2020 Election

Here’s a brief summary of what’s going on with the 2020 US Presidential election.

There’s no chance that Donald Trump will accept the outcome of the election if Joe Biden wins.

Trump could win “legitimately” (to the extent that a legitimate win is possible with the electoral college system), but here is the most likely scenario:

The election outcome will be close, and because Democrats are slightly more likely to vote by mail, the odds are extremely high that the day after the election, Donald Trump will have more electors than Joe Biden. Trump will claim victory, but the count will continue.

At this point, Trump will lean into his claims that mail in ballots are being used to steal the election. Over the following week, those mail-in ballots will reveal that Joe Biden has won more electors. However, Trump and his followers will reject that information — they’ve been primed to do so by Trump himself. That’s the whole reason he’s been doing it, and his followers understand that.

Most Democrats are claiming that this will be the end of the controversy — Biden has won, and so on January 20, Biden will take office and Trump will be physically removed. That’s not how this is going to go at all.

Instead, Trump will be working every possible angle to create excuses for Republican-held states to reject the outcome of their state’s votes. Even if Biden has the popular vote and the electoral college by virtue of those votes, the states can reject the popular vote in their state and send a different set of electors that support Trump. This has happened in the US before, and it is completely legal for a state legislature to choose the electors for their state rather than leaving it to the voters. Republicans will say this is just because the mail-in ballots are tainted.

Then, Mike Pence will announce that Trump has been elected based on the electoral certificates that he decides are worthy to count. Trump will have stolen the election, but it will all be perfectly legal. There certainly might be an extended bureaucratic tussle at this point involving the House of Representatives and the courts, up to and including the Supreme Court (which is Trump’s primary motivation for rushing confirmation of his new Justice).

I’m going to try not to editorialize too much, but it really comes down to how much disruption the Republicans are willing to create (total) and how much disruption the Democrats are willing to tolerate (very little). In terms of state violence as a solution, the military has already vowed to stay out of it, and US law enforcement backs Trump. It really appears as if the Trump regime has the upper hand.

Even if Trump loses the game, it’s very unlikely that he will be escorted out of the White House. If it looks like Trump’s gambit won’t pay off, he will attempt to escape to Russia with his family members. He’ll move millions of dollars into Russian banks before that, so US intelligence will see it coming, but they won’t be able to stop him from leaving because he will still be President at that time — he might even fly there on Airforce One.

Here’s a much more in-depth narrative about the problem that this election presents:

The Election That Could Break America
If the vote is close, Donald Trump could easily throw the election into chaos and subvert the result. Who will stop him?
by Barton Gellman, The Atlantic