Increasingly, MAGA Republicans associated with Trump are convinced he is going to lose the election. But they have a backup plan to put him in the White House no matter what. And that plan even has a second backup plan of its own.
The three states most likely to swing the election in the Electoral College this year are Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. And, just by coincidence of course, Republicans in those states recently passed laws guaranteeing Election Day chaos around their vote counting this November 5.
Trump and the GOP know there’s little chance he’s going to win the national popular vote; the last Republican initially elected to the White House with a majority of America’s voters was George H.W. Bush in 1988. Republicans just aren’t that popular with the American people.
Poppy Bush’s son George lost in 2000 by a half-million votes but got five Republicans on the Supreme Court (including two appointed by Daddy) to block the recount in Florida that would have shown that Al Gore won the state and thus that year’s election.
Like Bush, Trump lost the election in 2016 by three million votes. But in five swing states—focused on by Vladimir Putin and Jill Stein—he was able to eke out a tiny Electoral College win. And then everybody forgot he had lost by three million votes. Tip your hat to our media.
This year, Republicans are again counting on the Electoral College (and Jill Stein, Putin, and Elon Musk) as their first line of defense, focusing billions of dollars on a handful of swing states with ads that range from deceptive to outright lies. It’s all backed up by a massive Russian effort on social media.
If it looks like that’s going to fail, however, their primary Plan B is to replicate their 2000 strategy of messing with the vote at the local level and using the chaos from that to get the election in front of their Republican friends in the Supreme Court. To that end, they’re preparing a variety of lawsuits (check out Marc Elias’s site, Democracy Docket) in swing states.
As Joyce Vance noted........