Note: I wrote this post yesterday; I'm posting it early on Election Day.
Some random thoughts on the day before the election:
I published my first post about the 2020 election back on June 17, 2017, which was 1,234 days before election day. (Read it here. To read my first post about the 2024 election, click here.) Now here we are with just one day to go, and Jonathan Bernstein says tomorrow won't be a normal election day:
I’ve written a lot of items about how much I love Election Day and the affirmation of democracy that it represents. But this time around I have to agree with Larry Sabato: “Never in my 60 years around politics have I encountered this many people so tense, so full of dread and foreboding about an election — and what comes afterward. Of course, we’ve never before had a president undermining confidence and predicting fraud & mayhem — if he doesn’t win.”
That was before President Donald Trump applauded a group of supporters who attacked one of Joe Biden’s campaign buses; before it was reported that Trump plans to claim victory well before the votes are counted; before Trump’s staffers went on the Sunday shows and talked about their plans to stop states from counting legitimate ballots after Election Day; before the president talked about unleashing a blizzard of lawsuits as soon as the polls close; before he started fantasizing in public about assaulting Biden; and before Trump supporters shut down highways as part of ... a protest? A threat? It wasn’t quite clear.
In other words: Before Sunday. Of course, Trump has been stirring up chaos around the election for months. It’s possible that this is all part of a systematic plan to disenfranchise Biden voters. More likely it’s just the way this president operates, without any particular goal in mind. Claiming that he’s being cheated is second nature to Trump, the way most presidents automatically pledge loyalty to the entire nation and its laws and democratic customs.
It’s worth keeping in mind that Trump’s bluster is generally worse than his follow-up, and that the biggest danger in what he says is often the reaction (or overreaction) that it causes. So everyone should listen to Richard H. Pildes and Rick Hasen, who remind us “not to undermine our elections by giving excessive play to typical, Election Day problems or hastily spreading viral posts before the facts are verified.” While it’s possible that there will be serious disruptions this year, things could also go as smoothly as ever — which means that there will be plenty of minor glitches. As Pildes and Hasen point out, it’s critical that the news media separate the important from the trivial, and that everyone avoid spreading stories over social media without being sure that they’re true.
But we’ve already reached the point where it’s hard to treat this Election Day as the celebration of democracy it normally is. Instead, folks like me need to remind everyone that they shouldn’t panic about rumors. That it’s absolutely normal for the count to take days, and that no one has won any state until all the votes are counted. That voter fraud remains extremely rare. That, fair or not, it’s the electoral vote, and not the raw total vote, that determines the outcome in presidential elections. That accuracy, not speed, is the most important goal of tabulating the vote. That every legitimate vote needs to be counted.
And so all sensible American citizens are reduced to reciting the election administrator’s prayer — please let the winner win in a landslide — instead of rejoicing in the renewal of the republic. And yes, the fault lies mainly with Donald Trump. (This is the column in its entirety.)
270 is the magic number right now, the number of electoral votes needed to be elected president. As I've been thinking about that, and our weird "the popular vote doesn't pick the winner" system, I found myself wondering how many electoral votes recent presidents have gotten. Out of curiosity, and to distract myself, I did a little googling.
I looked at the last 15 elections, from Kennedy's win in 1960 to Donald's win four years ago. The results range from George W. Bush winning by 1 in 2000 (seriously, he got 271 votes) to Ronald Reagan's landslide reelection in 1984 with 525 electoral votes.
Here's the full list, from lowest to highest:
271 Bush (43), 2000
286 Bush (43), 2004
297 Carter, 1976
301 Nixon, 1968
303 Kennedy, 1960
304 Trump, 2016
332 Obama, 2012
365 Obama, 2008
370 Clinton, 1992
379 Clinton, 1996
426 Bush (41), 1988
486 Johnson, 1964
489 Reagan, 1980
520 Nixon, 1972
525 Reagan, 1984
Why start with 1960? The number of total Electoral College votes was increased from 531 to 538 for the 1960 election after Alaska and Hawaii became states in the late 1950s. It's been 538 ever since.
