Via Alternet, DCReport finds there’s an interesting set of numbers out of the Bluegrass State.
...In 2017, a Public Policy Polling Survey asked Kentuckians, "Do you approve or disapprove of Senator Mitch McConnell's job performance?" Only 18% approved. He clawed his rating back up to 39% on the eve of the election.
McConnell, leader of Senate Republicans, rarely holds town hall meetings with Kentucky voters—not since a heated exchange with an angry constituent went viral.
1 out of 5 voters appear to have filled out their ballots with votes for both the female Democratic Amy McGrath and the Republican pussy-grabber Donald Trump.
So, what exactly drove these angry Kentuckians to reelect Mitch McConnell with a 19-point advantage over opponent Amy McGrath—57.8% to 38.2%?
emphasis added
There are all kinds of allegations about voting machines switching votes, dead people voting, voter registration lists that don’t add up, and so on. Given that one of the GOP’s go to moves is projection, perhaps we should be asking how much of this explains why McConnell still has a job. Consider:
Even as Republicans across the country still insist that the election was rife with fraudulent Democratic votes, no one's asking how McConnell managed one of the most lopsided landslides of the Nov. 3 election. They should. An investigation of Kentucky voting results by DCReport raises significant questions about the vote tallies in McConnell's state.
- McConnell racked up huge vote leads in traditionally Democratic strongholds, including counties that he had never before carried.
- There were wide, unexplained discrepancies between the vote counts for presidential candidates and down-ballot candidates.
- Significant anomalies exist in the state's voter records. Forty percent of the state's counties carry more voters on their rolls than voting-age citizens.
- Kentucky and many other states using vote tabulation machines made by Election Systems & Software all reported down-ballot race results at significant odds with pre-election polls.
Read the whole thing. There are other items in the report about the election in Kentucky that don’t pass the smell test.
UPDATE: bmaples has a response that adds some perspective, which counters some of the allegations and observations in the DCReport article.
Please note – I run a web site (Forward Kentucky) that covers Kentucky politics. I spent hours looking into this, and talked directly with the chair of the state Board of Elections. Here are some points to know:
- Kentucky has not done voter roll maintenance for about a decade. The state signed a consent decree with the Dept of Justice to begin doing it, and in fact has started. However, there are about 200,000 persons on the rolls who should not be, for various reasons. This accounts for the “more voters on rolls than adults in the country” problem.
- McConnell wins because this is, outside of the urban areas, a deeply red state and getting redder. Party registration doesn’t matter; there are thousands of people registered as Dems who vote Repub. (Reflection of the state’s political background.) Almost no one likes McConnell, but they like him more than they like almost any Democrat.
- Trump’s base turned out, even more than in 2016.
This is a QAnon-of-the-left story. It needs to be called out as such.
emphasis added
The bolded text would explain a lot, without resorting to CT. That doesn't make it any more comforting as an explanation. As for QAnon-of-the-left stories, the things we are seeing from Trump and the Republican Party in plain sight is what we were told was CT when we first started bringing it up years ago. If 2020 should have taught us anything, it’s that we can’t rule out anything on the grounds that “It’s too crazy.”
Meanwhile...
Trump, the Republican Party, rightwing media, and the CT peddlers on the web are not going to give up the “stolen election” fund-raising boogaloo any time soon. It’s all part of delegitimizing Biden and his administration before they even take office. Speaking of rigging, don’t forget, Trump isn’t the only one with Russian connections.
It occurs to me that Democrats in the House should immediately begin planning to hold hearings into the 2020 election, in view of all the CT being propagated far and wide. Kentucky looks like it might be a very rewarding place to start digging. (Even more so if Democrats can take the Senate and start a matching effort there.)
It might be a good chance to see how reform-minded Lincoln Project people actually are, to see how much of a bipartisan flavor they’d like to contribute. (They probably know where a few of the bodies are buried.) Perhaps some international experts could be brought in to testify. And while they’re at it, the hearings could also make explicit how much structural anti-democracy we have.
DCReport looks like a good news site to be following. Don’t forget Eric Boehlert at Press Run Media, and others like Alternet, Mother Jones, or Pro Publica either. There are too many stories the mainstream media let slip through the cracks. Feel free to add your favorites in comments.
If we ever get another relief package out of DC, and you can spare the money, consider taking some of that $600 dollars they’re dangling in front of us and use it to support the reality-based blogging community and progressive news media. Progressives have a serious billionaire sugar daddy gap, and I’d bet they didn't get their fair share of PPP money, if any.