by Capt. Seth Keshel
In ten days, if I’m still above ground, I will stroll into my local polling station and cast my ballot for the Trump-Vance ticket and all down ballot races and measures on Election Day. I believe fundamentally that it is the soundest, most secure way to vote, and most importantly, is the fulfillment of practicing what I preach. Even though things are looking great right now, I don’t think freedom lovers can win every election from now until the end of time with so many open ended ways to control and manipulate election outcomes. If America is to turn the page on unreliable and perhaps fatally flawed elections, we must return to single day voting and a host of other important reforms. Trump himself knows this and has pondered how to get it done in the event he returns to the White House for another administration.
It has been my advice for more than three years to vote on Election Day, but I’ve made peace for quite some time that I am just a voice calling out in the wilderness, and if Donald Trump calls for early voting, then by God, there will be throngs of early voters. That is why I wrote not quite two weeks ago about ensuring you are voting early only on your own volition, and not because you are afraid of the government stripping you of your right and conscience to vote when and how you please in accordance with the law – that is, if you would prefer to vote on Election Day but are afraid to take the risk.
If and when Donald Trump wins the Presidency back, I will give praise where praise is due for innovation and strategic adjustments. If we have carried the field thanks to an increase in turning out low propensity voters by mail and early voting, and still flood the zone with in-person voting on Election Day, I will celebrate for several days, spike the football, feel good about how things turned out, and get right back to work making sure we do all we can to reform elections where there is still light left in the day. Let all readers understand that I do not think an impending Trump victory has as much to do with math and ballot counts as it does with masterful command of the narrative.
Much of what happens between my ears is like a cosmic battle between Rainman, Interstellar, 21, and A Beautiful Mind, as if they were all playing on the same screen and in competition with one another; I have found it easy to catch myself in linear, inflexible thinking. If you’ve thought of a doom scenario, I have too. Yes, I understand that Trump carrying North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, and Nebraska’s 2ndCongressional District without Pennsylvania, Michigan, New Hampshire, Virginia, Minnesota, New Mexico, or Wisconsin gives us a 269-269 tie in the Electoral College and puts us on a path to oblivion. I also know that adding Georgia and Pennsylvania to the 2020 certified column wins Trump the race along the shortest possible path to a majority. In recent years, I’ve had to purge this maniacal pattern of analysis and listen to folks like Chris Paul, who excels at describing narrative control like others do in explaining the tensile capacity of steel or combinations of creative curse words to form entirely new profanities. What I am about to tell you is something that may surprise you if you’re a rigid, doctrine-breathing election integrity original gangster:
I now know why Donald Trump pushed early voting so hard.
I’m not alone here. I have seen David Clements chime in on the same topic just in the last 24 hours. It has been less than two weeks since early voting commenced in earnest, and already the media have resulted to throwing the most desperate “Hail Marys” imaginable at the wall, and winebox cat women from across the land are checking in to inpatient shrink centers. Things have gotten so bad that the election commentariat in the press are now suggesting Trump may win the popular vote, while Jeff Bezos won’t allow The Washington Post, which hasn’t declined to endorse the Democrat for President since it dodged Michael Dukakis in 1988, to back Kamala Harris.
But don’t they still have the machines, the mail, and the big, pixelated screens in everyone’s living rooms? Of course they do. Remember, Donald Trump certainly had the votes where he needed them in 2020. You likely would not be reading this opinion if you’d never heard about or read my analysis on the 2020 election, which documents the most logical evidence outlining the substantial manipulation and deception surrounding the installation of Joseph R. Biden. Trump became the first incumbent President since Grover Cleveland (imagine the irony) to gain votes from his first election and not win reelection – and Trump’s gain was one of 11 million votes – no small accomplishment.
In 2020, however, Trump did not have command of the narrative. Polls are polls, but he was down so far in the polls, many people who thought the election was strange chalked it up to COVID, mail-in ballots, and alignment with polling:
Well, Trump sure closed the gap In Pennsylvania but look here – we never had him winning it at any point!
