In case 2020 didn’t make it clear enough, the 2022 Republican primaries are proof: Any election result that doesn’t go the MAGA way is fraud! Even when all the voters are Republicans. Take Pennsylvania, where the count for the Senate nomination is tightening with every ballot counted. Trump’s favorite, snake-oil salesman Mehmet Oz, is seeing his lead over Dave McCormick shrink.
Trump has been pushing Oz to declare victory before the rest of the ballots are counted, obviously not caring at all that it’s Republican voters he wants to disenfranchise. “Dr. Oz should declare victory,” Trump said Wednesday, echoing his own 2020 strategy when he said, “Frankly, we did win this election” even as ballots were still being counted.
It’s a grievance that Trump hasn’t let go of, a key part of the Big Lie. “It was 10 o’clock [on election night], and you looked at the numbers, and I’m sure you felt [I had won]; this election was over,” Trump said weeks after the election while the plot to overturn the election was ramping up. “And then they did dumps. They called them dumps—big massive dumps in Michigan and Pennsylvania and all over.”
Of course, it was a big massive dump of votes from Bucks County that gave Oz his slim lead.
Never mind the inconsistency. That vote dump was on his side, so it was clean. The mail-in ballots that are helping McCormick claw the lead back, however, are of course tainted, which means Trump is keeping at it Thursday. “Stop FINDING VOTES” he said on his pallid Twitter replica, Truth Social.
Remember when “finding votes” was the whole strategy for Trump?
“All I want to do is this: I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have, because we won the state,” Trump told Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger on Jan. 2, 2021, trying to overturn that state’s results. That little foray into finding votes, along with the Trump teams’ other efforts to interfere in the election, has now advanced to a Fulton County, Georgia, grand jury.
Expect plenty more “rigged” screeches from the MAGA crowd if McCormick pulls out a win on the basis of mail-in ballots—even when, again, this is a primary of Republican voters. Trump lost the mail-in vote in Pennsylvania and has been bitching about it since. If it happens again to his Senate candidate, he’ll be apoplectic.
The Daily Kos Elections Team talks with Joe Sudbay about the big primaries and all of the redistricting nonsense on The Downballot podcast
His Fox News crew is setting the stage for fighting the results already. “I think under every scenario I have factored out, extrapolated out, Oz will be the winner in this race, but God only knows when we're going to get that final call,” Sean Hannity said on his radio show Wednesday. “And to be perfectly honest, I don't trust people. And I'm not talking about Republican candidates. I'm talking about the people that have the ballots.”
It’s a repeat of the 2020 strategy—hell, even the 2016 strategy: Lay the groundwork for a potential loss by declaring the entire thing rigged. It does not bode well for 2024, not unless Democrats can somehow pull out a Manchin- and Sinema-proof Senate in November, end the filibuster, and pass legislation to shore up security for and trust in elections.
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