Donald Trump squatted over his GOP opponents and took a massive, steaming dump on all of them in the 2024 Iowa Caucus. Because he has seemingly garnered over 50% of the vote (vote counting is still ongoing in rural counties), it's very likely that Trump is locked in as the GOP nominee for president. Thus far, the big surprise is Ron DeSantis, who ended up outpacing Nikki Haley, who is set to be embarrassed by Trump in the South Carolina Primaries. Vivek Ramaswamy has done the math and bowed out of further campaigning, predictably endorsing Trump, so his story ends in Iowa. What a shame. The man campaigned hard, but I think Iowans knew they had to go with a confirmed winner. Ramaswamy is young; he can easily try again in 2028, to much greater success. He'll be a seasoned campaigner then, with a much more tightly focused message. I understand his bravado in the face of gloomy poll numbers, but this ran against the grain of his otherwise frank and pragmatic nature.
Of particular note is how accurate the polls were before the voting began. It seems that, within a GOP context, vote counts (for polls) can indeed be trusted, so any voting shenanigans lie elsewhere. Ramaswamy was polled at 8%, and that's about where he stands now, with over 95% of the votes counted. DeSantis's narrow trouncing of Haley for second place was predicted by people like Styx, who said DeSantis had the "better ground game." So: can you trust polls? Yes, if you're talking about GOP-only polls. Outside of that, use caution.
As we look to the future, we can expect the left-Dems to get more desperate in their attempts to incarcerate Trump. History-minded people have pointed out, though, that American men have run for president from prison, and in any case, Trump will most likely find himself under house arrest at the worst (as Styx points out, Trump has a Secret Service retinue that must be around him at all times, and how is that practical in prison?). So the real focus has to be on the potential for election fraud. My impression is that no one in the GOP is doing jack shit about fraud, but my boss counterargues that some states are taking measures. I'd like to know which states, and I'd like to know what measures. The measures I'd like to see are:
- paper ballots, hand-counted
- election—all voting—done within 24 hours
- no mail-ins, dragging out the count
- open counting process, not boarded-up windows
- no 3 a.m. truckloads of Biden ballots
- voter ID required
- no dead voters
UPDATE: Ballotpedia has a list of voting methods and equipment by state. About 13 out of 50 states are hand-counting votes. Out of six battleground states, only one is hand-counting its votes. This is not enough, people.
Hmm, not sure why you think that hand counting would be more accurate or less prone to fraud. Looking at basically the same piece of paper thousands/millions of times is mind numbing and one-by-one putting a tick in one column or another is a recipe for inaccuracies.
ReplyDeleteI am for sure an anti-conspiracy person. LOL In todays world, where people are willing to sell their soul for a few minutes of screen time/social media clicks, the thought that there was this nationwide fraud which would have needed to involve large numbers of people seems pretty ludicrous. In addition, neither party has a higher moral ground where they would be above reproach.
In 2016, everything pointed to Hilary Clinton winning. She didn't. Fraud? I doubt it. She just lost. 2020 - same thing.
Just because your guy (generic your - not necessarily you specifically) didn't win doesn't mean fraud occurred.
It seems to be endemic in society today that whatever happens, it is not "my" problem or "my" fault. It is always somebody else. Suck it up and take responsibility. I think it would go a long way towards curing a lot of what is wrong with your society today.
BTW, I do agree with the requirement for ID before voting. An ID is needed for many many things in life. Voting should not be any different.
Brian
And so it begins. We are in for a long ride, but the only way they'll stop Trump is through fraud. Or murder. I don't think they'll keep Biden on the ticket, either. Maybe Michelle or Newsome.
ReplyDeleteBeing reflexively anti-conspiracy in an era when "conspiracy theories" are being proven true (case in point: the Wuhan lab-leak theory, originally dismissed as paranoia by the left) is a dangerous stance to take.