Trump was sabotaged by his inner circle before and after November 3, 2020, had no time to respond to state legislatures allowing executives to steal their thunder and implement last-second rule changes (which means the election was unlawful from the start), and couldn’t even allow the economy to spread its wings and recover because too many important states controlled the narrative, which was, “you want grandma to die so the GDP goes up.” We had the votes. We did not have command of the narrative, and that is why the 2020 result was set in stone.
If all elections could be stolen, then there would have been no need to replace Joe Biden after his colossal debate clunker in late June. He was also senile in 2020 and campaigned largely from a bunker in Delaware, and when he did show his face, he showed it to six people spread awkwardly apart in taped circles to fully sell the social distancing nonsense. The decision to parachute Harris in was calculated, and the first signs were the response biases showing up in polling, giving her an artificial lead that has now crashed to right around, or perhaps below, where Biden was in June – in other words, in danger of not only losing every battleground, but also New Hampshire, Virginia, Minnesota, and New Mexico.
Here is where things stand relative to 2020 in the key states:
· Pennsylvania
The GOP is likely to close the mail ballot requests and returns differential to within 25%, whereas that gap favored Joe Biden by more than 45% in 2020. Everyone agrees Harris is not going to hit her firewall of a half-million votes prior to Election Day, and Republicans are now outpacing Democrats at their own game.
· North Carolina
Republicans have a lead of 1.3% in total mail-in and early voting in a state with a D+1.4% registration advantage. The Democrats held the lead at this point in 2020 by 11%. This represents a swing of 12.3% to the Republican right in a state Trump has already won twice, and urban minority turnout is in the toilet for Harris.
· Georgia
Many counties in rural Georgia are on the brink of surpassing their 2020 early voting turnout within days, and in some cases, roughly 20% of the votes are from those who didn’t vote in 2020. Metro Atlanta urban areas are turning out at levels well below those seen in 2020, with mail ballot volume substantially lower this time around.
· Arizona
Republicans are flexing their registration advantage and have a 7% lead in returns statewide, including a lead in Maricopa County. At this point in 2020, Democrats held a 10% lead in returns.
· Nevada
Perhaps the most shocking of all, Republicans have a 5% lead in returns in a state in which independent voters lean right. This is a reverse image from the Democrat lead of four years ago. Just yesterday, major Democrat money was pulled out of the Las Vegas market, suggesting a concession of the Silver State.
Right now, the TV would love to be telling you how far down Trump is in the early voting – how he is going to have to make up 850,000 ballots in Pennsylvania on Election Day, which may have bad weather, earthquakes, venomous bats, Black Panthers, ANTIFA gangs, and Hawk Tuah fireants that may keep you from reaching the polls, or how Arizona looks lost because Democrats have a lead in a state that is trending heavily Republican by registration.
They have none of that. What they do have are numbers like those I’ve shown you above, and if you want to look over at Florida, you’ll find a R+10.4% electorate as of this morning, on its way rightward toward a 1988 margin for Trump. Media will probably go as far to concede Florida, but I will assure you they won’t tell you no Republican has ever carried Miami-Dade County, which Trump will most certainly do, and lost the presidency. The media have now positioned themselves to try and explain to the public how the Democrats will suddenly evolve into the in-person on Election Day only party.
How impossible is that task? Four years ago, Democrats piled up over 81 million ballots for Joe Biden by abusing vote-by-mail, taking advantage of expanded early voting, and benefitting from organic bad press and chaos stirred up against Donald Trump. Trump won Election Day voting handily, including by a roughly 70-30% margin in Hawaii. If you were the Democrats and your edge in early and mail voting was so strong, why would you totally change your voting method in the very next presidential election?
They aren’t. Their problem is they aren’t turning out, and it’s because Trump has seized the narrative from them and also taken millions of their voters. Harris’s impending doom has been in the cards for a while, and it is evident by how her handlers sought to conceal her from public view until voting began, only to send her out to the cameras once the polling honeymoon soured.
