy to oblige. "Presidential"? What's that got to do with anything?

The US elections are not just about the next president

There's a timely article in the Globe about the OTHER elections going on in the USA. The presidential election takes up so much media oxygen, and it's so hard to look away, that it's easy to forget that there are also elections for Senate and House of Representatives going on this Tuesday, and these are also really important for the US, for Canada, and for the rest of the world.

One third of Senate Seats (34 out of 100) are up for grabs, as are all 435 House seats. Whoever becomes President, will either be constrained or aided by the make-up of the new Congress. Yes, there is still the possibility of executive orders (effectively presidential decrees, not requiring a vote by Congress), an expedient of which Donald Trump was particularly fond (he used them 220 times in his four years, compared to just 143 by Joe Biden in his), but Congress will still be critical for the passage of major legislation.

The Democrats currently have a slim majority in the Senate, but 19 of the 34 seats being contested are Democratic holdings, with only 11 being Republican, so the Dems face a large potential risk. 14 of the 34 seats in play are considered solidly Democrat and 11 solidly Republican. So, 9 could go either way and, in particular, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin are considered too close to call.

In the House of Representatives, where the Republicans currently have a three-seat majority, no less than 25 seats are seen as toss-ups, 14 of which have a Republican incumbent and 8 a Democrat incumbent (3 seats are currently vacant). It is almost impossible to predict where this will go.

So, as with the presidential election, things sit on a knife-edge both in the Senate and in the House of Representatives, and a few votes here or there in a handful of swing states could make a huge difference in how the next four years go. Scary stuff, but fascinating.

Expect the US election to go wrong, seriously wrong

The American democratic system - once thought so sturdy and robust, the envy of the world - has never looked so flimsy and fragile. 

The Electoral College system itself, Byzantine in its unnecessary complexity and rife with internal inconsistencies, as I have explored in a previous post, is already quite capable of converting a substantial popular vote majority into an effective loss (as we have seen). The whole antiquated system is shot through with what I have charitably termed "vagaries", which are open to exploitation by capable but unscrupilous hands.

Another excellent article by Andrew Coyne in the Globe and Mail lists some of the many ways this system can be gamed or weaponized. Trump's plan, should he lose, is to tie up the election results in certain states in legal knots long enough to prevent the certification of Electoral College votes within the statutory time limit (as far as I can tell from what I have read, this is December 17th). Tame election administrators can be called on to refuse to certify apparently clear vote results, or Republican-controlled state legislators can be pressed into setting aside the results. 

If neither party can be legally said to have won the Electoral College, the 12th Amendment of the Constitution allows for it to be thrown over to the newly-elected House of Representatives to decide. Of course, this is not by a normal majority of the House's members, but by a vote of its state delegations, i.e. one vote per state, of which the Republicans will probably hold a majority, regardless of the actual elected Representatives. Other options also exist, such as tossing out electors in some states to manufacture a Republican win despite the popular vote and even the Electoral College vote (yes, apparently it's technically possible). Did I mention Byzantine?

And it doesn't end with the Electoral College. Gerrymandered electoral districts make a mockery of one-person-one-vote rhetoric, and the Republicans in particular have been hard at work manufacturing more such inequities. 

A badly-unbalanced Supreme Court is now stacked with extreme partisans willing to sacrifice judicial fairness and ethical judgement for partisan political advantage, as it has repeatedly demonstrated over the last few years. So. if any of the legal wrangling mentioned above ends up at the Supreme Court, you know how it will end before it even starts.

All this is well-known, but Trump and the current band of feckless Republican enablers have blown these weaknesses up into unprecedented dangerous territory with their willingness to pursue suspect and often downright illegal avenues of procedure in their lust for power. 

Trump has made no secret that he will not accept a Democratic victory, even one that plays by the rules, Byzantine though they may be. He has repeatedly said that there is no way the Democrats can win without cheating, and has been preparing the way for such a claim for months now, laying the groundwork to challenge the results if he loses. 