ReplyDeleteAs for the accuracy of hand-counting: the idea is that you can always have the count done by several people, and there's physically verifiable evidence that can be recounted ad infinitum, ad nauseam, etc., thus eliminating the worry of people going cross-eyed. With optical scanning and other electronic methods, it's hard to dig through the 1s and 0s to find anything.
Zooming back to a very abstract level, it's certainly possible that 2016 and 2020 were exactly what they seemed to be—just good old losses, fair and square. But when Biden campaigns from a basement, draws anemic crowds when he does appear in public, then miraculously ends up with 81 million votes after a mysterious 3 a.m. surge, even an anti-conspiracist with any common sense has to scratch his head. Tim Pool is in your camp: he thinks Trump lost because of a combination of perfectly legal pre-election manipulation plus half a country's worth of hatred of Trump. And he's emotionally committed to his position (as most of us are to ours, to be fair).
I'm glad we at least agree on voter ID. They ID people for alcohol purchases, after all, and that's not considered "racist." Yet.
I'm OK with Trump's being "my guy." I don't like him on a personal level, but I generally agree with his policies and priorities, and I did vote for him in 2020 (not 2016, when I didn't take him seriously). There's absolutely nothing wrong with putting your own country and people first.
John,
ReplyDeleteNot sure who Newsome is, but Newsom, yes.
Just curious, do you go back to the US to vote, or can you vote in person at the embassy in Seoul?
ReplyDeleteAs an aside, I certainly dont think that Republicans have a higher overall morality when it comes to corruption/fraud than the Democrats have. Both are equally pretty despicable.
Brian
In 2020, before mail-in voting was being looked at as a huge flaw in the system, I voted via mail-in ballot, which requires the signature of a witness. My Korean buddy, when he learned about this procedure, flared up with, "But that's so easy to fake!" I hadn't thought much about it at the time, but yeah—he was right. This time around, I'm not sure what I'm going to do. Voting at the local embassy is possible, though, so that might be the route I take.
ReplyDeleteAs for moral equivalence: the cynic in me has long been of the "a pox on both their houses" variety. But these days, I see an objective difference between the two sides, with the left being so, so much worse, and it boggles my mind that others can't see the utter ruin that's happening all around us, especially when it comes to the economy and the border.
That said, I don't see the current inequality as permanent. History is pendular. It wasn't so long ago that we were in the neocon-theocrat GW Bush era, and Dubya had no clue how to manage the economy, or even how to be a principled conservative. He created a whole new branch of government, for God's sakes (Homeland, with its uncomfortable echoes of Blut und Boden), which runs totally against the grain of conservatism.
I also frequent the comment threads of Instapundit. Glenn Reynolds himself is more or less a libertarian, but some of those commenters are absolutely horrid. At least one supposedly conservative troll appears to be role-playing a parody of conservatives: he constantly uses racial and other epithets to make his points, and all of our problems come down to kikes and niggers and faggots. But even when we back away from that extreme, there are righties on those boards with attitudes toward, say, gay marriage that I deplore. (I officiated at my gay brother's wedding, so you can guess my attitude.) I simply can't relate to a lot of those commenters.
In sum, I'm not a total rightie, nor can I be a loony leftie. And when I do the thought experiment about whether things would be better under total-right domination or total-left domination, I don't come away feeling comfortable about either (albeit for different reasons). My belief, restated several times on the blog, is that the ideal would be a kind of dynamic tension, with each side keeping the other honest in a libertarian live-and-let-live environment.
But the erosion of civility (which didn't start with Trump) means the sides are increasingly extreme in their rhetoric, and I admit I may be part of that toxic dynamic by posting polemically. But I already quoted Dr. Vallicella on that score (the need for polemics), so until the left learns to moderate itself, I have no immediate plans to change.
On a personal note, the friends I've lost since Trump have all been lefties. Instead of discussing things, they just cut me off. I'm a fan of dialogue; in grad school, I was deeply interested in interreligious dialogue, and I see definite parallels between the religious sphere and the political sphere. So it's always disappointing when people just cut you off, but as they say: maybe they were never friends to begin with.