13 February 21
Unsurprisingly the Smallest Donors Are Responding
When we get into trouble on donations the small donors are always the first to respond. They see the problem more clearly, they feel the urgency more personally.
The three digit donations are still hard to come by.
Who can step up?
Marc Ash
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13 February 21
It's Live on the HomePage Now:
Reader Supported News
RSN: Bill Simpich | Election Integrity Is Why Trump Lost the Election, and Why the Dems Will Lose at Trial
Bill Simpich, Reader Supported News
Simpich writes: "I saw most of the Democratic presentation for Trump's impeachment trial. The House managers did a great job in telling the Democratic story of how Trump orchestrated the rioters and why Trump should be impeached. Really well done."
However, the House managers didn’t address the Republican story of why Trump and the rioters are American heroes. In the eyes of Trump’s followers, Trump and the rioters fought like hell against a stolen election.
If the House managers wanted to win – they should have addressed Republican concerns. What were they thinking?
When an election is stolen – you can’t expect the other side to concede. Or show remorse. Or go along with Robert’s Rules of Order.
That’s why many of us are still furious at John Kerry for his concession in 2004. We don’t think the Ohio election that year was fair in any way – we think Karl Rove and his pals stole that election due to voter suppression in that state, which swung the electoral vote to George W. Bush.
Right or wrong, that’s what we think, and we have what we consider good evidence. This time, the shoe’s on the other foot.
Right or wrong, when someone believes that an election is stolen – they believe that they are justified in using all the tools in the tool chest. The sky’s the limit.
Polls have shown that 77% of the Trump voters believe that the election was stolen.
The House managers refuse to explain how this was one of the cleanest elections in modern times. I think it was. One of the reasons was because of the expansion of vote-by-mail throughout the country due to covid restrictions. This meant that 90% of the voters were able to cast paper ballots, which created less room for possible problems with the voting machines.
Vote-by-mail also enabled people to vote much more easily. This was a big advantage for Biden and the Democratic down-ballot races.
In retaliation, Trump and his people slowed down post office operations as much as possible, to make sure that many votes never got counted in time. If anyone got cheated, I think it was Biden.
Trump convinced many of his followers that expanded vote-by-mail was the blueprint for stealing an election.
The House managers avoided Trump’s suppression of the post office and the vote-by-mail analysis like the plague – they didn’t want to get the Republican senators “mad.” But the Trump base is already mad. The senators vote according to what the Trump base believes. This issue had to be addressed head-on.
Saying that “Trump lost in court” isn’t good enough. You have to explain why there is no evidence to support Trump’s argument. Facts matter.
Saying that it’s a “big lie” that the election was stolen isn’t good enough. See above.
The House managers refused to do that. I doubt they convinced a single Trump voter that the election was not stolen.
Changing the minds of the Trump voters is the only way to move the polls to a place where the Republican senators would ever be willing to convict.
The Republicans in Congress know that the 2020 election was not stolen. Here’s the proof. In a closed-door, secret ballot vote on whether to remove Liz Cheney (who voted for impeachment) from House leadership among House Republicans on February 3, Cheney won by a 145-61 vote.
This makes it plain that Republican senators would love to get rid of Trump – but they fear Trump will primary them and destroy their careers.
I understand that the House managers are trying to complete a Hail Mary pass to win a conviction against Trump, against all odds.
The odds are long in any case. Why compromise your case by not addressing the vitality of vote-by-mail – the central reason that the Trump voters believe the election was stolen?
Most of us simply refuse to walk in the shoes of the Trump voters. That’s why we are in this horror show today.
These are people who have been lied to by Trump himself. Their manufacturing jobs have been swept out of the heartland. They have no place in the high-tech economy. They know that the two most important factors in today’s economy are where you live and whether you went to college. They know how vulnerable they are – and they turned to Trump as their savior – their strongman.
They are the victims of a massive con job by a master con artist. They deserve our support, not our scorn. The Trump base represents a major portion of the working class in America – with a surprising number of people of color – we can’t write them off because they got hosed.
Trump will be acquitted. His sins have been exposed once again to the top ten percent of Americans who have the time to watch these lengthy proceedings. However, much of the rest of the 90% will forgive Trump’s bad manners – even the sacking of the Capitol – because he fought like hell for them.
The rest of us are going to have to fight like hell for election integrity. For vote by mail. For early voting. For secure ballot boxes. For handwritten paper ballots. Some of the Trump voters will split and join us on some of the issues in this fight – even though the fight against voter suppression is the single reason that Trump isn’t president today.
If our battle for election integrity doesn’t succeed, someone a lot smarter than Trump will win in 2024 – and we can kiss our democracy goodbye. We held onto it this year by a matter of inches. We need to win in the swing states – and that means energizing the base with candidates willing to fight like hell – and enabling the voters to be able to get out and cast their ballots in large numbers.
Bill Simpich is an Oakland attorney who knows that it doesn’t have to be like this. He was part of the legal team chosen by Public Justice as Trial Lawyer of the Year in 2003 for winning a jury verdict of 4.4 million dollars in the lawsuit brought by Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney against the FBI and the Oakland police. 80% of the sum was for violation of their First Amendment rights by being falsely arrested after being bombed by unknown terrorists in an effort to chill their ability to politically organize.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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