by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
The November 3 presidential election is just two days away as I write this, and I’m scared shitless that Donald Trump will win.
I’m not alone. A recent Gallup Poll showed that 56 percent of all Americans think Trump will win -- 10 to 15 points higher than the numbers of people telling pollsters that they want him to win. So many Democrats and Left-leaning progressives are still so snakebit from Trump’s spectacular come-from-behind victory in 2016 that psychologists are already publishing articles about the mental state of people who don’t want Trump to win but remain convinced he will. Somehow the bastard will pull it out, they (I should say “we” here, because this group definitely includes me) think as the election lurches towards its final days. Perhaps we have here a new mental illness, a novel form of PTSD -- Pre-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
I’ve heard all the reasons from liberal news outlets like MS-NBC as to why I shouldn’t be worried. They’re saying that Joe Biden’s leads over Trump in the current polls are about four points higher on average than Hillary Clinton’s were on election eve in 2016. They’re also saying that Joe Biden is far better liked than Hillary Clinton -- the Trump administration and the Republican propaganda machine has tried to vilify him the way they spent 25 years attacking Clinton as the Dragon Lady of American politics, but with his aw-shucks manner and his lovable-folksy-grandpa image, Biden comes off as Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington while Hillary came off as Cruella de Vil.
They’re also mentioning that this time Donald Trump has a record to defend. He’s no longer a political neophyte presenting himself as a breath of fresh air to blow away the ossified stuffiness of the way things are usually done in Washington, D.C. Though he still portrays himself as “not a politician,” the fact remains that he is a politician -- and an unusually tone-deaf politician at that. Trump has made no secret of his utter disinterest in being President of all Americans, including the ones who didn’t vote for him. Rather, he seems to regard people who didn’t vote for him as miscreants who need to be disciplined and punished for their lese-majeste.
Political analysts, including ones who’ve actually run campaigns, have been flummoxed throughout the Trump presidency by his utter refusal to do anything to broaden his base of support. Instead of reaching out to people who didn’t vote for him in 2016, he’s focused on serving red meat to his base and contemptuously ignoring everyone else. He’s said the reason there isn’t going to be another COVID-19 relief bill is that, as much as he would have liked to play Santa Claus and given most Americans $1,200 apiece before the election, it was more important to him to punish “Democrat-led” states and cities by denying them any help to cope with the stratospheric costs they’ve suffered responding to the pandemic.
But there are at least four factors that keep Donald Trump very much in the running and could lay the groundwork for a spectacular come-from-behind victory for him like the one he won in 2016: voter suppression on the part of Republicans throughout the country; the success of President Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in packing not just the Supreme Court but all the federal courts with new judges who are radical-Right ideologues; what I call the “reverse Bradley factor” of millions of Americans who are planning to vote for Trump but don’t want to tell that to poll takers; and campaigns of violence and intimidation against both Democratic candidates and ordinary voters.
Voter Suppression
It’s long been axiomatic in American politics that the higher the percentage of eligible voters who actually vote, the better the Democrats do. Conversely, the lower the percentage of eligible people who vote, the better Republicans do. The modern-day Republican Party is on an ideological mission to impose a libertarian economic policy that will destroy Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, eliminate the right of workers to form unions, and end health and safety protections for workers, consumers and the environment. At the same time they want to shrink government’s ability to regulate economic activity and give huge tax breaks to wealthy individuals and corporations, they also want to impose Big Government control over people’s personal lives -- especially their sex lives -- allowing government to regulate who people can have sex with, how they can have sex and how they may deal with the consequences, both good and bad, of their sexual decisions.
This Republican Party agenda would almost certainly fail if the Republicans themselves were honest about it and if they sought the approval of the majority of the electorate. So they don’t. They frame the libertarian economic agenda in terms of “individual freedom” and the radical Christian Right anti-choice and anti-Queer agenda as “traditional family values.” And in order to make sure candidates committed to those agenda win, they want to keep the electorate as small as possible because the voters who would be hurt by it -- the poor, the young, people of color and Queer people -- are the least likely to vote generally and can be targeted to maie it even harder for them to vote at all.
Voter suppression has become not only something Republicans do; it’s the essence of their long-term political strategy. President Trump has pushed it farther than anyone else -- including putting Louis DeJoy, a Trump financial donor with no experience in mail, in charge of the United States Postal Service to sabotage the entire U.S. mail delivery system just to make it harder for people to vote by mail. He’s also repeatedly proclaimed that whoever is ahead in the count on election night should be declared the winner, and votes received after that day (even if they’re postmarked and mailed before November 3) shouldn’t be counted at all.
