Honoring elections is no longer the Democratic Party way
During one of the debates between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump during the 2016 election campaign, the Democrats became outraged when Trump said he might not immediately accept the election results should Clinton be declared the winner.
Questioned directly as to whether he would accept the outcome should Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton prevail on Nov. 8, Trump demurred. “I will keep you in suspense,” the Republican nominee said. Clinton called Trump’s answer “horrifying,” saying he was “talking down our democracy.”
The response from Democrats ranged from horror to fury. Articles from the entire liberal press attacked Trump for daring to suggest such a thing. Hillary Clinton response was typical, and quite pointed:
“That is not the way our democracy works,” Clinton said. “We’ve been around for 240 years. We have had free and fair elections. We’ve accepted the outcomes when we may not have liked them. And that is what is expected of anyone standing on a debate stage during a general election.”
She continued: “He is denigrating — he’s talking down — our democracy. And I for one, am appalled that somebody who is the nominee of one of our two major parties would take that kind of position.”
Hillary Clinton was correct, but anyone with even an ounce of skepticism would have immediately realized that Hillary Clinton didn’t believe her own words, for a nanosecond. From yesterday:
Hillary Clinton Claims 2016 Election Was ‘Stolen’ From Her
“You can run the best campaign, you can even become the nominee, and you can have the election stolen from you,” Clinton said, alluding to Russia’s election interference efforts.
My, how things change when it is Democrat who loses. Nor is Hillary Clinton the only Democrat unwilling to “accept the outcome” of an election, of “denigrating our democracy.” Also from yesterday: Stacey Abrams again claims she won Georgia governor’s race: ‘I’m not’ a good sport.’
“We won,” Abrams said, according to The Houston Chronicle. “I am not delusional. I know I am not the governor of Georgia — possibly yet.”
Abrams says this despite numerous vote counts showing her losing by more than 50,000 votes
Are Clinton and Abrams the only Democrats unwilling to “accept an outcome” and thus “denigrate our democracy?” Hardly. At the same time Abrams was reiterating her refusal to concede, Andrew Gillum, the defeated Democratic candidate for governor in Florida, was also claiming his election was stolen, despite having lost by more than 43,000 votes.
“Guess what, had we been able to legally count every one of those votes not just in Florida but also in Georgia, I wonder what the outcome may be,” Gillum later said to applause. His comments were first picked up by the Florida Politics blog.
Practically every election that Democrats have lost closely in the past two decades has required numerous recounts and were challenged aggressively in the courts and in the press by the Democrats. Though it is also true that Republicans have also made similar claims, no Republican has yet failed to concede — as Abrams has — once the votes were counted and the result certified.
Increasingly the Democrats appear to expect victory in all elections, and assume that if they lose the election it must have been stolen from them.
And even as they epitomize this behavior, they still have the gall to claim that Donald Trump is the worst player in this game. Also from yesterday: Nancy Pelosi Warns Democrats That President Trump Won’t ‘Respect’ Losing Election Results
“If we win by four seats, by a thousand votes each, he’s not going to respect the election,” Pelosi told The New York Times in a wide-ranging interview published Sunday, adding that she had the same concerns before the 2018 election, when Democrats retook the House of Representatives.
“He would poison the public mind. He would challenge each of the races; he would say you can’t seat these people,” she told the NYT.
Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.
Right now I firmly believe that should Trump win in 2020, no matter how large the majority, the Democrats as a party will refuse to concede and will do whatever they can in the courts to overturn the election. I will also not be surprised if their candidate joins in (no matter who that candidate is), refusing to concede, just like Abrams. Abrams is testing the waters for the Democrats, to see if this behavior benefits or hurts them. And they are finding that today’s Democratic voter likes it, and wants more.
Pelosi in turn is preparing everyone for this behavior on their part. She is priming her supporters to believe that Trump will steal the election, so that when the Democrats refuse to concede those supporters will rally to their support, no matter how flimsy the claim.
Be prepared for an ugly vote count in 2020.
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I have to be honest…. I don’t really understand the US electorial system… The phrases “popular vote” and “collage vote” are lost on me…
I was always under the impression that a country was split into representational areas, and if a party won the most seats in a particular area.. then that counted as “A” , and if there were more “A’s” than “B’s” then that party won..
Serious question… Can anyone point me to a primer on US election basics ?
( Originating from the UK , And watching the brexit fiasco, I no longer understand British politics either…. Perhaps I’m just getting old!)
