Voters did not. Even today, most republicans think the election was fraudulent. The people who should have been telling them the truth lied to them. And that's what this effort is about, not the very narrow sense of the objections. The objections were part of a coordinated effort across the whole party to lie to the american people in an attempt to subvert an election.
This was already the new normal. We'll see it again in 2024 regardless of which side wins or loses.
* The Republican presidential candidate won in 2016 despite losing the popular vote by a huge margin
* There was ample evidence of the malfeasance being complained about in the 2016 election, while there was no evidence of the malfeasance being complained about in the 2020 election
* The people who complained of a 'stolen' election in 2016 were pushing for reforms, and the protests were peaceful, while the people who complained about a 'stolen' election in 2020 were pushing for a violent overthrow of the democratic process, and there was subsequently an attempt to violently overthrow the democratic process.
I say all this as someone who is a cynic at heart, and I do my best to avoid hyperbolic media from either extreme on the political spectrum (and opinion pieces altogether), and to pay for and consume media that challenges my biases: Not everything is equal. Sometimes one of the options is worse than the other.
The 2 point margin between Trump and Clinton was less than the margin between Bush and Kerry in 2004. Neither candidate cleared 50%. Clinton “won” the popular vote with a lower total percentage than Kerry lost the popular vote in 2004.
Also, these counter-factual are irrelevant. The popular vote doesn’t matter because nobody is trying to win the popular vote. That’s why Clinton didn’t campaign in Wisconsin (where Obama had racked up a huge margin in 2008 and 2012.) And that’s why Trump didn’t campaign in California. Changing the voting system would change how people campaign, so the popular vote tells you nothing. Also, if we moved to a “modern” voting system, we would use a run-off, like other countries have. Trump still might have won without the large libertarian vote eliminated.
> * There was ample evidence of the malfeasance being complained about in the 2016 election, while there was no evidence of the malfeasance being complained about in the 2020 election
Not in 2017 there wasn’t.
> * The people who complained of a 'stolen' election in 2016 were pushing for reforms
So were many of the people objecting to the 2020 election. With a Democratic House the objections were futile. They were symbolic.
I sincerely don't understand why "won" is in quotation marks – I think you meant to say "the popular vote isn't something that can be won since we have the electoral college" – and if that's the case, let me clarify that what I mean is that she received a significantly higher number of votes than Trump did.
> The 2 point margin between Trump and Clinton was less than the margin between Bush and Kerry in 2004.
I don't understand the point you're making here.
>> There was ample evidence of the malfeasance being complained about in the 2016 election > Not in 2017 there wasn’t.
Russian hacking was discussed prominently during the presidential debates in 2016, so I have to disagree with you on that point.
>> The people who complained of a 'stolen' election in 2016 were pushing for reforms > So were many of the people objecting to the 2020 election
That may be true, but I haven't yet heard a good-faith argument for reforms (or in fact any argument for reforms) from people objecting to the 2020 election, nor any sense of what those reforms would be aside from things that could also be described as voter suppression and demands to reverse the outcome of the presidential, but not the down-ballot, elections. Maybe my sources are bad.
Yes. It's like "winning" the first 100m of a 400m race. If the runners were in a 100m race, they would run differently.
> I don't understand the point you're making here.
The point is that there was a significant third-party vote in 2016, so it's not like Clinton had a particularly large vote share overall. The same vote share "lost" the popular vote in 2004, where third parties were less significant.
> Russian hacking was discussed prominently during the presidential debates in 2016, so I have to disagree with you on that point.
Of email servers. Not election systems.
> That may be true, but I haven't yet heard a good-faith argument for reforms (or in fact any argument for reforms) from people objecting to the 2020 election, nor any sense of what those reforms would be aside from things that could also be described as voter suppression
The fact that Democrats can describe something as "voter suppression" doesn't mean anything. Many things Democrats object to, such as Voter ID laws or signature matching, are prevalent in European countries. In Switzerland, mail-in voting has strict signature matching requirements. In Pennsylvania, it was the subject of a civil rights lawsuit. Mail in voting is, in general, discouraged in most of Europe. France had it, then abandoned it in the 1970s, due to voter fraud.
Other countries don't run elections like we do: with a flurry of last-minute lawsuits trying to chip away at any sort of rules or deadlines. That's not a healthy way to run an election system.
Well, if on nothing else, we agree on that.
Over that time period, Republican primary voters have evicted moderate Republicans in the House, and have started to successfully evict them from the Senate. The state GOP twitter accounts for Arizona, Oregon, and Hawaii have continued to peddle conspiracy theories, post-January 6. Arizona GOP have censured three Republicans for insufficient fealty to Trump: the widow of Sen. John McCain, former Sen. Jeff Flake, and the current governor. Senators Toomey, Portman, and Burr, all Republicans, are not running for re-election. It's not due to partisanship between Republicans and Democrats, but within the Republican party. They are all moderate Trump supporters, but that's not good enough now. Senators report a significant pressure campaign, very angry Republican constituents insisting upon a Trump acquittal no matter what, even including death threats. The pressure campaign is probably working, as evidenced by jurors claiming
Trump himself attacked Republicans, who wouldn't help him overturn the election, far worse than Democrats who were never part of the fold in the first place. The impeachment trial and conviction vote will demonstrate the degree to which the Republican party is really the Trump party, perhaps most especially the party of Trumpian primary voters.