Whether Joe Biden gets to be President will, I believe, be determined largely by whether or not he leads in the count in the Electoral College on the night of November 3. If Trump leads on the election-night count, he will file suit in every state that still has outstanding mail-in ballots and demand that the courts rule they not be counted. Thus, not only will Trump remain President, the American people will literally never know who would have won if all the ballots had been counted.
Republicans throughout the country are using a wide variety of voter suppression tactics, including -- ironically -- many of the ones used by Southern Democrats back when they were the party of slavery, segregation, racism and the Ku Klux Klan. They’ve cut back polling hours and closed polling places in communities of color while leaving them open and easily accessible in white neighborhoods -- especially affluent ones. They’ve publicly questioned the integrity of mail-in voting -- with no evidence, but as Hitler’s propagandist Dr. Joseph Goebbels said, people will believe a lie if you repeat it often enough. They’ve restricted the number of drop-off boxes where you can cast a mail-in ballot if you don’t trust the mail to get it to the election counters on time -- in Texas and Ohio to only one per county.
And in addition to outright threats of physical violence against voters who vote “wrong”, the Republicans have filed a barrage of lawsuits aimed at restricting the ability of people to have their votes counted. They’ve gone to court to impose confusing regulations and allow state authorities to throw out a ballot if it isn’t contained in two envelopes instead of just one. They’ve also filed lawsuits to block the counting of any ballots received after November 3, no matter when they were actually cast. And most frighteningly, in Michigan they won a state court ruling giving Republican paramilitaries the right to carry guns into polling places, the better to intimidate the “wrong” kinds of voters.
Court-Packing
“Court-packing” was a derogatory term invented in the 1930’s when Franklin D. Roosevelt, elected to the presidency in 1932 at the height of the Great Depression, and a Congress with a huge Democratic majority were having a problem with the United States Supreme Court. The Court was dominated by long-serving justices appointed by conservative Republican Presidents, and they were throwing out Roosevelt’s New Deal legislation as unconstitutional almost as soon as Roosevelt could get it through Congress and sign it into law. In 1936 Roosevelt won a landslide re-election victory, increased his Democratic majorities in Congress, and decided to use his new-found power to expand the Supreme Court to 15 justices.
Roosevelt’s plan was a dismal political failure. But one of the Republican justices on the court, Owen Roberts, started voting to uphold the kinds of bills to create social-welfare programs, guarantee workers’ right to organize unions, regulate the economy and prosecute financial speculators that he’d previously voted to throw out. It became known as the “switch in time that saved nine,” and because FDR served longer in the White House than anyone else ever has (or ever will), he ultimately got to remake the Supreme Court by sheer attrition.
Over time, the U.S. Supreme Court transformed from a bastion of reaction and repression into an institution of far-reaching social change. And it wasn’t just Democratic appointees that did that, either. Dwight Eisenhower appointed Earl Warren and William Brennan; Warren, the former governor of California, steered the Court to its unainmous Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawing racial segregation and radically expanded voting rights and the due-process rights of criminal defendants. Richard Nixon picked Harry Blackmun, who wrote the majority decision in Roe v. Wade that guaranteed women the right to control their own reproduction. (The dissent in Roe, by the way, was by a Democratic appointee -- Byron White, picked by John F. Kennedy.) Gerald Ford, faced with the task of replacing FDR appointee William O. Douglas, pledged to pick someone who would continue Douglas’s progressive legacy -- and found him in John Paul Stevens, George H. W. Bush put David Souter on the Court, and even one of Ronald Reagain’s appointees, Anthony Kennedy, though usually a solid Right-winger, deviated from party orthodoxy on two key issues, juvenile justice and Queer rights.
Many Republicans thought those appointments of liberal and even progressive justices by Republican Presidents had been mistakes, and in 1982 Right-wing law students at Harvard, Yale and the University of Chicago sought to “correct” that. They formed an organization called the Federalist Society whose purpose was to identify young law students committed to Right-wing ideology, mentor them and help them rise through the legal profession, and ultimately get them lifetime appointments to the Federal bench. Today the Federalist Society virtually dictates the composition of not only the United States Supreme Court but the entire federal judiciary -- and will continue to do so as long as the Presidency and the U.S. Senate remain in Republican hands.