Lee S: Simple answer: In the U.S., the popular vote does not elect the president. Under the constitution, each state legislature picks “electors” equaling the number of congressmen and senators for that state, and those electors vote for the president.
The legislature also decides how those electors will vote. Since the country’s founding, almost every state legislature has ruled that all electors for their state will vote for the candidate who won the popular vote in their state. There are exceptions.
The system was designed by the Founding Fathers to distribute power more regionally. This system prevents lopsided wins in a few big populace states from dominating the final election, should the other candidate win almost every other state. (This by the way is exactly what happened in 2016.)
The state legislatures have the power to change how the electors are to vote however.
Trump was not talking down Democracy, he was speaking from the point of view of a person that understood that the system that he was playing within was fixed for his opponent. Fixed for his opponent by his opponent no less.
Two very different things, Trump, you, me and many others who have witnessed and will continue to witness the perversions and corruptions of the Democrats revealed are not as stupid as the democrats need us to be. They assume.
But the Democrats want to be able to point the finger of outrage in order to gain some order of leverage over the system and the results.
The Democrats are as desperate as they have ever been and will become more and more desperate as the 2020 elections nears. The existential death spiral of the Democrat party Phoenix continues, what will emerge after is once again rises from the cleansing fire of destruction and resulting ashes still remains to be seen.
PS: Hillary’s problem is not with Trump but with Comey regarding the election and the position he allowed himself to become cornered into. Comey’s ego allowed himself to be dragged into the political realm, he forgot who and what he was, an employee, an inhabitant of pedestrian realm.
But then again Hillary was going to win so it was no biggie, it would all be put right after the election. As in swept under the rug and forgotten.
He got and will continue to get what he deserved and so did and will she.
Robert,
It is my understanding that the Electoral College was put in place for the reasons you cite, but also to guard against vote fraud. I suspect that is the primary reason Democrats want to abolish it. That, and they are losing elections.
When one looks at the geographical area won by the HRC, she won less than 5% but had greater than 50$ popular vote.
The Canadian system is setup some what like the USA’s electoral college in that there is regional equity: much to the liberal and NDPs dislike.
I ask you all: Should a very small part of a country get to make all the decisions for places they have not lived or experienced the problems? If you say YES, then you are a Briton trying to rule the new world, which ended up in one great tea party.
In Ontario, Canada, Toronto rules the province and one example is the rulers banned the spring bear hunt. These were people who had no ties to the northern regions. Now, even in small towns, people can not let their kids play in their back yards due to the high bear populations. Also, by this ban, they put a very negative impact on the northern economies which depended on the US customer.
There are better examples like the illegals running across our NM community. Bus them to Santa Fe and we will hear the outcry about the violence and crime.
For Lee S. and our other international friends:
The key to understanding America’s unusual government structure is to remember that the United States was not meant to be a single unified nation but instead a federation of semi-independent states. Thus the basic unit of government was meant to be the state level, not the federal level.
The federal government was only meant to manage foreign and military affairs and those things with a very broad consensus across the country. Thus, a bill could only become a federal law if it 1) fit within a specified list of enumerated Constitutional powers, 2) was passed by representatives of a majority of the citizens of the country (the House), 3) was passed by representatives of a majority of the states of the country (the Senate), and 4) signed by the President of the United States*. Getting to a majority of the people AND a majority of the states meant either forging a consensus or abandoning the effort at the federal level and instead passing the law in only in the states where it was popular.
The electoral college is based on the same principles in that it gives small states more representation than a pure population representation would and gives large states more representation than a pure state representation would.
I often think the elegance of the solution the Founding Fathers came up with is not appreciated enough today. It is an incredibly simple solution that still works 250 years later in a country vastly larger and more populous with vastly different demographics, issues, and technology than when it was created. I also think that if we could go back to a more Constitutional form of government, most people would be happier (moral busybodies excepted, of course).
*There are some veto override scenarios outside this list, but this is the normal way.
Maine and Nebraska both award electors on a congressional-district basis, plus two “at large” for the entire state.
https://www.270towin.com/content/split-electoral-votes-maine-and-nebraska/
More insidious, however, is the “National Popular Vote Interstate Compact”, whereby when enough states sign on to account for 270 electoral votes, those states will be statutorily required to award all of their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote. Basically kiss the Electoral College goodbye then.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact
Robert wrote: “Increasingly the Democrats appear to expect victory in all elections, and assume that if they lose the election it must have been stolen from them.”
