There’s a downside to cribbing your political strategy from Donald Trump—namely, Donald Trump doesn’t know what he’s talking about on any subject, ever. (Unless, of course, you want to know which 25 McDonald’s Dollar Menu items pair best with cutting off your gravely ill infant nephew’s health insurance.)
Back in 2020, when Donald Trump was plotting to steal the presidential election, he sought to undermine faith in mail-in ballots. Because after he lost—an outcome that seemed all but certain, even to addlebrained mediocrities like Donald Trump—he’d need some way to rouse his flying monkeys into action. Oh, and gee, it “worked”! He managed to get people killed with his lies. Good show, Shitler!
Well now, after two election cycles in which Republicans’ new, Trump-inspired disdain for mail-in voting likely cost them dearly at the ballot box, some in the GOP are reconsidering the wisdom of following Donald Trump’s advice on anything more complicated than a Denny’s kids’ placemat.
RELATED STORY: Republicans may finally be realizing baseless fraud claims likely depressed their 2022 turnout
Politico:
Gee, you think? Telling your voters not to bank votes early while relying on a small window of time during which anything from a thunderstorm to a family emergency to a shitty anti-abortion candidate who (allegedly) pays for abortions could dissuade them from showing up? Not sustainable, folks.
But getting GOP voters to embrace mail-in ballots again could be a tough sell. After all, Republicans across the country have spent more than two years smearing mail-in voting as potentially rife with fraud. And it’s been especially bad in Pennsylvania. After Republicans overwhelmingly backed a 2019 law that legalized no-excuse mail-in voting, they did an abrupt about-face after Trump started slandering the method. In fact, Doug Mastriano, the 2022 GOP nominee for Pennsylvania governor, promised to end no-excuse mail-in voting if he were elected. Which, to be clear, he wasn’t.
That appears to have been a mistake, and the numbers bear that out. For instance, during the midterms, Pennsylvania’s winning gubernatorial candidate, Josh Shapiro, received more than 1 million mail-in votes, while Mastriano won just 187,000. Meanwhile, Sen.-elect John Fetterman got 960,000 mail votes to Mehmet Oz’s 234,000.
As Rep. Guy Reschenthaler, a Republican from Pennsylvania, noted, “Democrats transformed the election landscape with their mail-in ballot schemes in many states—and Republicans must respond by decisively winning this battle.”
Uh-huh. Well, good luck with that, because the damage appears to be done.
For instance, a recent guest on Steve Bannon’s War Room tried to talk some sense into Bannon’s listeners—which, granted, is a little like opening a cannabis dispensary in Mitt Romney’s basement. But hey, he’s doing what he can.
Republican strategist Athan Koutsiouroumbas not only told Bannon that there was no mail-in election fraud in Delaware County, Pennsylvania (and presumably nowhere else in Pennsylvania), but that such fraud was nearly impossible to pull off, and that Republicans have put themselves at a disadvantage by eschewing mail-in voting.
“The first thing you want to do is try to establish, was there any fraud? Steve, there is no evidence that I’ve seen in Delaware County,” said Koutsiouroumbas. “In order to commit mail-in ballot fraud, you can do it in two places. No. 1 is that when you apply to vote by mail, you have to provide either your Social Security or driver’s license number. Now, we don’t have voter ID when you walk into a poll in Pennsylvania, but you need voter ID to vote by mail. So you need someone that builds a list, somehow steals a whole bunch of driver’s license numbers, submits an application without a voter’s knowledge, and then completes them. That didn’t happen.
“The second way you can have fraud is if there’s some type of conspiracy in a courthouse to not count ballots. I’ve seen no evidence of that in Delaware County. Ultimately, what the Democrats did is exactly what Republicans used to do prior to the pandemic. We used to have coordinated campaigns to get Republicans to vote by mail. The way we did that is we mailed everybody an application and we would chase it with a phone call.”
Okay, that election analysis is suspiciously lacking in pillow ads. Not sure I can trust it. Oh, and neither can Bannon’s minions!
As Raw Story pointed out, Bannon immediately noticed that his listeners were taken aback at the explosive no-fraud claims, and he appeared to realize that all of this non-conspiracy thinking was going to be difficult for his audience to digest.
So there’s just one more way the GOP allowed Donald Trump to royally screw them. It’s like they all chose to get on the bus with the driver who promised to get them from New York to Los Angeles in 12 hours, without ever considering what would happen when he crashed.
And now the GOP is left with a smoldering crater where a viable political movement used to be—thanks, in no small part, to their mandarin messiah. And man oh man, am I ever here for it.
Sen. Raphael Warnock is still defending his Georgia seat, and the Dec. 6 runoff is coming fast. If you can—and if you aren’t too tired from saving America on Nov. 8—please rush a donation to Team Warnock now! You can also write letters to Georgia voters with Vote Forward! Let’s finish up strong!
Check out Aldous J. Pennyfarthing’s four-volume Trump-trashing compendium, including the finale, Goodbye, Asshat: 101 Farewell Letters to Donald Trump, at this link. Or, if you prefer a test drive, you can download the epilogue to Goodbye, Asshat for the low, low price of FREE.
