A Desperate, Fragile President
As the cycle winds down, we enter a phase where it feels like an alternate Universe.
It wouldn’t be another day without multiple bombshell reports, some of them sifting through half-truth government propaganda being reported through gossip magazine journalism. In one work day, we saw a report of Rudy Guiliani getting busted by Borat for indecent behavior, the FBI report on election tampering by Russia and Iran (but reporting that it the intelligence was attempting to discredit Trump), and a piece that the Trump campaign is looking at radical measure to circumvent the will of the people by convincing Republican-controlled states to seat his electors and ignore the vote.
Let me repeat that: A sitting President is actively trying to instill a coup d’tat on his own people by circumventing their will by asking his political allies to ignore the vote.
While it just continues to get crazier and crazier by the day, I want to focus on whether or not this could come to fruition. Anything is possible, but it would be extremely complicated and would literally lead to hundreds of lawsuits, the probability of chaos in the streets by activists from both sides (one of which has access to million of deadly weapons), and the type of institutional chaos that Trump thrives on.
I decided to divide states into 4 different categories.
Color: The core color on the map is dependent upon who is currently expected to win that state, according to my current map. There were a few states that I simplified for the purposes of this experiment.
Solid Red/Blue: This was awarded if a candidate is expected to win a state, holds the Governorship and both houses of the legislature. These states are outside of purview of being able to subvert the Constitutional directive by a losing candidate.
Dark Red/Blue: The candidate is winning the state, holds the governor and one branch of the legislature, or both branches of the legislature while the other party holds the executive branch. These states would be highly difficult to subvert.
Light Blue: These states have a candidate winning, but the Democrats only hold the governorship (Wisconsin, Michigan, North Carolina) or only hold on chamber in this legislature with a Republican governor (Pennsylvania). This is why Trump is emboldened by this strategy. There are no red states in this category. Essentially, even if Biden won these states, theoretically, you could realistically seat a different slate of electors.
Tint Blue: Only Arizona falls into the category. Biden currently leads here, but all branches of government here are in Republican hands. If they were able to move on this plan in the states listed above, Arizona would even easier to be successful.
Right now, Biden currently leads in Florida and Georgia, but by a slim margin. These states would be in same category as Arizona and seemed like a futile effort. The interesting part of this plan for the Trump campaign is that the Biden camp would be unable to fight fire with fire, as there are no real opportunities of states that they could try and go after, even if they felt that it was an appropriate power grab.
One would like to assume that a move like this would be met with some resistance by Americans of all political stripes. On the other hand, in the era of negative partisanship, we continue to see people sit on the sidelines sacrificing principled values for ideological victory.
What would the people in the Rust Belt do if they collectively elected Biden by 8 points, and the Republicans moved to seat a Trump slate of electors? Would right-wing militias rise up to try and intimidate through force these moves by elected officials? It seems far fetched, but so has the last 4 years of norm shattering governance.