It will all go according to plan—unless we stop it.
Strictly speaking, a coup is an illegitimate
change of government by violent means. But what if you can do it without
violence? To win without fighting is best, Sun Tzu says. An ostensibly
(“mostly”) peaceful ouster from power is preferable to the use of force because
it can much more easily be sold as “our democracy” at work.
National polls consistently predicted a huge
Biden blowout. That they were wrong (again) is demonstrated by the facts that
(a) the 2020 popular vote is, so far (California is not fully counted), a mere
two-point spread, hardly a blowout; (b) Trump got a higher share of the vote
than last time; and (C) Trump received far more total votes than last time.
But it’s the swing states that matter. Here
(again) Trump was supposed to lose—if not necessarily bigly in every case, at
least widely.
But throughout the day, the president
consistently outperformed the polls. He crushed his 2016 performance in
Florida. He also outperformed in Iowa, Ohio, South Carolina, and Texas.
Senators he was supposed to drag down with him, including Joni Ernst, Lindsey
Graham, and Mitch McConnell, won handily. Even Susan Collins, who was supposed
to be sure goner and lose by at least three, won by nine. A party that was “certain”
to lose the Senate has kept it and gained (so far) six seats in the House.
Looking at states no one expected Trump to
lose, his overperformance is even more stark. The polling average for West
Virginia was Trump +17; he won it by 39. Kansas was estimated at
+9; the result was +15.
Throughout the day the president was also
outperforming his expected result in key states such as Arizona, Georgia,
Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. He
even, for a time, looked like he was within striking distance in Virginia, a
state Hillary Clinton won by five points in 2016. At one point the New
York Times’s “meter” had Trump’s chances in North Carolina at
92%. The needle was also sliding in the president’s direction in Arizona and
Georgia, among others.
And then, suddenly, the counting stopped in
at least five states (or parts of states): Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North
Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin; all but one with a Democratic governor
(coincidence, surely!). When has that ever happened? Well, it
happened in Broward County, Florida, in 2018, when a dodgy Democratic election
official appeared to be intervening, illicitly, on her party’s behalf. The
process only got back underway when the state’s (Republican) governor
intervened and had her removed from the process.
But getting back to last night, some time in
the wee hours, additional ballots were “found” and added to early totals which
had Trump ahead. To no one’s surprise, those votes were
overwhelmingly—literally as much as 100% in some batches—for Biden. According
to Nate Silver, no one’s idea of a Trumpist, one tranche of 23,277 votes that
turned up in Philadelphia were “all for Biden.” Absent some kind of harvesting
or fraud (or both), that’s a logical and statistical impossibility.
Through the night, all such ballots came from
heavily Democratic areas posting unusually, improbably high turnout. 85% in
Milwaukee? A city that turned out at only 61% in 2016, and even with Obama on
the ballot in 2012, at 71%? But 85% for Sleepy Joe? According to one report, seven Milwaukee precincts returned
more presidential votes than they have registered voters. Turnout in Wisconsin
overall is alleged to have been 89.25%, more than five standard deviations for
the state’s mean turnout since 1960—another statistical impossibility.
One might also wonder why this urban Blue
wave materialized only in close states. Milwaukee was way up but not Cleveland? Philly
but not St. Louis? Granted Ohio and Missouri are Red, but their big cities
aren’t.
How It’s
Done
We’ve seen this movie before. This is how
they beat Scott Walker in Wisconsin in 2018, Tom Foley in Connecticut in 2010,
and Norm Coleman in Minnesota in 2008.
Why stop the count? Because that’s the only
way to know how many votes you need to “win.” Sure, you can just brute force
things by backing up a truck full of ballots. But that looks bad. You might
even end up counting more votes than there are registered voters in the state.
Better to eke out a narrow win. As Joseph Kennedy, Sr. allegedly said to his
second son, “I’m not paying for a landslide.”
Speaking of the Kennedys, veteran political
observer Theodore H. White—in their company on election night 1960—explained
how it’s done. In Illinois, the race came down to
downstate (Republican) versus Cook County
(Democratic), and the bosses, holding back totals from key precincts, were
playing out their concealed cards under pressure of publicity as in a giant
game of blackjack….
The AP ticker chattered its keys once more
and reported: “With all downstate precincts now reported in, and only Cook
County precincts unreported, Richard Nixon has surged into the lead by 3,000
votes.”
I was dismayed, for if Nixon really carried
Illinois, the game was all but over. And at this point I was jabbed from dismay
by the outburst of jubilation from young Dick Donahue, who yelped, “He’s got
them! Daley made them go first! He’s still holding back—watch him play his hand
now.” I was baffled, they were elated. But they knew the counting game better
than I, and as if in response to Donahue’s yelp, the ticker, having stuttered
along for several minutes with other results, announced: “With the last
precincts of Cook County now in, Senator Kennedy has won a lead of 8,000 votes
to carry Illinois’s 27 electoral votes.”
Later that evening, Kennedy told his friend Ben Bradlee
of an early call from Daley, when all seemed in doubt. “With a little bit of
luck and the help of a few close friends,” Daley had assured Kennedy before the
AP had pushed out the count, “you’re going to carry Illinois.”
Is that what happened last night? Sure looks
like it. Plus ça change.
To say nothing of other considerations, it’s
hard to believe that an eight-point win in Ohio would be coupled with losses
throughout the rest of the upper Midwest, or that historically deep purple
Florida would go strongly for Trump while Georgia and North Carolina would not.
Are those states really so unrepresentative of the American electorate?
Stop the
Steal
The thing could (but will never) be proved.
Those who ran the operation are also in charge of all the potential
investigating agencies. There’s zero chance they will use any of that power to
uncover their own malfeasance. Think a Biden Justice Department will look into
it?
Expect instead a media typhoon of propaganda
insisting that the results are all legit, that any anomaly you think you see (or
saw) is a “conspiracy theory,” or at any rate innocently explainable by mundane
process details too boring to get into. Twitter is already slapping warnings on
the accounts of those who point out irregularities. How long before they start
outright suspensions?
Will it work? That depends on the president
and his allies and what they do. The odds and the forces arrayed against them
are immense.
What would I have them do? I’m no expert but
the crew at Revolver has some good ideas: (1) challenge the late-night “finds” in
the courts; (2) hold rallies in contested states; (3) urge GOP officials in close
states to expose shenanigans and, if necessary, to refuse to seat Biden
electors in the event of a fake count; (4) mount a campaign to marshal
grassroots public opinion in the president’s favor. Convince the people that if
in fact the election is in the process of being stolen, the president and his
allies are going to fight the steal on their behalf. If middle America wants to
prevent this election from being stolen, it will have to be willing to act—now.
I know they are willing, but they need to hear from the President and his best
surrogates. I’d get Trump on Tucker, tonight, to explain his plan.
But in another sense, the Democrats’ plan
won’t “work.” Even if the steal can be made to stick, half the country won’t
accept it. That is, they’ll accept the reality that power is now in the hands
of a party that took it by fraud. But they won’t believe that the election was
fair or the outcome real. They will believe, or be confirmed in a belief that’s
been brewing for a long time, that the system is rigged, the process is fake,
the ruling class are liars, the government is illegitimate, and that they
themselves are subjects and not citizens—anything but a free people with a say
over its own destiny. If the ruling class can get away with this, they will be able
to get away with anything. And they will know it.
The irony will be that those who, over the
last four years, have bleated the loudest about “our democracy” will have been
most responsible for killing it off.
Michael Anton is a lecturer at Hillsdale College.