Nobody cares about the popular vote. The electoral college incentivizes Republicans to campaign in states that don’t necessarily yield a ton of popular votes, and disincentizes them from campaigning in states like California that have a lot of votes. The President popular vote simply doesn’t reflect what the results would be if people were actually trying to win the popular vote.
Republicans routinely win the House popular vote, where these incentives to go after smaller states don’t exist, and there is an incentive to campaign in the red counties of blue states. Republicans won the House popular vote 8 times since 1992. Democrats won the House popular vote 6 times.
In particular, Republicans won the House popular vote in both 2000 and 2016. Do you think Bush and Trump couldn’t have matched the popular vote share of congressional Republicans if they had an incentive to campaign in every red House district in California?
Folks love to speculate about alternative election systems where we used a direct popular vote. But if we’re imagining a counter-factual scenario with a different election system, why that one? Direct election of the executive is unusual. Nearly every developed country chooses the executive based on who gets the majority in the legislature. Under that system, we would have had even more Republican executives (16 years) and less Democratic executives (12 years) since 1992.
Those aren't independent variables, though. Those elections are on the same ballot. In fact the republican house vote in 2016 was about 3M votes less than Clinton got. So... no, Trump wouldn't have been able to win the popular vote in that election merely by getting all the votes republicans got in the house. Because he already got them. Lots of voters voted for Trump in those competetive house districts who didn't cast a vote for a representative at all.
I know that argument sounds good, but it doesn't work numerically.
There’s a key difference: nobody credible said that the election itself was fraudulent. There were a few hucksters, of course (e.g. Jill Stein cashing in for the Green Party), but Clinton immediately conceded and the focus of all of the subsequent discussions were about things like propaganda campaigns and use of social media influence campaigns. There were no credible allegations of vote fraud and nothing like a multi-month campaign trying to trump up state support for overturning the election results.
And saying well election fraud and voter registration cheating isn't the same thing as voter fraud is a distinction without a difference.
The GOP took it further than the Clinton did in 2016. But the democrats pushed russia conspiracy theories for 3 years in order to de-legitimize Trump. Their hands are not clean.
She’s talked about real things - voter suppression, propaganda campaigns, some funded by foreign governments – but she’s never made the kind of lies we saw about fake votes or said that millions of legitimate votes should be thrown out because she didn’t like the results.
Now, you are trying to conflate talk of voter suppression with fraud but that’s not correct for two reasons: the first is simply that widespread fraud is imaginary in the modern era, but the second is the difference between following a legal process and subverting it. Trying to conflate the two so it’s easier to pretend your party didn’t do something unusual is just dishonest.
The lies are different in the specifics but they’re lies calling into question the legitimacy of the results. Fact checkers have given Clinton multiple “pants on fire” ratings for these claims: https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2019/sep/19/hillary-cl...
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2019/mar/06/hillary-cl...
Based on the studies we have seen, complaining about Voter ID laws, like Clinton did about Wisconsin, is akin to complaining about mail in voting security: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/2/21/18230009/v...
> The results: Voter ID laws do not seem to decrease turnout, even when the data is broken down by race. This held when the data was analyzed in different ways, like evaluating only the effect of stricter laws that require an ID with a photo.
Voter ID laws are also broadly popular, among whites and non-whites: https://news.gallup.com/poll/194741/four-five-americans-supp...
(81% of whites and 77% of non-whites support both early voting and voter ID. Funnily enough, “voter suppressed” states like Georgia and Texas have both. Georgia also had automatic voter registration, which non-whites strongly support, thanks to Brian Kemp.)
Democrats think its voter suppression to ban letting party functionaries go register and collect ballots with out any ID or signature matching. Republicans think its fraud to let party functionaries go register and collect ballots with out any ID or signature matching. You've just decided the former is fact and the later is wrong.
The insane conspiracy theories peddled by Trump associates like Guiliani, Woods, and Powell are far beyond what mainstream democrats said (but not really that different from what fringe democrats said about ROVIAN DIEBOLD MACHINES STEALING OHIO in 2004). While Kerry didn't push these theories, 31 house members and Barbera Boxer in the Senate voted to reject the Ohio votes based on the same sort of conspiracy theories.
And again in 2016, while not lead by Clinton, there was a concerted effort to flip electoral votes--the so called hamilton electors. At least one actually did change their vote.
I'll agree the GOP took it to a new level. But some democrats had previously taken it to new levels in prior elections.
I’m not comparing the impact of two situations! What Republicans did was shameful. Grandstanding and symbolically calling into question the legitimacy of the administration based on a big lie is worse than doing it based on a small lie. (Though, I think folks underestimate how many people with authority genuinely believe the election fraud lie, and also believed the Russia changed the votes lie. The vast majority of Americans don’t believe the official story about the Kennedy assassination! People are extremely prone to conspiracy theories.)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/hillary-clinton-trum...
https://www.cnbc.com/2016/11/09/clinton-calls-trump-to-conce...
She might complain to anyone willing to listen that he didn't win fairly, but she never made the claim that he didn't win, and has stated on several occasions that he did win.