There's been one camp consistently attacking the legitimacy of the election and it's not Biden's.
Lots of states are pushing for larger scale vote-by-mail than has ever happened before. Some states have been doing this for a long time (Oregon, Colorado), but they have the processes in place to handle elections. Other states are trying to do it in a few months with no real prep ahead of time. We're already seeing this lead to ballot printing problems, ex:[0].
To build on that, many of these states aren't allowed to even open/proces absentee/vote-by-mail ballots until election day or after[0.5]. That means that problems with these ballots may not be caught ahead of time. Along with that, having to processing millions of ballets (when they are used to 5-digit amounts of ballots), means it will take a lot longer to handle those ballots. This will lead to a delay in knowing the results. As well, mail-in-ballots get rejected at a much higher rate than in-person voting[1], which will lead to lawyers fighting over which ballots are valid if things are close.
Democrats are more likely to vote-by-mail than Republicans[2]. This means those delayed ballots will likely swing towards Biden, which means as days go on for counting, Biden's lead is likely to increase (which is totally fine, but it will definitely stir up controversy).
Then you have lawmakers and judges changes the rules[3]. There are a few cases going on around the country where there is a push to allow late mail ballots to be counted. In this case, a Judge decided to allow ballots to arrive up to 3-days post election. These kinds of cases are going on around the country and still being fought.
It's going to be messy.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/va-politics/virginia-vo...
[0.5] https://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/vopp-t...
[1] https://www.npr.org/2020/08/22/904693468/more-than-550-000-p...
[2] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2020/...
[3] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/09/pennsylvania-becomes...
I guess Americans just love their broken legacy system too much...
Can't really see how he'll be removed over this seeing he's preparing for and even fuelling this chaos.
Anyway, look at Belarus: a free and fair election was won by an ~%80 margin by a Trump-like figure. Big deal, he still is in the process of getting removed from office.
Macron just last week welcomed the 20% Belarus loser as the "President-elect" to France, and refuses to recognize the Trump-like winner. That's Color Revolution 101: the election really doesn't matter, what matters is its legitimacy. Protests, the media, and any kind of election problems all help to delegitimatize an election, and allow Trump-like figures to be removed in the name of "integrity" should they actually win. This playbook works.
As I've said elsewhere, I think Biden will win big electorally, including on Nov. 3rd, so all of this ground-preparation will ultimately not be needed. Better safe than sorry though…
This definitely isn't true. Both parties have been repeatedly claiming that a loss for their side will be evidence that the election isn't legitimate.
All mainstream Democratic Party discourse has been revolving around the delegitimisation of the results of the 2016 election, and an insistence that exactly the same process is happening during the 2020 election. It's the only reason we're paying attention to Facebook ads, because Facebook developers who claimed to be doing academic experimentation having too much access to user information has been tied through vagueness and innuendo to the claim that Russian government-sponsored targeted ads on Facebook delivered the 2016 election to Trump.
Given that legitimacy is exclusively a product of belief, they qualify as a 'legitimate media' source.
> Given that legitimacy is exclusively a product of belief, they qualify as a 'legitimate media' source.
If we accept the first part as fact and apply the standard implied by the second, then Fox is in a hazy gray area of equally legitimate and not-legitimate, rather than clearly legitimate.
Which seems (ignoring the people who haven't heard of it or have no opinion) about right:
https://www.journalism.org/2020/01/24/media-polarization-app...
This is almost exactly mirrored on the other side of politics. See https://www.journalism.org/2020/01/24/u-s-media-polarization...
No, it's not, if you actually pay attention to the details of the study. Fox is the only source in the study in that weird middle ground, all four of the other top 5 sources Republicans rely on are on the same list for Democrats, and 3 of the other top 5 Republicans trust are on the comparable list for Democrats, and all the ones on either Democratic list that aren't on the corresponding Republican list (as well as, more obviously, those that are on the corresponding Republican lists) are significantly positive in net trust, while Fox is in that weird middle and Hannity on radio (the other one on the Republican trust list) is far in net negative territory. There are differences on the opposite sides of the spectrum, but not the kind of symmetry implied by “mirrored”.
Ambiguity is great when you are running an election and you are trying to appeal to the greatest number of people -- it is not good when you need to convey information in situations where human life is on the line. The reasons we have seemingly obvious warnings on household chemicals are written in blood.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6923e2.htm?s_cid=mm...
Then pair that with this interesting talk by Matt Taibbi[2]. His basic argument is that most news organizations target a specific demographics and only cover things that reinforce the beliefs of that group. Fox dominates that for conservatives, while liberals tend to have a wider range of organizations to go to.
[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2012/09/27/section-4-de...
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2012/09/27/in-changing-...