This is what comes from Democrats living in their own echo chamber. Because they reject as friends and associates anyone who does not agree with the Democratic politically-correct points-of-the-day, they do not understand that there are plenty of people who disagree with them. Since everyone that they know thinks the same as them, they conclude that most people — at least rational people — also think like them, so there is no way that they could have lost any fair election.
Another problem that they have is the hubris to believe that they are always right. (Everyone knows that it is only I who is always right, not the Democrats, and if I were wrong, I’m smart enough to know it.) If their solution to a problem does not work as expected, then they must apply more of that solution until it does work, because they cannot imagine a world in which their solution is the wrong solution. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NK6oGi5g4QE (30 seconds) This is why we had such an expensive Stimulus Package under the Obama regime (the pen and phone regime). Keynesian Economics had never worked in the past, so the Democrats decided that they just had to apply more of it in order to get it to work for the 2008 hiccup. They still are unwilling to accept that their stimulus plan stifled the economy and are today insisting that the present good economy is actually Obama’s economy.
Gee, they try to steal everything good, don’t they?
The Democrats also have the problem that they believe that they are the ones who can make a system work, despite that it has never worked before. This is why Democrats have so many calls, these days, for socialist policies. Just because Cuba had to send its leader, Fidel Castro, across an ocean for medical care does not mean that Cuba’s socialist medical care is not the best in the world; thus we must emulate it here in America. Venezuela, the Soviet Union, and the Plymouth Colony may have all suffered greatly under socialism, but Democrats are the ones who finally know how to do it right. A billion people may have come out of poverty in China and India, now that they are moving toward free markets and capitalism, and every free market capitalist society on the planet may be among the richest, most prosperous societies in all of history, but that does not mean that capitalism and free markets are good.
But then again, these two other problems seem to be reinforced by their first problem, their echo chamber. Only the politically-correct thoughts of the day may be uttered or reinforced, and all other ideas must be squelched, rejected, mocked, and attacked, even if physically, such as Antifa (anti First Amendment) does. Thus they seem to be always right, even though they aren’t. They believe that they are too smart to fail at making something work, no matter that the other smart people couldn’t do it.
The only possible conclusion that the Democrats can come to is that only Democrats should be allowed to rule; they are the smart ones, and the rest of us aren’t smart enough to even run our own lives (e.g. not buy large sodas). And if it takes lying to the people (as Jonathan Gruber said, relying upon the stupidity of the (Democrat) voters), then fooling the people into voting Democratic is their primary play. If the people are too smart to vote for Democrats, then work the system to change the vote; use government agencies to intimidate, arrest, imprison the opposition; or collude with the Russians to influence or change the vote.
With all that they have going for them — deception, thugs, stupid voters, their own brains, abusive governmental power, and foreign assistance — how could they possibly lose an election?
It must have been stolen.
This conclusion allows them to justify an attempt at a coup, using government agencies, in order to correct the results of a vote.
After all, it is only fair.
Edward wrote
“Because they reject as friends and associates anyone who does not agree with the Democratic politically-correct points-of-the-day”
Here lies the major part of the deep division growing in the world at large. Not just in the USA, do the liberals among us, reject people based solely on their political point of view. In our area of rural NM, most republicans will talk and befriend a democrat. Not so with the democrat saturated Portal AZ.
It is amazing how well Bob works with the democrat dominated caving community!
Lee, this will help: https://www.usa.gov/election#item-36072
mkent–
Well stated.
We are the United States of America, and the separate & sovereign States, created the Federal Government. (not the other way around– the federal government thinks they rule us all.)
(In the Alternate Universe, these America-haters might all be rendered off-shore and disappeared, all-the-way.)
“Total War”
William T. Sherman and Atlanta
https://youtu.be/Fi7nNhukn-4
4:15
The electoral collage also gives third parties a better chance at gaining national votes.
In states that allow their electors to go proportionally to all candidates, third party candidates would actually get a few votes in the presidential election.
Smaller “third” parties should be fighting to keep the electoral collage.
pzatchok-
Good stuff.
For Lee S. and our other international friends, or anyone fuzzy on the mechanics and original reasoning thereof:
“The Electoral College – How and Why:”
Mark Levin Show 10-24-12
https://youtu.be/gaoJBboEGPY
25:07
>Maine & Nebraska have proportional representation for Electors.
>Contrary to what the fake, poorly educated, biased news media portrays, we don’t actually have a “Federal” Presidential Election, as in a ‘nationwide vote,’ but rather we have thousand’s of individual local elections for electoral college Electors previously pledged to the Candidate.
a musical interlude….
compare & contrast
Neil Young & Crazy Horse
“God Save The Queen/ My Country ‘Tis of Thee”
Americana 2012
https://youtu.be/3Dk9xl_heTY
(4:11)
Lee S.
