RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://americanmind.org/post/game-on-for-the-coup/

It will all go according to plan—unless we stop it.

Strictly speaking, a coup is an illegitimate change of government by violent means. But what if you can do it without violence? To win without fighting is best, Sun Tzu says. An ostensibly (“mostly”) peaceful ouster from power is preferable to the use of force because it can much more easily be sold as “our democracy” at work.

National polls consistently predicted a huge Biden blowout. That they were wrong (again) is demonstrated by the facts that (a) the 2020 popular vote is, so far (California is not fully counted), a mere two-point spread, hardly a blowout; (b) Trump got a higher share of the vote than last time; and (C) Trump received far more total votes than last time.

But it’s the swing states that matter. Here (again) Trump was supposed to lose—if not necessarily bigly in every case, at least widely.

But throughout the day, the president consistently outperformed the polls. He crushed his 2016 performance in Florida. He also outperformed in Iowa, Ohio, South Carolina, and Texas. Senators he was supposed to drag down with him, including Joni Ernst, Lindsey Graham, and Mitch McConnell, won handily. Even Susan Collins, who was supposed to be sure goner and lose by at least three, won by nine. A party that was “certain” to lose the Senate has kept it and gained (so far) six seats in the House.

Looking at states no one expected Trump to lose, his overperformance is even more stark. The polling average for West Virginia was Trump +17; he won it by 39. Kansas was estimated at +9; the result was +15.

Throughout the day the president was also outperforming his expected result in key states such as Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. He even, for a time, looked like he was within striking distance in Virginia, a state Hillary Clinton won by five points in 2016. At one point the New York Times’s “meter” had Trump’s chances in North Carolina at 92%. The needle was also sliding in the president’s direction in Arizona and Georgia, among others.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/11/defiant-president-joseph-klein/

Election Day 2020 finally arrived. Anxiety across the country has reached a fever pitch about an election that may go down as the most divisive one since 1864, which was held during the midst of the Civil War. Abraham Lincoln ended up winning that election handily. But the 2020 election has turned out to be much closer than pundits in the media and pollsters predicted, despite a widening gender gap and the movement of suburban voters into the Democratic camp. The tidal wave for Biden that Democrats were hoping for did not materialize. Polls in some key states such as Florida turned out to be way off base.

This race has seen a record numbers of mail-in ballots cast, which will be counted under a hodgepodge of rules that vary from state to state. The mail-in votes skewed heavily in favor of Biden in key battleground states in the early tallies, but Trump managed to close the gap with the votes from his supporters cast in person on Election Day. With teams of lawyers from both sides out in force planning to litigate close vote counts, it could be days or even weeks before we know for sure whether Donald Trump or Joe Biden will finally prevail.

In addition to trying to hold onto the White House, Republicans have the task of defending 23 seats in the Senate. As of early Wednesday morning, the Republicans took the contested Alabama Senate seat back from the Democrats, as former college football coach Tommy Tuberville defeated Democratic Senator Doug Jones. The Democrats in turn flipped the contested Senate Arizona seat, as Mark Kelly defeated the incumbent Senator Martha McSally who nevertheless has refused to concede. It looks like the Senate seats currently held by Susan Collins in Maine and Thom Tillis in North Carolina will remain Republican, although these races have not been officially called as of early Wednesday morning. If the Republicans manage to hold onto these seats, they will be able to retain control of the Senate. Meanwhile, the House is projected to remain in control of the Democrats.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/11/election-and-wait-katie-hopkins/

This the hard bit—the wait.

Sometimes I think I can hear my friends across the pond holding their breath, collectively, not daring to breathe or move or eat in case it somehow jinxes the swing states yet to call.

I dare not text anyone, because I just don’t see how words are going to help right now. Only a win will make this stop.

Trump has called it already. The President of Slovenia has even sent his congratulations, and yet the noise from my radio and TV tells me that the media are launching an all-out assault to ensure the win is not given.

I cannot tell you how many times our State Broadcaster (the BBC) has “plotted the Biden path to victory” on the irritating tech toy they insist on using, but it is countless, as if by plotting his path to a win they can make viewers believe it so —and bring down the will of the American people.

And when my children ask me “Who won?” I can’t bring myself to say it is undecided. Or to report that it is “too close to call” or “all the votes haven’t been counted yet.” None of that rings true to me. I think of all the faces I have met at Trump rallies and Republican events over the last few months, and I know they are the truth of America.

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/11/05/mad-about-2020-election-chaos-blame-dems-fraud-prone-vote-by-mail-scheme/

s many feared, the election has ended, but it isn’t over. Ballots are still being tallied, and races in Nevada and Pennsylvania remain up in the air. Even when finished, there will be angry disputes. The counts will go on, but even when done they’ll be litigated for months. Blame the Democrats’ vote-by-mail scheme for the election chaos.

Fed up with riots, demonstrations, nonstop name-calling and demonization of political opponents, Americans speak longingly of a clear result to our elections that would let us all get on with our lives.

It wasn’t to be in 2020. Costly, and no doubt lengthy, legal challenges await. It may yet even be discovered that there was massive electoral fraud.

For this, you can thank mail-in voting, which the Democrats pushed as part of their “make every vote count” campaign (not to mention, of course, the four-year hate-affair the unhinged left in the Democratic Party conducted with President Donald Trump).