When Mitch McConnell became leader of the Republican delegation in the U.S. Senate in 2006 and majority leader after the Republicans took control of the Senate in 2014, he set out on a long-term project to remake the federal judiciary in a hard-Right direction. During Barack Obama’s last two years as President, he systematically denied confirmation votes to most of Obama’s judicial appointees -- including, most infamously, Merrick Garland to the U.S., Supreme Court -- in order to leave as many judicial vacancies open as possible if and when the Republicans took over the Presidency in 2016.
Since then, he has created a smooth pipeline for Right-wing judges to get on the bench for life in association with President Trump and Leonard Leo, the head of the Federalist Society. The simple fact of life these days is that if you don’t have a Federalist Society recommendation, you don’t get on the federal bench. Though the Federalist Society originally declared itself in favor of “judicial restraint” -- using the courts’ power to invalidate laws as unconstitutional only rarely -- that soon changed. The Federalist Society’s judges at all levels have made decisions to strike down the entire Affordable Care Act, President Obama’s signature legislative achievement and the only part of Obama’s agenda Trump has not yet reversed, as unconstitutional.
The death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and her replacement by her ideological opposite, Amy Coney Barrett, almost certainly means the death of the Affordable Care Act as well as Roe v. Wade, a decision Coney Barrett has publicly announced as “barbaric.” It also vastly increases the likelihood that Donald Trump will win judicial challenges to the election and be able to stay in office for a second term whether the voters want him to or not. Trump himself said as much when he announced he was determined to replace Ginsburg before the election because “the election will be decided by the Supreme Court” and he wanted a solid six-vote Right-wing majority he can count on to rule however they have to rule to keep him in power.
Even if Joe Biden wins the presidency -- which, in order to have a reasonable chance of taking office, he has to do by such a wide margin the Republicans can’t possibly mount a credible court challenge to it -- and even if the Democrats take control of the United States Senate, which they will have to do if Biden wants to get anything done legislatively, he is still likely to have a tug of war with the Supreme Court similar to what FDR went through in his first term. And with six hard-core Right-wing justices on the bench, all thoroughly committed to the principles of the Federalist Society, he’s unlikely to be saved by a “switch in time” the way Roosevelt was -- or Obama was when chief justice John Roberts, who used to hold the balance of power on the Court but has now been almost totally neutralized, switched sides and voted to uphold the Affordable Care Act in 2012.
The upshot is that while Republicans are increasingly denouncing Democrats for threatening to try what FDR tried -- expanding the Supreme Court to get more liberal and progressive justices and balance out the Right wing -- it is Republicans who successfully packed the courts with hard-Right ideologues. Once again the federal judiciary is reverting to its historical role as a reactionary institution in American politics -- and the current Supreme Court will either keep Donald Trump in the White House or, failing that, prevent the Biden administration from doing much of anything. For Republicans, no matter how people actually vote, it’s “heads we win, tails you lose.”
The “Reverse Bradley Factor”
The phrase “the Bradley Factor” entered American politics in 1982. Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, a political moderate and an African-American, was favored to win that year’s election for governor of California against his Republican opponent, attorney general George Deukmejian. Polls on the eve of the election indicated Bradley had a lead of about 2.5 percentage points. But when the actual votes were counted, he had lost the election by 2.5 points.
After that, American political researchers noticed a pattern: other Black candidates in high-profile state and local races, as well as U.S. House and Senate contests, also seemed to do five percentage points worse in the actual elections as they’d done in the polls. Eventually people came to the conclusion that five percent of voters were too racist to vote for an African-American candidate but also too ashamed of being thought “politically incorrect” to tell that to a pollster.
When Barack Obama was elected President in 2008, his win was widely thought of as the end of the “Bradley Factor.” It wasn’t. Obama was ahead by 10 points in the final polls but won the election by only five points. So the “Bradley Factor” worked against him exactly as predicted. He was just so far ahead he won anyway.
When Donald Trump routinely started doing about five points better in the 2016 Republican Presidential primaries than he was polling, I came to the conclusion that there was a “reverse Bradley factor” working in his favor. I argued that there was about five percent of the American electorate which was planning to vote for Trump because they shared his racism, but once again they were ashamed to tell that to a pollster for fear of being thought “politically incorrect.” As the campaign progressed, and especially after Trump won by eking out small victory margins in traditionally Democratic “battleground states” like Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, I concluded that the reverse Bradley factor had been key to his victory. Not only had he done better throughout the country, and especially in these battlegrounds, than the polls predicted, but the Democrats had been lulled into a false sense of security because they’d read the poll numbers as written and hadn’t applied the reverse Bradley factor to them.