Back in 2020, when Donald Trump was plotting to steal the presidential election, he sought to undermine faith in mail-in ballots. Because after he lost—an outcome that seemed all but certain, even to addlebrained mediocrities like Donald Trump—he’d need some way to rouse his flying monkeys into action. Oh, and gee, it “worked”! He managed to get people killed with his lies. Good show, Shitler!
Well now, after two election cycles in which Republicans’ new, Trump-inspired disdain for mail-in voting likely cost them dearly at the ballot box, some in the GOP are reconsidering the wisdom of following Donald Trump’s advice on anything more complicated than a Denny’s kids’ placemat.
RELATED STORY: Republicans may finally be realizing baseless fraud claims likely depressed their 2022 turnout
Politico:
Gee, you think? Telling your voters not to bank votes early while relying on a small window of time during which anything from a thunderstorm to a family emergency to a shitty anti-abortion candidate who (allegedly) pays for abortions could dissuade them from showing up? Not sustainable, folks.
But getting GOP voters to embrace mail-in ballots again could be a tough sell. After all, Republicans across the country have spent more than two years smearing mail-in voting as potentially rife with fraud. And it’s been especially bad in Pennsylvania. After Republicans overwhelmingly backed a 2019 law that legalized no-excuse mail-in voting, they did an abrupt about-face after Trump started slandering the method. In fact, Doug Mastriano, the 2022 GOP nominee for Pennsylvania governor, promised to end no-excuse mail-in voting if he were elected. Which, to be clear, he wasn’t.
That appears to have been a mistake, and the numbers bear that out. For instance, during the midterms, Pennsylvania’s winning gubernatorial candidate, Josh Shapiro, received more than 1 million mail-in votes, while Mastriano won just 187,000. Meanwhile, Sen.-elect John Fetterman got 960,000 mail votes to Mehmet Oz’s 234,000.
As Rep. Guy Reschenthaler, a Republican from Pennsylvania, noted, “Democrats transformed the election landscape with their mail-in ballot schemes in many states—and Republicans must respond by decisively winning this battle.”
Uh-huh. Well, good luck with that, because the damage appears to be done.
For instance, a recent guest on Steve Bannon’s War Room tried to talk some sense into Bannon’s listeners—which, granted, is a little like opening a cannabis dispensary in Mitt Romney’s basement. But hey, he’s doing what he can.
Republican strategist Athan Koutsiouroumbas not only told Bannon that there was no mail-in election fraud in Delaware County, Pennsylvania (and presumably nowhere else in Pennsylvania), but that such fraud was nearly impossible to pull off, and that Republicans have put themselves at a disadvantage by eschewing mail-in voting.
“The first thing you want to do is try to establish, was there any fraud? Steve, there is no evidence that I’ve seen in Delaware County,” said Koutsiouroumbas. “In order to commit mail-in ballot fraud, you can do it in two places. No. 1 is that when you apply to vote by mail, you have to provide either your Social Security or driver’s license number. Now, we don’t have voter ID when you walk into a poll in Pennsylvania, but you need voter ID to vote by mail. So you need someone that builds a list, somehow steals a whole bunch of driver’s license numbers, submits an application without a voter’s knowledge, and then completes them. That didn’t happen.
“The second way you can have fraud is if there’s some type of conspiracy in a courthouse to not count ballots. I’ve seen no evidence of that in Delaware County. Ultimately, what the Democrats did is exactly what Republicans used to do prior to the pandemic. We used to have coordinated campaigns to get Republicans to vote by mail. The way we did that is we mailed everybody an application and we would chase it with a phone call.”
Okay, that election analysis is suspiciously lacking in pillow ads. Not sure I can trust it. Oh, and neither can Bannon’s minions!
As Raw Story pointed out, Bannon immediately noticed that his listeners were taken aback at the explosive no-fraud claims, and he appeared to realize that all of this non-conspiracy thinking was going to be difficult for his audience to digest.
So there’s just one more way the GOP allowed Donald Trump to royally screw them. It’s like they all chose to get on the bus with the driver who promised to get them from New York to Los Angeles in 12 hours, without ever considering what would happen when he crashed.
And now the GOP is left with a smoldering crater where a viable political movement used to be—thanks, in no small part, to their mandarin messiah. And man oh man, am I ever here for it.
Sen. Raphael Warnock is still defending his Georgia seat, and the Dec. 6 runoff is coming fast. If you can—and if you aren’t too tired from saving America on Nov. 8—please rush a donation to Team Warnock now! You can also write letters to Georgia voters with Vote Forward! Let’s finish up strong!
Check out Aldous J. Pennyfarthing’s four-volume Trump-trashing compendium, including the finale, Goodbye, Asshat: 101 Farewell Letters to Donald Trump, at this link. Or, if you prefer a test drive, you can download the epilogue to Goodbye, Asshat for the low, low price of FREE.