Upcoming Chaos at the Ballot Box, Thanks to the GOP
RFK, Jr and 'No Labels' Are Shills for Trump
Republicans have big problems heading into the next presidential election. Some of their billionaire benefactors think they have the answer, namely more candidates splitting up the vote.
Their leading candidate is toxic, and a majority of Americans believe the pending criminal charges should disqualify him from running..
The number two guy is a wannabe fascist idiot. (DeSantis) He just had the 13 year old son of a whistleblower arrested for posting a meme critical of police in regards to school shootings on snap chat. An undercover agent befriended the young man online and “anonymous” source reported him, leading to police coming out with guns drawn to arrest him for a “terrorist threat.”
In what seems to be a contest, local Republican groups are embracing positions on everything from transgender youth to firearms known to be unpopular outside the MAGA base.
Republican dominated state legislatures are racing to dream up harsh laws based on misinformation.
Kids participating in school sports in Kansas must be willing to undergo inspection of their genitals to make sure they’re not transgender. Missouri eliminated funding for public libraries as a reaction to lawsuits seeking first amendment protections from book ban types. And a gaggle of states are racing to remove some or all restrictions on handgun purchases and carrying in public.
Idaho’s legislature gets the blue ribbon for nastiest law, thanks to a newly signed bill making it a criminal offense for women and any accomplices to cross the state line to get an abortion. Sure, the law is unconstitutional, but so what? In the meantime, providers and patients will spend years in the legal system trying to protect themselves, and as a ‘bonus’ will be outed so wannabe extremists can target their families.
With this short-sighted strategy, Republican extremists will win lots of primaries only to face a huge challenge in general elections. As recent elections have shown, the electorate’s attitude about the seriousness of abortion as an issue has changed since the Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling.
Democratic pollster Celinda Lake was quoted in a New York Magazine article:
“I don’t think Democrats have fully processed that this country is now 10 to 15 percent more pro-choice than it was before Dobbs in state after state and national data,”
Democrats running for keeping access to abortion and/or opposition to draconian laws on women’s healthcare are outperforming expectations. It’s the one issue the GOP has no answers for, and as recent elections in Chicago and Wisconsin have shown, the “soft on crime” pitch isn’t working.
The biggest 2024 contest is, of course, the competition for president. Any known candidate running under the GOP umbrella can only expect 40% of the popular vote, despite the plethora of laws aimed at restricting access to the ballot box.
President Biden has proven to be a “steady Eddie;” not too controversial, apparently hard working and scandal free, and running on a platform opposed to the brutality of Republican promises. His challenge is that he lacks ‘star power,’ with many Americans. Boring apparently doesn’t cut it with a certain class of voters in the age of reality TV.
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While mainstream (party hacks) Republicans lack enthusiasm for their most likely candidate, ultimately they’d rather see Trumpian neglect and antipathy toward governmental functions.
That’s why we now have TWO political campaigns now existing for the sole purpose of siphoning enough votes away from Democrats, either by causing internal divisions, or by creating a third party.
For months now, evil gnome Steve Bannon has been encouraging Robert F. Kennedy to run for president. This has nothing to do with ideology and everything to do with Bannon’s warped world view on chaos as a path toward authoritarian governance.
Yesterday, Kennedy filed a statement of candidacy as a Democrat with the Federal Election Commission. His role, in the Bannonist scheme of things, will be to drum up anti-vaxx sentiment, energizing that part of the electorate.
Beyond the legacy of his name, he has a following, which grew by leaps and bounds during the pandemic, as he proselytized against COVID vaccines.
Via the Associated Press:
His anti-vaccine charity, Children’s Health Defense, prospered during the pandemic, with revenues more than doubling in 2020 to $6.8 million, according to filings made with charity regulators.
His organization has targeted false claims at groups that may be more prone to distrust the vaccine, including mothers and Black Americans, experts have said, which could have resulted in deaths during the pandemic.