So I’m unconvinced by the current polls showing Biden leading by four to nine points in key battleground states. If you apply the reverse Bradley factor, some of those margins become dead even and some fall within the polls’ margin of error (which is usually three points in a national survey and five points in a single state). Trump himself and his campaign staff are well aware of the reverse Bradley factor working for him; it’s what Trump is referring to when he claims he has “invisible voters” or “shy Trump voters” in the wings, ready to deliver decisive margins to him in enough states to win him the Electoral College even if he loses the overall popular vote (again).
There is an open question as to whether the reverse Bradley factor is as important in 2020 than it was in 2016. It’s possible that the percentage of “invisible” or “shy” Trump voters has shrunk simply because Trump has done such a good job normalizing racism in American political discourse that they’re no longer ashamed to tell pollsters they’re voting for Trump. The polls showing that Trump voters are more enthusiastic about their choice than Biden voters -- two-thirds of Trump voters say they’re genuinely excited about him; two-thirds of Biden voters say they’re merely voting for him to get rid of Trump -- suggest that maybe this year the reverse Bradley factor is less significant than it was in 2016.
But if I were a political operative in the Biden campaign or the Democratic Party as a whole (and especially if I were working for a Black candidate running against a white one, like Jaime Harrison’s campaign for the Senate against Lindsay Graham in South Carolina), I would be routinely reading the polls as if my candidate were doing five points worse than they say, and I would be strategizing accordingly.
Political Violence
If all else fails -- if the “reverse Bradley factor,” the Republicans’ intense efforts at voter suppression and the packed judicial system don’t come through for them to re-elect Trump, they have one more ace up their sleeve: political violence. Already the Biden campaign has had to cancel a scheduled event in Texas because armed vigilantes surrounded the Biden campaign bus and threatened to attack the event if it took place.
The most shocking threat of political violence this year has come from Michigan. It snowballed from a series of protests against the state’s Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, and the Michigan legislature for imposing statewide masking requirements and other measures to stop the spread of SARS-CoV-2 and the disease it causes, COVID-19. It attracted the support of at least one Michigan county sheriff, a member of the so-called “Posse Comitatus” movement which regards all government authorities above the level of county sheriffs as illegitimate and an affront to freedom. Eventually it spread so far that 13 people have been arrested for an alleged plot to kidnap Governor Whitmer, hold her hostage, put her through a mock “trial” and execute her.
And what has President Trump said about this at his rallies? While he’s challenged Joe Biden to condemn violence at Black Lives Matter protests (which Biden has consistently done), Trump’s only comment on the plot against Governor Whitmer was to say she should be grateful that “my Justice Department” arrested the alleged conspirators. Instead of condemning their actions and saying that violence has no legitimate role in our country for settling political disputes, he’s condemned Governor Whitmer repeatedly and demanded that she “open your state” and “liberate Michigan.”
Trump doesn’t seem to care that this cavalier attitude puts him on the same ideological side as a bunch of white-power extremists. He also called on the far-Right “Proud Boys” movement to “stand back and stand by” -- to do God knows what, though on the face of it it seems like he’s calling on them to use violence to prevent Trump from being removed from office. When he’s asked for a public condemnation of white supremacists, he usually mutters something vaguely like a statement that he doesn’t like them -- but then he immediately changes the focus to the Left-wing Antifa movement (which exists but is far less organized than the white supremacist groups and is mostly just concerned with keeping Right-wing speakers off college campuses) and says, contrary to statements by U.S. intelligence officials, that it’s the domestic Left and not the domestic Right that’s America’s main terrorist threat today.
Donald Trump’s thuggish temperament and his belief in violence has been on display ever since he emerged down the escalator at Trump Tower in 2015 to announce his presidential candidacy and denounce Mexican immigrants as murderers and rapists. He’s openly called on his rally audiences to beat up hecklers and offered to pay their lawyers if they’re prosecuted for it. He’s said he could murder someone in broad daylight on Fifth Avenue and it wouldn’t change his poll numbers one bit. He’s called on police officers to stop pushing down the heads of suspects they’ve arrested and said they should just slam their heads into the roofs of the cars. The only thing that keeps Trump from being a street thug is his utter lack of physical courage; he’s the sort of chickenhawk who wants to pay other people to do his dirty work for him.
And it’s not just free-lance vigilantes with guns and homemade weapons (including the sorts of IED’s -- improvised explosive devices -- that have wreaked havoc on our soldiers in Afghanistan or Iraq) we have to worry about. It’s also the U.S. military. If there’s a protracted struggle over the outcome of the Presidential election and both Biden and Trump claim the right to occupy the White House, eventually the U.S. military may be called upon to resolve the issue. Biden himself has told reporters that if he wins the election and Trump won’t leave the White House, he trusts the U.S. military to do its duty and evict him.