To do a little presidential sorting, four of these presidents served two complete terms: Reagan, Clinton, Bush 43 and Obama.
Two served one full and one partial term: Lyndon Johnson, who served the final 14 months of Kennedy's term then was elected to a full term in 1964, and Richard Nixon, who was elected twice but resigned due to the Watergate scandal halfway through his second term.
Two presidents served one full term then lost their reelection bids, Jimmy Carter and George H. W. Bush.
Finally, two served less than one term: Kennedy because he was assassinated and Gerald Ford, who served out the second half of Nixon's second term then lost to Jimmy Carter in 1976.
And consider this interesting historic tidbit: In six of the seven previous elections (1992 through 2016,) the Democratic candidate has won the popular vote. George W. Bush, in 2004, was the only Republican in that period to win both the Electoral College and the popular vote.
Which of these categories will Donald end up in? My fervent prayer is that he'll be a one-term president, having gone down in a landslide ignominious defeat. Another option, that's been floating around since the beginning of his presidency, is that Donald might not serve a full term, for one reason or another. The Mueller Report. The impeachment. Donald's poor health. The various crimes he's committed throughout his life and his presidency. Or maybe, Donald would just get tired of it all, pack up his toys and go home.
In the last few months, as polls appear to predict a Trump loss, I've seen speculation that if he loses, Donald would resign before Inauguration Day, with the sole purpose of putting Mike Pence in position to issue a presidential pardon. And every time, I want to respond that I don't think a Pence pardon is a given, in fact, I think it's unlikely. I first wrote abut this about halfway through Donald's term, when many of us were hoping the Mueller Report would be strong enough to force Donald out of office. I pondered what Mike Pence might do if he were elevated to the presidency:
I know I've wandered into the weeds a bit in this post, but there's one more thing on my mind as I ponder Mike Pence's future. A month after Gerald Ford became president he issued an unconditional pardon of Richard Nixon. He did it partly out of compassion for Nixon and his family, partly because he believed that having to resign the presidency counted as a serious punishment, meaning that Nixon didn't "get off scot-free," and partly so he (Ford) and the country could move on from Watergate.
Would Pence follow Ford's lead and pardon Donald, if he was in a position to do so? Ford's pardon of Nixon was volcanically unpopular and the conventional wisdom is that it played a significant part in Ford's loss to Jimmy Carter in 1976. I think it's accurate to say that Ford didn't anticipate how unpopular the Nixon pardon would be. (In his memoir, Ford wrote that he was surprised at how little compassion American voters felt for Richard Nixon after he resigned. I wonder how much compassion Americans would feel for Donald Trump.) President Ford had no historic precedent to look to for guidance but Pence would have one. Based on Ford's experience, my best guess right now is that even if Pence wanted to pardon Donald, he wouldn't do it before the 2020 election. Too risky.
In our "what if" scenario, Donald's best shot at a pardon would probably be a Pence loss in 2020. Soon-to-be former President Pence could issue the pardon on Inauguration Day, 2021, right before he walks out the door of the White House for the last time, which is when outgoing presidents traditionally issue pardons that are expected to be controversial or unpopular. Would he? Pence, who would be 61 at the time, presumably would be looking forward to enjoying the cushy life of a former president. (He could also, of course, be thinking about running again in 2024.) Would he be willing to risk his popularity, and possibly some of his future income from paid speeches and a memoir, by taking the heat for letting Donald off the hook? There's no way to know right now but I'd say it's not a given. (Read the entire post
here.)
Now writing at Politico, Garrett M. Graff ponders a Trump pardon, from himself to himself, or by resigning with the expectation of a pardon from President Pence:
The biggest open question would be if Trump could engineer a way to ensure that he himself isn’t charged: The Mueller Report accepted that a president has federal legal immunity while in office, but currently there’s nothing to stop a federal prosecutor from picking up post-January 20 where Mueller left off. Trump has previously asserted he has the “absolute right to PARDON myself,” but legal experts doubt whether a president could successfully “self-pardon,” and the legal battle over such an attempt would unfold only after criminal charges were brought against the former president and he sought to offer as a defense the fact that he’d pardoned himself.