Kennedy released a book in 2021, “The Real Anthony Fauci,” in which he accused the U.S.’s top infectious disease doctor of assisting in “a historic coup d’etat against Western democracy” and promoted unproven COVID-19 treatments such as ivermectin, which is meant to treat parasites, and the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine.
His push against the COVID-19 vaccine has linked him at times with anti-democratic figures and groups. Kennedy has appeared at events pushing the lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen and with people who cheered or downplayed the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
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Fallen Democrat Joe Lieberman was the front man for the “No Labels” group in a recent Washington Post article prompted by the announcement of a $70 million campaign to get on the presidential ballot line in all fifty states.
Uncertainty over the $70 million No Labels ballot effort has set off major alarm bells in Democratic circles and raised concerns among Republican strategists, who have launched their own research projects to figure out the potential impacts. As Lieberman spoke, the Arizona Democratic Party filed a lawsuit to block No Labels from ballot access in that state on procedural grounds. Matt Bennett of the centrist Democratic think tank Third Way has argued that the plot is “going to reelect Trump,” and Adam Green of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee has accused No Labels of wanting “to play the role of spoiler.”
“The only way you can justify this is if you really believe that it doesn’t really matter if it is Joe Biden or Donald Trump,” said Stuart Stevens, a former presidential campaign strategist for George W. Bush, John McCain and Mitt Romney, who now works with the anti-Trump Lincoln Project. “So it is sort of a test. If you live in a world where it doesn’t matter, this is kind of harmless. If you live in a world where it does matter, it is dangerous.”
The impetus for this effort comes via some questionable polling by Mark Penn, husband of No Labels chief executive Nancy Jacobson. Supposedly a “moderate” candidate with a “common sense” No Labels agenda would leave Democrats with 64 electoral votes and Republicans with 66.
Those folks must have consumed some mighty wicked mood-altering substances while figuring out that vision. West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, who’s functioned as a one man wrecking crew in Congress, is purportedly interested in taking up their banner.
I can see it now: Vote for the guy who stopped Medicare for All! Vote for the guy who thinks coal is environmentally friendly! Yeah!
“Common sense,” by the way, means whatever makes corporate America happy.
Here’s Luke Savage, writing in Jacobin, with an overview:
As the Intercept’s Clio Chang noted in 2018, No Labels is one among several prominent organizations that leverages anodyne centrist messaging to promote what is, for all intents and purposes, a conservative policy agenda. What’s more, as Chang put it, “The sensible solutions so often proposed by No Labels and its ilk have an uncanny likelihood of benefiting one particular element of our nation’s political economy: the superrich, or more precisely, the finance industry.”
That alignment, of course, is not incidental. When No Labels launched some thirteen years ago, it courted a rogue’s gallery of activist oligarchs and corporate barons who included David Koch, former AIG head Hank Greenberg, Peter Thiel, and Home Depot founder Ken Langone. During the 2018 election cycle, its network of affiliated super PACs raised more than $11 million from just over fifty individual donors on an average contribution of $124,000.
Strip away the artifice, in other words, and you find a bog standard dark-money operation whose actual mission is to slap post-partisan branding onto an agenda that would be perfectly at home in your average Chamber of Commerce or overpriced Wall Street luncheon.
I do understand that the two party system leaves lots of Americans feeling left out. The reality is that adding another party involves an impossible struggle for the simple reason of our winner-take-all-system in most down ballot contests.
Ranked choice voting (which can be done one locality at a time) or switching to a parliamentary form of government (which would require a constitutional convention) are two potential paths out of our current conundrum.
In the meantime, we must face what’s on the electoral table in front of us. Right now one side is doing everything it can to rig elections and infringe upon the liberties of the people it has “otherized.”
Maybe, just maybe, we can have an honest discussion about voting and political parties once those who would force an authoritarian government on us are repudiated at the polls.
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I am hopeful that all of their nonsensical shenanigans will cost the Party of Death, the Guns Over People Party a huge number of votes.