But should he? The current U.S. military isn’t a representative sample of the whole population; it’s a self-selected group of people who signed up, some because they saw no other way to finance a college education and move themselves up economically; some because they wanted for whatever reason to learn to fight in combat for their favorite cause. What poll evidence exists suggests that the U.S. military is farther Right politically than the country as a whole -- and Right-wing organizations, including white supremacist militias, have openly encouraged their members to join the military in order to learn combat skills they can then bring home and use for political violence against what they call the “Zionist-Occupied Government” (ZOG).
In short, there may be many people in the U.S. military who regard their principal allegiance not to the nation as a whole, but to a white-supremacist vision of it in which people of color, non-Christians and Queers are driven out of it or simply eliminated. There may be many more who haven’t imbibed the whole white supremacist Kool-Aid but see President Trump as the last defender of American freedom against radical anarchist socialist Antifa hordes who want to destroy American capitalism and culture. If it comes down to an armed conflict between Biden and Trump factions within the U.S. military -- if individual servicemembers are called on either to live up to their oath to defend the U.S. Constitution or swear the Fuhrer oath to Donakl Trump -- American civilians can’t necessarily count on most of the troops to back the Constitution over Trump.
We got a chilling vision of what the future might look like when General Mark Milley, head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, joined the delegation of Trump himself and his top officials to clear Lafayette Square Park in Washington, D.C. of legitimate, nonviolent protesters so Trump could walk to a church and do a photo-op holding a Bible and denouncing Black Lives Matter. Milley not only joined Trump’s party, he did so in full camouflage uniform as if he were entering a battle zone. (Later Milley acknowledged that his joining Trump's anti-democracy procession in uniform had been a mistake.) When you have people like Trump’s current defense secretary saying city governments need to respond to street demonstrations by “dominating the battle space” and Trump sending in unmarked paramilitary forces, apparently responsible only to him, to cities like Portland and Seattle to kidnap protesters and hold them in undisclosed locations, it starts to look like Trump will be able to hold the Presidency at will as long as he wants to through force of arms.
The Consequences
The sheer extent of the anti-democratic tactics Donald Trump and his supporters are willing to use to keep him in office whatever the outcome of the impending election is exceeded only by the potentially catastrophic consequences of another four (or eight, or 12) years of a Trump Presidency. Already it’s a pretty foregone conclusion that if Trump wins another term, the American republic as we have known it for nearly 250 years is history. A re-elected Trump will be free to ignore or eliminate any challenge to his power. He will have an attorney general in place (maybe his current one, maybe someone even crazier) who will fulfill Trump’s long-standing promise to launch politically motivated prosecutions of Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and all the many others he regards as his political enemies.
The direct threat Trump poses to the American experiment in republican self-government (notice that I’m using the word “republican” instead of “democratic” because the framers of the Constitution designed the U.S. to be a republic, not a democracy) is bad enough, but Trump poses an even more direct and immediate threat to the lives of millions of Americans. Already Trump’s White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, has said, “We’re not going to stop the pandemic.” Instead they plan to let it run riot across the country and let the virus kill as many people as it takes to achieve so-called “herd immunity” -- even if that death toll runs in the millions. The simple fact is that there are hundreds of thousands -- perhaps millions -- of Americans living today who will survive if Joe Biden becomes President, and will die if Trump remains in office.
And a Trump re-election is not only a direct threat to the millions of Americans who may die from COVID-19 if Trump continues to fight pandemic mitigation efforts and pursue the “herd immunity” strategy. It threatens the entire human race through his rejection of the scientific fact that humans are permanently and drastically altering the Earth’s climate and we’re fast approaching the so-called “tipping point” at which we’ll no longer be able to stop it. Other Presidents, including Barack Obama, at least paid lip service to the fact of human-caused climate change even though their efforts were too weak to address the climate crisis as it needs to be addressed.
But Donald Trump is actively and scornfully against any effort to mitigate human-caused climate change. In fact, he’s directly intervened with the U.S. government’s own scientific agencies to deny them the ability even to monitor climate change and maintain the evidence that it is happening. The actions of the human race in continuing to burn fossil fuels, generate greenhouse gases and pollute the environment far beyond its ability to repair itself are already threatening the ability of the human species to survive as the dominant life form on this planet -- and Trump’s proud and relentless assault on any attempt at environmental protection is only driving more and faster nails into humanity’s climate-change coffin.
