Midterm Red Alert: Expect the Steal in These Dem-Run States

by Revolver

In the late hours of November 3, 2020, Donald Trump seemed to have done the improbable: against the unified opposition of bureaucracy, academia, media, and military, against unprecedented big tech censorship, and against the superior funding and organization of the enemy, he seemed to have won a second term. The polls had once again proven themselves to be nonsense, and the 45th president held small but substantial leads in the key Rust Belt states that had brought him victory in 2016. Bookies gave Trump roughly 75% odds of a second term, and on PredictIt Trump’s odds of victory peaked at above eighty percent.
 
In the earliest hours of November 4, we warned “Trump Is Poised To Win The Election. Now He Has To Stop The Steal.”
 
You all know what happened next. In a never-before-seen development in American politics, counting in key states went on for days on end. Over the course of those extra days, Trump’s leads in Georgia, Michigan, and Pennsylvania shrank and then vanished. Legal efforts to block what was unfolding and contest certain questionable ballots went nowhere, and on January 20, it was Joe Biden who took the oath of office.
 
Republicans have rightly complained about evidence of fraud, whether it was mysterious pauses in counting, unmonitored ballot drop boxes, or mass harvesting of mailed-out ballots. But the truth is, if there was a steal, it was one that the GOP enabled through its own incompetence.
 
As chronicled by Mollie Hemingway in her book “Rigged”, the time to secure the 2020 election wasn’t on November 4, but in the months before it, when governors, judges, and state election boards cavalierly changed the rules and basic process of how elections were conducted, using Covid-19 as a blanket excuse. During those months, the GOP legal effort was slapdash and poorly organized. Come election night itself, instead of having a professional legal team ready to go, the campaign was stuck having Jared Kushner desperately calling around for a “James Baker-like figure” to save the campaign. Instead, he got Rudy Giuliani’s melting hair.
 

It's not hair dye, Giuliani is actually melting. Experts think it's the ultimate manifestation of the dissolution of the simulacrum and the last gasps of postmodernity pic.twitter.com/hnlAGbOo1O

— Karl Sharro (@KarlreMarks) November 20, 2020

 
Two years have passed. The first major post-2020, post-Covid election is upon us. What happens on Tuesday will be the trial run for what happens in 2024.
 
The watchword for Tuesday night isn’t “Stop the Steal.” It is “Expect the Steal… And Be Ready”.
 
Consider Pennsylvania, with its crucial Senate contest between Mehmet Oz and The Creature Who Answers to the Name John Fetterman. Two years ago, Pennsylvania’s election process probably featured more red flags than any other closely contested state. The state took a whole week to count its votes, with Biden only overtaking Trump’s large election-night lead on Friday morning. Pennsylvania let votes count even if they arrived after Election Day, even if they had no postmark, and even if they didn’t have a matching signature. Twenty Pennsylvania counties used millions of dollars donated by Mark Zuckerberg to finance their election activities, including the famous unsupervised “Zuckerboxes,” which made it virtually impossible to enforce the state’s relatively strict limits on ballot harvesting. When Trump supporters tried to independently monitor drop boxes, state attorney general Josh Shapiro (now running for governor) threatened them with prosecution.
 
So, what are things like two years later? Pennsylvania’s Republican legislature passed bills to ensure signature verification and photo ID, and to ensure proper poll-watching… but Democratic governor Tom Wolf vetoed those bills. So in Pennsylvania this cycle, things are substantially like they were two years ago. And, yep, the state is even warning that it’s going to take a long time to count ballots again.
 

 
So, unless Mehmet Oz absolutely buries Fetterman, how much confidence should we have in a perfectly aboveboard election in the Keystone State?
 
Not all states are so bad. In Arizona and Georgia, Republican-controlled state governments reacted to the questionable events of 2020 by wising up. Arizona banned same-day voter registration (just a precaution, as it wasn’t in use before), created a new tracking system for early ballots, and passed new requirements to present photo ID when dropping off an early ballot. Georgia passed a law sharply restricting the use of ballot drop-off boxes, to prevent the fiasco of entirely unmonitored 24/7 boxes used in 2020. Georgia also banned Brad Raffensperger’s stunt of sending an absentee ballot to all voters in the mail, and finally required the use of ID for absentee voting as well as in-person.
 
So that’s good news. Kari Lake, Blake Masters, and Herschel Walker all have a great chance to win genuinely fair elections. But most of the states with questionable election nights in 2020 were not in GOP hands over the past two years. Like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin have had Democratic governors who could block any legislation, so they’ve been restricted to petition the courts for election security victories. And there have been some victories: Notably, in Pennsylvania a GOP lawsuit has blocked the state’s absurd attempt to tally undated mail-in ballots. But on the other hand, Wisconsin officials just charged a former election official with fraud after she revealed how trivially easy it is to fraudulently obtain ballots in the state:

Kimberly Zapata, who was fired by Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson Thursday, told investigators she sent the improperly-obtained military ballots to state Rep. Janel Brandtjen, R-Menomonee Falls, on Oct. 25. She now faces three counts of election fraud involving absentee ballots and one felony count of misconduct in public office, according to a criminal complaint filed by the Milwaukee County District Attorney’s Office.
 
Zapata, who oversaw absentee ballot voting in her former role, told investigators she requested the absentee ballots under false names to “show how easy it is to commit fraud in this manner,” according to the complaint.
 
[WPR]

So anyway, good luck on Tuesday, Ron Johnson!
 
The regime has already spent months setting its preferred narrative for how election night will unfold. Just like in 2020, it is propagandizing the public about how “perfectly normal” it is to take ages to count votes. Forget everything intuitive about how an election should go, and be prepared for counting to take days, maybe weeks!
 

 

 

 
While the press psyches up the public for “perfectly normal” holdups in ballot counting, the White House itself is aggressively warning that the GOP is not going to accept the results.
 

Karine Jean-Pierre: "The President is making this speech because we're seeing an alarming number of Republican officials who are saying—they're being very clear—they're not going to accept the results of these elections." pic.twitter.com/q1AOMDlk9g

— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) November 2, 2022

 
It’s a clever way to set expectations. No matter how shady things look on election night, if anyone complains or (God forbid) files a lawsuit, the Biden administration is poised to spring out, point its collective finger, and shout “Aha! They’re disputing the election, just like we all warned you!”
 
What’s our message here? First, whatever the polls say, and however great the results first look on Election Night, be ready for the steal. Recent polling has indicated major GOP momentum in places the party hasn’t won victories in years. According to polls, Lee Zeldin has nearly pulled even in New York, and one poll even puts him ahead of the unelected witch currently occupying the governor’s mansion. The races for senate seats in Washington and Colorado, and governor’s seats in Oregon and Michigan, have all very abruptly tightened.
 
That’s great. But none of these races is going to be a bloodbath, and that means every marginal advantage Democrats can eke out has the potential to be decisive.

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