The cleanest — and legally bulletproof — way for Trump to escape any further federal investigation post-presidency would be for him to resign early, even just minutes before noon on January 20, and have a newly sworn-in President Mike Pence grant him a full and complete pardon. However, such a move would seem to be un-Trump — he seems unlikely to be willing to leave the presidency a minute early — and would be incredibly dicey politically for Pence, who clearly has own presidential ambitions for 2024.
Politically dicey indeed. Consider:
"Mike Pence was elevated to a historically short lame duck presidency in exchange for granting a presidential pardon to his criminal predecessor."
That would be the first line of Pence's obituary, as the saying goes, not to mention the tagline of every political ad the Democrats run against him, from the day of the pardon to the end of time. Mike Pence might want to pardon Donald or feel he owes it to him, but in the end I believe, if nothing else, it would be a very hard decision.
The New York Times has posted a new story titled "As Election Day Arrives, Trump Shifts Between Combativeness and Grievance:
President Trump arrives at Election Day on Tuesday toggling between confidence and exasperation, bravado and grievance, and marinating in frustration that he is trailing Joseph R. Biden Jr., whom he considers an unworthy opponent.
“Man, it’s going to be embarrassing if I lose to this guy,” Mr. Trump has told advisers, a lament he has aired publicly as well. But in the off-camera version, Mr. Trump frequently exclaims, “This guy!” in reference to Mr. Biden, with a salty adjective separating the words.
Trailing in most polls, Mr. Trump has careened through a marathon series of rallies in the last week, trying to tear down Mr. Biden and energize his supporters, but also fixated on crowd size and targeting perceived enemies like the news media and Dr. Anthony Fauci, the federal government’s infectious disease expert whom he suggested on Sunday he might try to dismiss after the election.
At every turn, the president has railed that the voting system is rigged against him and has threatened to sue when the election is over, in an obvious bid to undermine an electoral process strained by the coronavirus pandemic. It is not clear, however, precisely what legal instruments Mr. Trump believes he has at his disposal.
The president, his associates say, has drawn encouragement from his larger audiences and from a stream of relatively upbeat polling information that advisers have curated for him, typically filtering out the bleakest numbers.
On a trip to Florida last week, several aides told the president that winning the Electoral College was a certainty, a prognosis not supported by Republican or Democratic polling, according to people familiar with the conversation. And Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, has responded with chipper enthusiasm when Mr. Trump has raised the idea of making a late bid for solidly Democratic states like New Mexico, an option other aides have told the president is flatly unrealistic.
His mad dash to the finish is a distillation of his four tumultuous years in office, a mix of resentment, combativeness and a penchant for viewing events through a prism all his own — and perhaps the hope that everything will work out for him in the end, the way it did four years ago when he surprised himself, his advisers and the world by winning the White House.
But by enclosing himself in the thin bubble of his own worldview, Mr. Trump may have further severed himself from the political realities of a country in crisis. And that, in turn, has helped enable Mr. Trump to wage a campaign offering no central message, no clear agenda for a second term and no answer to the woes of the pandemic.
Most people in the president’s inner circle share his optimism about the outcome of the race, even as they fight exhaustion and the president’s whipsawing moods, interviews with more than a dozen aides and allies showed. But some advisers acknowledge that it would require several factors to fall into place. They spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal deliberations.
Republican lawmakers have offered less rosy assessments of his prospects, and in private some Trump advisers do not argue the point. One high-ranking Republican member of Congress vented to Mr. Meadows last month that if Mr. Trump “is trying to lose the election I can’t think of anything I’d tell him to do differently,” the lawmaker recalled, noting that the aide only nodded his head in acknowledgment. “They just think they can’t do anything about it.”
Beyond the capital, though, some Republicans insist that Mr. Trump can again defy the odds, and that a devoted base will fuel a traditional G.O.P. surge in Election Day voters.
