It has long been obvious that the Democrats badly want Donald Trump to be the Republican presidential nominee in 2024. This may seem counterintuitive in light of a recent spate of polls showing the former president leading Joe Biden, but this is primarily an artifact of the latter’s weakness.
The most reliable polls show Trump bumping up against a ceiling of about 47 percent of the popular vote, which is consistent with his performance in the last two elections. Moreover, in order to win in the Electoral College, he must recapture several swing states Biden narrowly won in 2020 — and that will be more difficult in 2024 than it was in 2016 due to the metastasis of mail-in voting.The RealClearPolitics average shows Trump leading Biden in general election polls by 3.5 percent. It’s not enough.
The RealClearPolitics average shows Trump leading Biden in general election polls by 3.5 percent. It’s not enough.
In 2020, Biden was able to avoid a 269-269 tie in the Electoral College by a mere 42,918 votes in three states (10,457 in Arizona, 11,779 in Georgia and 20,682 in Wisconsin). Trump won these states in 2016 and is now outpolling Biden in all of them. In a new Bloomberg/Morning Consult poll, for example, “President Joe Biden trails former President Donald Trump in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and — for the first time since tracking began in October — Michigan.” This sounds bad for Biden, but few of these states have viable systems for ensuring the security of mail-in ballots. A new poll conducted for the Heartland Institute by Rasmussen Reports illustrates why this matters:
One in five voters who cast mail-in ballots during the 2020 presidential election admit to participating in at least one kind of voter fraud … 21 percent of mail-in voters admitted they filled out a ballot for a friend or family member; 19 percent of mail-in voters admitted that a friend or family member filled out a ballot on their behalf; 17 percent of mail-in voters admitted they voted in a state where they were no longer a permanent resident; and 17 percent of mail-in voters said they signed a ballot for a friend or family member with or without his or her permission.
None of these votes were legally valid, of course. This is why the Commission on Federal Election Reform, co-chaired by former President Jimmy Carter and former U.S. Secretary of State James A. Baker, presciently warned: “Absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud.” And they have certainly lived up to their potential. About 43 percent of voters cast ballots by mail in 2020, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. That comes to about 66.5 million of 158.4 million total votes reported by the Federal Elections Commission. If 21 percent of those mail-in ballots were illegal, that comes to a whopping 14.3 million votes and there is no reason to believe that the 2024 election results will be any more legitimate. (READ MORE from David Catron: Dictatorship Is as Dictatorship Does)
In fact, the Democratic Governors of several states mentioned in the Bloomberg/Morning Consult poll have vetoed election bills passed by their legislatures to render mail-in ballots more secure. Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs, for example, has vetoed no fewer than 20 such election bills. Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has similarly used her veto to kill election integrity bills. The same dynamic has manifested itself in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. In North Carolina, the Republican legislature had to override Democrat Gov. Roy Cooper’s veto of an election integrity bill. Nevada, meanwhile, adopted universal vote-by-mail. The Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) issued this scathing report on its disastrous debut:
As states expand mail voting, Nevada’s 2022 midterm elections offer an alarming case study of close results as they relate to rejected, unreturned, and undeliverable ballots. Nevada’s U.S. Senate race was ultimately called four days late on a margin of 7,928 votes, which determined party control for the chamber. In 2023, the Secretary of State finally published figures showing that 95,556 ballots were sent to undeliverable or “bad” address and another 8,036 were rejected upon receipt. Another 1.2 million ballots never came back to officials for counting.
Nevada’s Republican governor, Joe Lombardo, introduced legislation last March that would have repealed universal mail-in voting and required voters to show a valid ID to cast a ballot. The Democrat-controlled legislature refused to hold hearings on it and accused Lombardo of “rolling back voting rights.” This illustrates the problem with recent polls showing former President Trump leading Biden in “swing states” like Nevada. He will inevitably suffer the same fate as Adam Laxalt in that state because the Democrats will manipulate the final tally with mail-in votes. Even in genuine swing states like Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, mail-in voting will be deployed against Trump.
As this is being written, the RealClearPolitics average shows Trump leading Biden in general election polls by 3.5 percent. It’s not enough. He will win the Republican nomination. Still, if the Democrats can pad their popular vote tally by 14 million mail-in votes — about 9 percent—they have little chance of reproducing Grover Cleveland’s aberrant election to nonconsecutive presidential terms. It’s not impossible, however. It can be done if Trump recaptures Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan by double-digit percentages of the popular vote in each state. He must reproduce the 2022 victory of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis or at least that of Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp. Trump can’t win a close election in 2024.
via spectator