Repeat after me: There was no fraud in the 2020 General Election. There is no evidence of fraud in the vote counts, and no legitimate reason to doubt the vote totals in ANY race.
Got it? That is the response to Trumpers, and it must be the response to those who want to sow doubts about the legitimacy of GOP wins, especially in Senate races. When Cris Krebs says this was the most secure election we've ever had, that applies to every state, and every race. Not just the Presidential race. You don’t get to cite that to respond to Trumpers and then start questioning why Democratic candidates didn’t win down ballot.
That should be obvious in states like Kentucky and South Carolina, which were won by Donald Trump, but it’s also true in Maine, where Biden and the two Democratic congressional candidates won, but Susan Collins held on to her seat.
There was no fraud, and I’m about to debunk the conspiracy theory claiming there must be because “the numbers don’t add up.”
But, first, you ask, what about ALL THAT MONEY we raised and sent to KY, SC and ME to support McGrath, Harrison and Gideon? Surely, they must have won, with all that money coming in from around the country to support their campaigns, record amounts in any state, but surely enough to win big in small states, you say? What about all those phone calls to those states to support those candidates?
I’ve got a secret for you — and maybe there’s a lesson in there: All that money? It probably hurt far more than it helped, especially during the last month. Not just in those states, though. It probably hurt in Alaska and North Carolina, too. Voters were sick of the phone calls, far, far more than anything they’d faced before. They also really resented all that money coming in from out-of-state, from “coastal elites” trying to buy the Senate elections in those states.
Remember Lindsey Graham on the Sunday shows, and talking from the Senate offices, saying he was “getting killed’” by money flooding his state for his opponent, and asking for help? Sure, it was illegal to make that pitch on federal property but Graham didn’t really want or need the money.
There’s only so much you can spend in a month or two in South Carolina, or Maine. That’s why Gideon still had $15 million when the race ended in Maine.
Graham’s main purpose was to get out the word that Harrison was getting gobs of money from out of state. Money from rich New Yorkers and Hollywood types? They don’t like it in Maine, South Carolina, or Kentucky. Nobody wants to be told how to vote by people who have no idea what life is like their state.
I’ve got more to say about this aspect of the argument, but you came here to be convinced that the conspiracy theory you’re reading about is as bogus as the Kraken lawsuits, and I promised to prove that. So, let’s talk about Kentucky. I’ve put this in a comment to that other diary, but I hope more people will see it this way, so I’ve written my own story.
That conspiracy theory which got some attention on Twitter when a woman named Alison Greene posted it? It’s back because Raw Story has written about it, but it’s as baseless as the Trumper claims about fraud in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
The theory is predicated on one main pillar, which is built on quicksand. There’s a secondary argument, which isn’t on much stronger foundations.
Essentially, Alison Greene claims that Mitch has never done this well before, so it must be fraud — and she looks to several counties where he won for the first time. She notes those counties have big registration advantages for Democrats. Ergo, it must be fraud...in Mitch's race alone, I guess. She ignores GOP votes in the Presidential race, and the House races. Her argument is the flip side of the arguments Trumpers are making about GA, WI, PA, and MI. Both arguments lack any evidentiary support and are based on the flimsiest presumption that different results this year must mean fraud.
Are there more registered Democrats in those counties Ms. Greene identifies? You betcha. Do they vote for Democrats? No. Not for years now. Kentucky was largely a Democratic state a few decades ago. Mitch’s rise was a harbinger of what was to come. In my rebuttal to Ms. Greene, I noted that a deeper dive confirms that Democrats are in a steep decline in those counties. The evidence is in the general elections, to be sure. Obama won most of them, but Romney narrowed the gap and won one in ‘12. While Grimes beat Mitch in those counties in 2014, it was clear Mitch was gaining. Trump’s resounding wins in ALL of those counties in ‘16 confirmed that Kentucky was moving red quickly, more quickly in Presidential races perhaps. Trump repeated those wins in ‘20, increasing his margins by 100s of votes in all but one of those counties. It's fair to assume that Mitch greatly benefited by running on the same ticket as the GOP Presidential candidate for the first time since ‘08, when Obama lifted Dem turnout.
Perhaps more compelling though is the primary turnouts. You can see it go down precipitously since ‘08. Sanders won those counties in ‘16, but the number of votes was down by 50% or more from ‘08 high. Also the number of uncommitted votes was up noticeably. That pattern was repeated in ‘20, as turnout fell even farther, and the number of uncommitted votes continued to rise. Clearly, the KY electorate was turning against the Democratic party. The registrations hadn’t changed, but they weren’t voting for Democrats any more. Not in the primary. Not in the general election.
That McConnell won in those counties is not surprising. It's a phenomenon we've seen in the South for decades. The same conspiracy theories have been floated about Florida elections since 2000. There were counties Bush won, where Democrats outnumbered Republicans by 7:1 or even 9:1. It's not evidence of election fraud. It just shows that registrations are a lagging indicator of votes. in ‘20, for the 1st time, Republicans outnumber Democrats in those FL counties, but Democrats have not won there since the ‘90s. That’s happening in Kentucky counties where Democrats USED to win. Get used to it. The population is dwindling, but getting much more conservative. Andy Beshear is our one hope there, but he barely beat out the most unpopular Kentucky Governor imaginable.. Perhaps he can beat Rand Paul for a Senate seat, but it will take a reversal of voting trends there --voters turning against the GOP.
Alison Greene also makes guesstimates based on census data that some counties have more people registered than are of voting age. She naturally concludes that this must mean Russian hackers were busy creating registrations for tens of thousands of non-existent Kentuckians. Brilliant logic. In her Twitter thread, Ms. Greene pointed to one county where she compares registrations (over 11K) to census data (13K population, so she guesses that less than 11k are age-eligible), concluding that Russians must be registering fake voters. What she doesn’t consider is the strong likelihood that this county has done a really lousy job of maintaining its voter rolls. There are probably a good number of dead people and many people who moved out over the years. That’s not just supposition on my part. Look at the turnout in that county — Breathitt County. It was less than 50% in ‘16. About 50% in ‘20. That is 50% of registered voters. That’s in the highest turnout election of our lives. Way below the 60-70% in other KY counties. If the Russians were creating fake registrations to rig elections, then they forgot to submit the votes to rig the election. Dumb, lazy Russian intelligence officers.
In short, this is a DUMB conspiracy theory. Don’t make us look as dumb and crazy as Trumpers by taking it seriously. NEVER speak of it again.
Having said that, I want to return to the question of why Democrats lost in those races. Yes, Trump won in KY and SC. McConnell and Graham winning shouldn’t be surprising. Democratic party ran awful campaigns though. Same in Maine. They tried to demonize their opponent without offering a real agenda. Massive ad budgets for ads that ran in other states to raise the money to pay for those and other ads. Never made the case that they had an economic agenda that offered more for voters than their Republican opponents.
This is a problem that’s fed by the professional consultant class — a group largely dominated by Daily Kos staff veterans and allies at other professional left groups like Emily’s List and NARAL. They run negative messaging efforts to drive the fundraising from out of state donors, but it does nothing to win votes in state. I hope these lessons from these defeats are absorbed by the people who think that money will cure everything. It helps pay staff and pays consultants very handsomely. It doesn’t win votes. Not without a winning message. We didn’t lose because of election fraud. We lost because we had no good message. That must change. It’s the economy, stupid. It always is.