Joe Gruters, the chairman of the Republican Party of Florida who appeared with Mr. Trump in Tampa last week, described the president as “a lock” in the state.
“You can take it to the bank and cash the check,” Mr. Gruters said, adding of the Democrats: “We’re crushing them on the ground. That’s what’s going to make the difference.”
Seldom far from Mr. Trump’s thoughts, however, is the possibility of defeat — and the potential consequences of being ejected from the White House.
In unguarded moments, Mr. Trump has for weeks told advisers that he expects to face intensifying scrutiny from prosecutors if he loses. He is concerned not only about existing investigations in New York, but the potential for new federal probes as well, according to people who have spoken with him.
While Mr. Trump has not aired those worries in the open, he has railed against the democratic process, raising baseless doubts about the integrity of the vote and suggesting ways of undermining an election that appeared to be going against him, including interference by the Supreme Court.
He has also mused about prematurely declaring victory Tuesday night, but if there’s any organized plan to do so his top lieutenants are not conveying it to their allies. One congressional strategist said that he spoke to Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, on Sunday and that Mr. Kushner not only didn’t ask for buy-in from Capitol Hill Republicans for such a plan but also didn’t mention the prospect at all.
Mr. Trump’s advisers do continue to believe he has a realistic chance of besting Mr. Biden, but they concede it would take a last-minute breakthrough in one of the Great Lakes states where he is currently trailing, as well as a hold-the-line performance across the South and Southwest. Some Republicans, however, are already bracing for losses or close calls in a series of Sun Belt states — and expressing alarm that Mr. Trump may have turned some of them prematurely blue in the same fashion that Barack Obama’s 2008 landslide made Virginia and Colorado Democratic bulwarks.
“Arizona and Georgia are a big deal,” said Nick Everhart, a Republican strategist. “That’s a shift people thought would come but once they’re gone they’re hard to reel back.”
Even Mr. Trump’s advisers allow that if he wins in the Electoral College, it is likely he will lose the popular vote, potentially by an even wider margin than he did in 2016.
The president himself has done little to strengthen his chances in the final days of the race. On Friday, Mr. Trump used a rally in Michigan to float a baseless theory that doctors are classifying patients’ deaths as related to the coronavirus in order to make more money, drawing fierce condemnation from medical groups, as well as Mr. Biden and Mr. Obama.
And on Saturday, in Pennsylvania at the site where George Washington mapped out his Delaware crossing during the revolution, aides wrote out a sober speech for the president to deliver. Midway through, he seemed to get bored and began to riff about the size of Mr. Biden’s sunglasses.
He has frequently used his speeches to deliver long diatribes against Mr. Biden and his son, Hunter Biden, even though some Trump advisers believe the whole subject is a sideshow in the midst of a public-health disaster. But Trump associates say he simply enjoys attacking the Biden family.
Senator Kevin Cramer, Republican from North Dakota, said that he believed Mr. Trump did not let the possibility of losing interfere with his approach.
“He certainly isn’t going to buy into anybody’s argument that’s all over or that he’s lost,” Mr. Cramer said.
What confounds some Republicans is how little Mr. Trump is discussing last month’s confirmation of Justice Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court; some G.O.P. senators have made that achievement a centerpiece of their campaigns.
Campaigning in Kentucky this weekend in pursuit of his seventh term, Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, repeatedly trumpeted Justice Barrett and the other two Trump-nominated judges on the high court while not mentioning Mr. Biden’s name once.
Though Mr. Trump has reconstituted parts of his 2016 inner circle in the waning days of the race, the operation lacks a figure who is both willing and able to force the president to stick to a script. Four years ago, Mr. Trump viewed the campaign’s top official, Stephen K. Bannon, as something of a peer— one who was able to focus the candidate. These days, Mr. Trump often rages to associates and aides that he believes they are failing him.
There was a fleeting effort to bring in a new voice as recently as three weeks before the election: Some Trump advisers floated the idea of recruiting Karl Rove, the former George W. Bush adviser, who has been involved in a super PAC supporting Mr. Trump, or someone like him.