As has been noted repeatedly, expanding mail-in voting under the pretense of making voting easier during the lockdown was always spurious. We saw just how deceitful that was this week when the Centers for Disease Control told those with COVID-19 to go ahead and vote in person – just be careful.

So much for: “We have to vote by mail to keep people safe.”

Of course, voting by mail is fraught with potential for fraud, something that has been demonstrated by numerous studies.

How big is the problem? The federal Election Assistance Commission found that, between 2012 and 2018, 28.3 million mail-in ballots went unaccounted for. That’s equal to missing roughly 20% of “all absentee ballots and ballots mailed to voters residing in states that do elections exclusively by mail,” a recent Real Clear Politics piece noted.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2020/11/04/did-the-tree-fall-trump-wonbut-n1125734

Everyone knows the old teaser: If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? The answer turns on the concept of “sound.” There will be sound waves, of course, but “sound” depends on the human ear registering and interpreting the kinetic energy released by the falling tree. So, no, it doesn’t make a “sound”—and if one is not present, or is not paying attention or is distracted by other considerations, one will not know whether the tree has fallen or not. But if one takes a walk through the forest, one may note the fallen tree and arrive at the proper conclusion. It fell, sound or no sound.

The analogy with the current electoral muddle is obvious. Everyone knows that Donald Trump has won the 2020 election. Everyone knows that electoral tampering has been massive and ubiquitous, and that a fair vote would have borne landslide numbers for the president. Everyone knows that ballot harvesting, mail-in voting, and extended vote tallying for an indefinite period after the polls close, when new ballots are miraculously found and illegible or absent postmarks are ignored, is the broad, well-trodden path to electoral fraud. And everyone knows that the fix was in from the start. 

/11/suddenly_all_the_democratrun_swing_states_need_to_stop_counting_ballots_for_awhile.html

Is the U.S. on track to see its first election utterly stolen in front of its eyes? The way Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez used to do it in the face of huge, huge enthusiastic crowds protesting against him back in Caracas? 

How else to explain strange doings like these?

Michigan, too, needs some extra time to count the ballots. And so does North Carolina. And so do all of the states where Trump was running ahead — Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan… The counting suddenly shut down. Arizona went down a suspicious 90 minutes before the announcement that the state had flipped to Biden.

Mark Steyn has some brutal observations here, emphasis mine.

2.40am The President entered to the familiar strains of “Hail to the Chief”, which seemed very consciously chosen. His remarks were brief, but this line struck me:

I said, ‘What happened to the election?’ ‘It’s off…’ All of a sudden everything just stopped.

Indeed. The election special mysteriously ground to a halt. Trump could reasonably have expected to be giving his victory speech right now, had not Pennsylvania, Georgia, and North Carolina all decided to have an early night and resume in the morning, or afternoon, or next Tuesday.

There is great peril in that.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/trump-won-highest-share-of-non-white-vote-of-any-republican-since-1960-exit-polls-show/?utm

President Trump has won the highest share of non-white voters of any Republican presidential candidate since 1960, according to preliminary results from Tuesday’s election.

Roughly one quarter of non-white voters cast their ballots for Trump, according to an Edison exit poll. If the poll is an accurate reflection of final results, Trump will have won over more non-white voters than any Republican since Richard Nixon, who won 32 percent of the non-white vote in 1960 but lost to John F. Kennedy. Trump will also have improved on his performance in the 2016 election when he won 21 percent of the non-white vote.

Democrats have attacked Trump as racist, including during the 2016 and 2020 elections. In the wake of the George Floyd demonstrations in late May, Democrats lashed out at Trump’s opposition to removing monuments of Confederate figures and the Confederate flag from public spaces, and have repeatedly invoked Trump’s 2016 comments in which he warned of Mexican “rapists” illegally crossing the border. The president has also opted to call coronavirus the “China virus,” which has unnerved Democrats concerned about anti-Asian racism.

However, the Edison poll showed that support for Trump rose among African Americans, Asians, and Latinos. In particular, 18 percent of black men voted for Trump in 2020 compared with 13 percent in 2016, and black women increased support for Trump from 4 percent in 2016 to 8 percent in 2020. Trump also roughly doubled his share of gay voters.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/11/when-vote-fraud-is-claimed-question-always-is-did-it-make-a-difference/

HUH? FRAUD IS FRAUD REGARDLESS OF ANYTHING ELSE!!!!! RSK

On the matter of vote fraud, there is law and there are facts. We’ll hear plenty about fraud, but we’ll have to remind ourselves to ask: Did it make a difference? Even if the Trump campaign has potential claims in law, they would collapse if, as a matter of fact, they would not affect the outcome of the race.

Pennsylvania, which I’ve discussed extensively over the last three weeks, is a good example.

As repeatedly recounted (most recently, in Wednesday’s column), the state supreme court, by fiat, ordered a the three-day extension of the November 3 Election Day deadline for the state’s receipt of mail-in votes — i.e., until close-of-business November 6. I believe this was an unconstitutional usurpation of the state legislature’s power to set the rules for elections. If so, that would give the Trump campaign a basis to seek the Supreme Court’s intervention. Indeed, four justices on the high court were poised to grant a stay against the state court’s order in mid-October; and just last week, three of those justices induced Pennsylvania to agree to segregate the ballots received during the three-day extension, anticipating that the Court might review the matter on an expedited basis after Election Day.