What's also strange, okay, let's call it what it is -- weird -- is that Trump has also been telling people "I don't need your votes," "I've got tons of votes," "we don't need votes, we've got more votes than anybody has ever had," "I don't worry about voting."
This is something that should prick up your ears, because what it means is that he doesn't think he needs to win the vote to win the election. He doesn't think he needs to win the election in order to take power. He thinks something other than votes is going to determine whether or not he gets back in the White House.
At Rolling Stone yesterday, they profiled 70 different election officials who have been put into position in the swing states of Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina and Pennsylvania, who are committed election denialists. Officials that have been put in place in all of those states to make sure that election results, no matter what they are, do not get certified in those states this year.
“At least 22 of these election officials have already refused or delayed certification processes in recent elections” according to democratic election lawyer Marc Elias, “I think we are going see mass refusals to certify the election in November. Republicans are counting on not just that they can disrupt the election in big counties, they're counting on the fact that if they don't certify in several small counties, you can't certify statewide results.”
Seventy officials in place across just the swing states. For all the surface level weird behavior and language, strange choices and incoherence, and odd donors in the republican campaign, the serious core at the heart of it is that they're not planning on the vote being counted as normal. They're not counting on the election results being tallied as normal. They're not counting on the vote. And in fact, Trump is now repeatedly saying the vote will not matter. He doesn't even want your vote. The Republicans are counting on the election results not being certified, thereby creating chaos in Washington around the results.
Just like 2020, right? Just like January 6th, 2021, except this time with no Mike Pence in the way and with Republican officials already in place in multiple states saying, “yeah.” You may not get any sort of official vote.
The weirdness of this campaign is astonishing 98 days out. The dislocation from real campaigning, though, the dislocation from actually asking people for their votes -- that means something. It means they are not trying to win this thing in a normal way. So 98 days out, as Democrats run what by all accounts looks like a juggernaut traditional campaign under Kamala Harris, are they prepared for this level of weirdness after the votes are cast?
