The cable news talking heads seem obsessed with Joe Biden’s “significant” lead over Donald Trump in the national polls – as if this lead signifies a certain coming Biden victory in the presidential election.
Also feeding the narrative that Biden is likely to win are stories and film clips of millions of Americans standing in long lines to vote early in record numbers.
This is dangerously pacifying. Nearly two and a half centuries since its founding, the United States, self-described homeland and headquarters of democracy, does not select its top elected official, the president, on the basis of a national popular vote. The Electoral College, devised by slave-owning constitutional framers for whom democracy was the ultimate nightmare, restricts the presidential election to the contest for all-or-nothing Elector slates in a relatively small number of states. And in these states, the horse race between Biden and Trump is much closer than it is in on the national scale. It seems likely that Trump will receive a significant amount of hidden white support, not captured by pollsters.
Overall, the Electoral College leans well to the right, over-representing the country’s most reactionary, white and rural regions so extremely that Biden cannot win the final tally without beating Trump by far more than a simple majority of the national popular vote.
But that’s not all. People telling pollsters how they are going to vote is one thing. Getting votes adequately taken and fairly counted is another thing altogether.
Reflecting their captivity to the Republifascist party, many of the contested states practice partisan and racist voter suppression (both legal and extra-legal) in ways that hurt Biden’s chances. The violence promoting Republifascist president’s campaign has added physical intimidation to the mix in and around battleground state cities and towns.
At the same time and far worse, the Trump administration and GOP have made it crystal clear that they will immediately attack the legitimacy of the record-setting number of mail-in ballots that are required by the very pandemic that Trump has multiplied across the nation. Those mail-in ballots are going to lean heavily Democratic since Democrats take the coronavirus more seriously than do Republicans. With many right-wing state and federal courts on their side all the way up to the now 6-3 right-wing US Supreme Court, Trump’s attorney general William Barr and the GOP’s army of (anti-)election lawyers will move to stop the counting of mail-in ballots, thereby throwing Trump the election in the states that matter and thus in the nation.
Three members of the right-wing Trump court – Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, and now Coney Barrett – were Bush lawyers in the high court’s infamous Bush v. Gore decision. That ruling cancelled a re-count of ballots in a single state, Florida, throwing the 2000 election to the right-wing monster George W Bush.
Excerpted: ‘Make a Plan to Resist’
Counterpunch.org
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