President Donald Trump points during a campaign rally Wednesday, Oct. 31, 2018, in Estero, Fla. (AP Photo/Chris O’Meara)
In 2016, Donald Trump made some noise about questioning the results of the election if it turned out he wasn’t the winner. Understandably, the media and Democrats went into a frenzy over the remarks.
I say it’s understandable because the process by which presidential elections happen is simply too complex for any large-scale conspiracy to create a big enough fraudulent swing in favor of one person over another. There aren’t enough illegally cast votes to do it, nor are there any means by which Russia or any other actor can hack into every state’s system and make the changes by election night.
Trump was criticized as someone who was undermining democracy with his “irresponsible” statements. Yet, since the 2016 election went in his favor, every Democratic politician in the United States appears to be finding some reason to reject Trump’s election as possible without significant help from outside forces or outdated processes.
Elizabeth Warren is one of the loudest voices currently out there on eliminating the electoral college – a system put in place by the Constitution in order to make sure that the smaller handful of larger cities and states don’t get full control over the entire nation – claiming that it prevents all votes from truly mattering. Warren, like so many other Democrats, believes that those larger, urban areas, should have full say over what happens in the smaller, less populous areas with wholly different values.
The entire point of the House and Senate being what they are today, and the electoral college as a result, was to balance the power between the more populous urban areas and the smaller, less populous rural areas. So the rural areas have equal say, states that largely fall into that category have an equal number of Senators. So the urban areas’ population gets equal say, they have far more Representatives.
It is a balance that prevents the process from being too one-sided. It isn’t on the rural areas to convince the urban, but the urban to recognize that there has to be a balance for the nation to survive.
But Warren and other Democrats don’t want to accept that their side completely blew it. Hillary Clinton lost the Rust Belt because she focused almost exclusively on the urban and elite, ignoring the rural and blue collar. There was this sense that all others would have to jump on the elites’ train rather than the elites having to take the time to understand those they deem below them.
The Democrats won’t accept that they lost in 2016. In fact, it has gotten so bad that any Democrat who loses a close race at any level seems to want to jump to fraud as the reason they can’t win. So, tell me again how it’s Trump who is undermining Democracy.
Take Georgia gubernatorial candidate – and probable U.S. Senate candidate (I don’t see her jumping in the 2020 presidential race) – Stacey Abrams at a rally yesterday.
Says Abrams: “I don’t concede that I lost. I acknowledge that I’m not the governor of Georgia. That’s made plain every day I don’t walk into the Governor’s Mansion.” #gapol
— Greg Bluestein (@bluestein) March 19, 2019
To date, Abrams has never conceded the race. She has never acknowledged that she lost. Her campaign liked to point the blame at now-governor Brian Kemp, who was Secretary of State at the time. They all but accused him of cheating, and several stories that came out from Georgia were written by national media to imply it. But, several of the “scandals” involving precincts and ballots were the result of Democrats’ actions and not Kemp’s.
Instead, she continues to take the outrage and turn it into a perpetual campaign point… despite saying she’s not trying to make this about her.
On her frame of mind after the vote: “I could fight just to fight, but the minute it becomes about me, it becomes a vanity project. … That can’t be the reason you do things. And I spent that 10 day period plotting. Revenge can be very cathartic.” #gapol
— Greg Bluestein (@bluestein) March 19, 2019
But we know it is. She is teasing a presidential run in interviews and on social media. If she did, she becomes the one-thousandth Democrat to hop in the race at this point. She can’t even win her own state, but somehow believes she can win a national election against bigger names and better candidates.
Abrams will not admit that the moment her campaign turned to the black voters in Georgia and said “They are stealing your vote!”, they became the ones who most likely (and unintentionally) suppressed the vote. It took away the hope she had spent the whole campaign building. Her campaign had done very well in getting new voters registered and getting people excited and ready to vote. However, they latched onto the national stories about precinct closures and ballot issues (the media in Georgia was far more responsible than the national media in not casting blame on Kemp) and killed a lot of that hope right at the end.
So she won’t concede, even now, months later. She is dead set on reminding people that Kemp is, in her eyes, not a legitimate governor, and Democrats are dead set on reminding people that Trump, in their eyes, is not a legitimate president.
Somehow, it is all the fault of Republicans and their cheating ways. There is no evidence to support their claims, but they make the claims nonetheless to a largely uncritical national media and they get national sympathy.
Meanwhile, the votes that really do matter and the systems that were put into place to make sure that our votes mattered, are under constant assault by a party that will not accept that they lost.
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