But by the time that idea was discussed the election was already less than a month away. And advisers have been consumed by a significant cash crunch, one exacerbated by tentative plans for virtual fund-raisers that never materialized in part because of Mr. Trump’s own lack of interest in such events.
Some Republicans appear to be looking past the end of the Trump era, whether that comes on Tuesday night or in another few years.
Several ambitious young Republicans have recently made visits to the early primary states of Iowa and New Hampshire, including Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota. Ms. Noem also quietly visited Mr. Trump at Mar-a-Lago, which may become another stop on the G.O.P. primary circuit should Mr. Trump lose. Another, Senator Rick Scott of Florida, is maneuvering to take over the National Republican Senatorial Committee, an effort seen by other Republicans as a step toward running for president.
There is even quiet lobbying underway for the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee, a body helmed for four years by Ronna McDaniel, who is well-liked within the committee but has never become one of the people closest to the president.
Several Trump loyalists are seen as potential successors in that job, including Mr. Bossie, who is an R.N.C. member from Maryland, as well as the Ohio Republican Party chairwoman, Jane Timken, whom the president effectively installed in her post. Mr. Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. and his girlfriend, the conservative pundit Kimberly Guilfoyle, have both been discussed as possible chair, though their aides said they are not interested in the job.
Mr. Gruters said he was not aware of any efforts by the president’s son to pursue the R.N.C. job, and praised Ms. McDaniel. But Mr. Gruters said a Trump scion could ascend to the job if she were to step down.
“Ronna has really done well and she certainly deserves the nod if she decides to continue on,” Mr. Gruters said. “Don Jr. obviously would be credible for anything he wanted to go after. He has a solid command of the base. He has the ability to raise a lot of money and would be another superstar for the party.” (This is the article in its entirety.)
Update on Monday, November 9: The election was finally called Saturday morning and, Praise God, Donald will be a one-term president. Now, in an article at the Washington Post titled "Trump can still make it very hard for the FBI to investigate him next year," Asha Rangappa mentions the possibility of a Trump resignation followed by a pardon from President Pence, but unlike Graff, above, she neglects to consider any political consequences for Pence:
The strongest, and broadest, immunity from federal prosecution for Trump would come from a presidential pardon. President Gerald Ford offered Richard Nixon a blanket pardon for any crimes committed while in office, and President George H.W. Bush — with help from Barr, then also the attorney general — pardoned six people involved in the Iran-contra affair in 1992, stopping two ongoing prosecutions dating back to the Reagan administration dead in their tracks. However, since President-elect Biden has categorically stated that he will not pardon Trump, Trump would have to engineer that during the transition.
He has two options. First, he could try to pardon himself. This is a risky move, as whether a self-pardon would be constitutionally valid is an unsettled legal question because no previous president has tried it. Most legal scholars agree that it’s not permissible, though, and if a Trump pardon of himself were later challenged and invalidated, he would be back to square one. Alternatively, Trump could resign at some point before his term ends at noon on Jan. 20, 2021, leaving Vice President Pence to assume the presidency, however briefly — giving him the plenary power to pardon Trump. Thanks to the precedent that Ford set with Nixon, such a pardon, which Pence could also extend to members of Trump’s family, would probably be constitutionally secure if it covered uncharged crimes committed while Trump was in office. (Read the entire column here.)
Update #2: It's Tuesday, November 24 and I've mostly been away from the blog since the election. I just read this at CNN.com, and it goes further in discussing political consequences for Mike Pence if he pardoned Donald:
[Trump] could, like Nixon, resign and hand power in his final days to Vice President Mike Pence, who could pardon him.
He could even temporarily hand Pence power under the 25th Amendment and let Pence, as acting president, pardon him.
"The problem is that's fraught with peril politically for Mike Pence, because ultimately he would be stepping into a political timebomb," said Williams, who pointed out Pence very clearly may want to run for president on his own.
It could also open Pence up to allegations of bribery if he and Trump had a pardon agreement in place. Pence would be receiving something of value -- the presidency, even for a short time -- in exchange for an official act. (Read the entire article here.)
