Red Mirage takes center stage on election night

>> Wednesday, September 30, 2020

PERRYSCOPE

Perry Diaz

        What if President Donald Trump wins on November 3 based on 15% of the vote by mail ballots that had been counted?  According to FiveThirtyEight, this could give Trump a projected lead of 408-130 electoral votes on election night.  But once 75% of mail ballots are counted, four days later, the lead could flip to Joe Biden’s favor.  This particular modeling scenario portrays Biden as the ultimate winner in a massive victory, 334-204.   
      But on Election Night, the “Red Mirage” would come into play.  The Red Mirage is a term coined by a group called Hawkfish, Democratic data and analytics funded by billionaire Michael Bloomberg who lost in the Democratic presidential primaries.  Red Mirage is based on the premise that Trump will appear to have won on Election Night, perhaps in a landslide.  However, he could lose when all the votes were eventually counted.  But among Democrats, fear of a “Red Mirage” on Election Day is gripping them.  It has caused some Democrats to change their plan on mail-in voting and instead encourage people to “vote early” and “in person if possible.”
      Polls show significantly more Democrats plan to vote by mail than Republicans: a Monmouth University poll released last month found 72% of Democrats planned to cast their ballots by mail in November, while just 22% of Republicans said the same. 
      And this is where Trump – who has prepared for this scenario – will prematurely declare victory based on the Election Night counted ballots.  But as soon as Biden has overtaken Trump a few days later, chaos will erupt with Trump’s diehard supporters massing in the streets, some armed with guns and assault rifles.  Trump’s legal team will also challenge the mail-in ballots that Trump said are fraudulent. With the Post Office in disarray due to the changes that Postmaster General Louise DeJoy instituted that would delay the delivery of mail on Election Day, there would be a possibility of Trump applying political pressure to reject a high number of mailed-in votes counted after Election Day.
Refuses to concede
It’s anticipated that if Trump loses, he will refuse to concede.  Instead he will challenge the validity of the mailed-in votes, contending that massive fraud has been made.  He had time and time again discredited mail-in voting for months, claiming Democrats could rig the election.  However, experts say there's no evidence that mail-in voting is unsafe and point to the fact that the practice has been widely used by both Democrats and Republicans in previous elections with no issues.
      Meanwhile, Democratic candidate Biden said he is ready to fight for the absentee and mail-in votes that will ultimately determine the winner.  He said his campaign has assembled a team o 600 lawyers to counteract Trump’s attempt to suppress the vote.
      The question is:  What will happen if Trump loses and refuses to leave?
      There has been discussion among a bipartisan group of about 80 political operatives and academics what could happen if Trump lost the election and then barricaded himself in the White House? 
      One of the group’s organizers said, “All of our scenarios ended in both street-level violence and political impasse. The law is essentially helpless against a president who's willing to ignore it.”
      Trump could be desperate enough to call his base to come to his rescue with assault rifles.  The likelihood that armed militia who are supporting Trump would converge in Washington, DC ready to heed Trump’s “call to arms.”
Martial Law
And this dovetails into Roger Stone, Trump’s longtime political ally and Republican ”dirty trickster,” who has urged Trump to seize power and declare “martial law” or invoke “the Insurrection Act If he loses reelection on November 3.  Stone called for Trump to “form a special task force of federal agents to physically stand in the way of criminal activity” in the election.
Stone then suggested that Trump order the arrest of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Apple CEO Tim Cook, the Clintons and ”anybody else who can be proven to be involved in illegal activity.”  The progressive group MediaMatters first reported Stone’s comments.
      As reported, “Stone called for Trump to appoint former Rep. Bob Barr, a Georgia Republican, as a special counsel ‘with the specific task of forming an Election Day operation using the FBI, federal marshals, and Republican state officials across the country to be prepared to file legal objections and if necessary to physically stand in the way of criminal activity.’”
“He singled out Nevada,” the report said, "The ballots in Nevada on election night should be seized by federal marshals and taken from the state. They are completely corrupted. No votes should be counted from the state of Nevada if that turns out to be the provable case. Send federal marshals to the Clark county board of elections, Mr. President!"
      "They want to play war — this is war," Stone said, adding: "I'm for a legal election. Everything I'm going to be involved with in terms of helping Donald Trump get elected will be perfectly transparent and legal."
With Stone encouraging Trump to seize power if he loses the election, this brings to fore the military’s role should Trump would indeed seize power.  Will he barricade himself in the White House surrounded by groups of armed white supremacists, white nationalists, Ku Klux Klan, Boogaloo Boys, and white militias?  Will the military intervene, which could lead to bloodshed and possibly, civil war?
Supreme Court ruling
And while the confrontation is going on, legislative peacemakers will enter the picture and mediate the issues that Trump has brought about.  Trump could petition the Supreme Court to rule on the fraud and rigged election allegations.  And this is where the Supreme Court could rule either way.  With the recent death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, it is expected that Trump will nominate a hard-line conservative to replace her.  That would put the Supreme Court with a 6-3 conservative majority.  However, recent Supreme Court decisions showed that three justices have crossed ideological lines to favor the    liberal minority’s thinking. 
      And this is where Trump hopes that at least five of the six conservatives in the Supreme Court would support him.  But with the voting record of conservative Chief Justice John Roberts tilting either way – he’s the ”swing vote” in the court – and possibly Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh (both of them ruled against Trump in the Court’s decision over whether Trump could defy a subpoena making him turn over his tax returns) there is no guarantee that Trump would get a 5-4 vote in his favor.  But what if he doesn’t get it?
(PerryDiaz@gmail.com)
 

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