—more American political minutia;
–Members of our (federal) House of Representatives are directly elected within State congressional Districts, via popular vote. They were designed to be closest to the people via the ballot box and directly accountable. {our federal House originates all federal Taxing & Spending Bills}
Our (federal) Senators were originally elected by their respective State Congress assemblies. In that manner each Senator was accountable to his State and could be recalled or replaced at any time by the State Legislature.
–The 17th Amendment to our Constitution however, provides that US Senators be elected by popular vote, and they are no longer directly accountable to their respective States. (We don’t need a Senate, if they don’t represent the separate & sovereign States which created the Federal Government.)
As well, Article I, Section 8, of the Constitution originally empowered Congress to “lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States.” Article I, Section 9, further states that “No Capitation, or other direct, Tax shall be laid, unless in Proportion to the Census or Enumeration herein before directed to be taken.” .
The 16th Amendment however, upended all that and provided the Federal government power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several states.
>>Repeal these 2 Amendment’s, and we can starve the Beast.
The first thing to explain is that the United States of America is not a “democracy.”
We are a REPUBLIC, even says so in the Pledge of Allegiance. “I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands.”
This is an important distinction lost on most people.
https://www.justfactsdaily.com/the-u-s-is-a-democratic-constitutional-republic-and-yes-it-matters/
Oh, and case #1, though not the first, for the Democrats not accepting results, should be 2000 – Al Gore
At that point in the debate when the President was asked that question, I turned to my wife and asked why the same question was not posed to Queen Hillary.
It appears I was then more correct than I knew.
The much needed reconciliation approaches even closer.
https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/442278-james-comey-is-in-trouble-and-he-knows-it
Attorney General Bill Barr is about as transparent as can be on this issue.
A walking, talking legal heart attack.
How deep will it go? Possibly very deep, so deep that some people may be asking for pardons?
STUPID X’s STUPID = DESPERATE
How desperate and chaotic have the Democrats become?
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/06/05/pelosi-impeachment-1355435
Nancy Pelosi now, “Wants the president to be jailed!”.
Trump has done his train-in and his learning curve has topped out and is now the real world fully operational threat to the Democrat leadership who from the beginning had him off balance. He has become stronger under pressure not weaker. This is the D.J. Trump super power. Trump now owns them all, and they know it.
Pelosi’s statement has absolutely no weight because it is based in emotional desire and desperation because she is being beaten so badly and she is stressed to the max. Impeachment? Go ahead with it already, that too is going nowhere. Why? Because it will be founded in the Robert Mueller biased and now through evidence fraudulent and bias ridden investigation.
In the report, Mueller and his team have been caught cherry picking Trump’s lawyer Dowd’s words in order that it appears that Trump and his lawyers were attempting to manipulate / obstruct the law. This will all be coming out as Bill Barr, the Attorney General, further investigates the investigation and reveals it for what it is, a necessary and desperate political hit job.
President D.J.Trump and Bill Barr are taking care of the business at hand and it does not appear that they will shy away from the chaos and caterwauling that will certainly come in order to rid the well in-trenched corruption and abuse of power that naturally manifests itself in government and in this case in the former leadership of the FBI and CIA.
This is exactly what the Constitution was designed to counter balance over time given the proper leadership. America now has proper leadership. MAGA
I was able to find Jerrold Nadlers road map to facilitating Trumps removal from office, its quite brilliant.
https://youtu.be/zrzMhU_4m-g
The video is an exact analogy to the Democrats ongoing efforts and the now crumbling Mueller report. Its all they have.
Nadler introducing John Dean into the Trump “Collusion / Obstruction” investigation hearing in the form of his testimony. I guess about the Mueller report which he had absolutely nothing to do with and knows absolutely nothing about was another brilliant move in crafting the story line needed for the people of America to absorb and believe to accomplish what the Democrats are unable to do in a contest of ideas and through an election.
No emergency on the border, illegals must now vote, 16 year old’s should now vote, eliminate the electoral college, no identification required to vote, post birth abortion is desired, abandon Israel etc, etc.
Like I have said, the Democrats and the Democrat leadership are toast…………………………………..and they know it. Just like you know it.
just for fun (as it were)….
“Working Class Hero” –
John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band
1970
https://youtu.be/iMewtlmkV6c
3:49
>brief adult language<