He is already claiming that election fraud is under way, from millions of fictitious illegal migrants voting Democrat to fraudulent overseas ballots to tampered election machines in swing states. According to him, all of these ploys are supposedly aiding the Democratic vote. None of it is true: despite what Trump says, electoral fraud is exceedingly rare in the USA, as several inquiries and court cases after the 2020 vote have confirmed.

What IS happening is widespread intimidation and harassment of voters and electoral workers by Republican "poll-watchers", who are being trained to be "assertive" and "aggressive" in their work. While monitoring elections might seem like a good idea in principle, extreme partisan monitoring can work against the stated goal of fairness. Armed and mask-wearing poll-watchers like we saw in Texas and Arizona in 2022 are not just trying to maintain fairness, and Republican poll-watchers in North Carolina were accused of blocking access to poll booths and generally disrupting the electoral process. 

Some Republican states like Florida, Texas and Missouri, on the other hand, are refusing to let the normal Justice Department  election monitors enter polling stations on election day. I'm not sure how legal that is.

The latest security twist comes from the Sheriff Lieutenant of Springfield, Ohio (yes the same place accused by Republicans of eating cats and dogs...), who has vowed not to help Democrats requiring security aid, only Republicans. It doesn't get much more ridiculous than that, does it?

Anyway, you can expect Trump to declare victory on Tuesday, whatever actually transpires. What happens then is extremely uncertain, but it will probably involve weeks of chaos and, quite likely, violence. We here in Canada like to denigrate our own political and electoral systems, and they are certainly not perfect. But God, am I glad I'm not American! 

Half of the voting population of the United states appears quite content to vote in a guy they see as a "straight talker" who "tells it like it is" and who will release them from the "woke liberalism" that is strangling their starry-eyed notion of America. They seem oblivious, or wilfully ignorant, of what is happening behind the scenes, even though the information is out there. When the chaos and violence descends on their country, as surely it will, they will all have been complicit.

UCP not right wing enough for Take Back Alberta

The United Conservative Party (UCP) of Alberta is having its annual general meeting in Red Deer, among reports that the party is anything but united.

Specifically, the meeting will be voting on whether Premier Danielle Smith, who has been at the helm of the UCP since October 2022, is fit to continue leading the party. Ms. Smith is regarded by the rest of Canada as a rabid right-wing hawk, but most of the grievances against her leadership seem to be coming from the RIGHT of her party, particularly groupings like Take Back Alberta and the 1905 Committee that helped get her elected in the first place.

Take Back Alberta seems still to be hung up on opposition to COVID-19 restrictions - remember those? - although they also claim to be exercised by "freedom, accountability and healthcare choices" in some vague, general way. For some reason, many of them feel that, for all Smith's radical and extreme legislative agenda over the last couple of years, she has been something of a "disappointment" to Take Back Alberta. Which is a scary  thought.

These people would not be out of place in Texas or Wyoming. They seem very out of place in Canada.

UPDATE

In the end, Smith won a resounding 91.5% of the UCP vote, so I guess she's right-wing enough after all. Not exactly the "stern message" her right flank was thinking of...

If you are losing track of Trump's lies...

It's no secret that Donald Trump lies. A lot. It's easy to lose track of just how many mistruths he has spun over the years, even from.wrrk to week and day to day. 

Yes, Joe Biden is not above the odd fib from time to time, and even the much more careful Kamala Harris is not entirely squeaky clean (as even CNN admits). But no politician EVER has lied as much as Donald Trump. Neither he nor his people bother to refute allegations of lying - they just don't really care, and it's just seen as part of Trump's campaign style and indeed his whole persona.

So, thanks to a recent CNN article that neatly summaries Trump's main recent lying campaigns, without literally listing them all which would be tedious (and depressing). It makes sobering reading, not least because half of Americans either believe them or just don't care. 

As I have argued elsewhere, though, the sheer amount of lying that happens in politics these days - not just by Trump, but mainly as a result of Trump's campaigning "style" - is ushering in a period of political cynicism and nihilism that makes a complete mockery of our democratic systems.