Anti-Democracy, Pro-Political Violence Message
11:51 A.M.
By Eric Levitz
Donald Trump is trailing Joe Biden by 8.5 points nationally — the biggest polling deficit that any incumbent president has ever faced this late in a campaign. One major cause of Trump’s woes is his collapsing standing with self-described “moderate” voters. In 2016, Hillary Clinton won this group by 12 points; some recent polls have Biden winning it by roughly four times that margin.
But the president has a plan for expanding his coalition: He will reassure moderate skeptics by putting greater emphasis on his indifference to public health, contempt for democracy, and support for political violence ...
... Over the past 24 hours, the president has vowed to fire Dr. Anthony Fauci, praised a caravan of Trump supporters that surrounded a Biden campaign bus in Texas and nearly ran it off the road, and argued that voters whose ballots aren’t counted on Election Night deserve to be disenfranchised ...
Trump’s plan to exploit a partisan discrepancy in voting methods (with Democrats being more likely to cast mail-in ballots that are counted last in some key swing states) has long been clear: Over and over, the president has insinuated that he will declare himself the winner on Election Night if he is leading in partial returns — and then fight in court to halt the counting of further ballots. What is new, however, is the president and his advisers openly copping to this strategy. Further, in his remarks Monday, Trump didn’t just baselessly assert that mail ballots were rife with fraud; he also made the less factually problematic — but more openly anti-democratic — argument that last-minute mail ballots shouldn’t be counted because procrastinators don’t deserve to have their voices heard, saying, “If people wanted to get their ballots in, they should have gotten their ballots in long before that” ...
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/11/trump-fire-fauci-texas-biden-campaign-bus-mail-ballots-pa.html
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