Cameron Joseph Profile picture
Sep 21, 2020 8 tweets 2 min read Read on X
.@realDonaldTrump has signaled strongly that he won't concede if he loses this election. I gamed out what could happen next. There are some really alarming scenarios.

vice.com/en_us/article/…
The key tipping-point Electoral College states (AZ/MI/PA/WI) all will use heavy vote by mail this election and all but AZ can't start counting ballots 'til election day means long counts expected - and Trump could lead big on election day even in states where he'll lose.
On top of that, mail ballots are a lot more likely to be rejected for technical reasons (missing signatures/envelopes/witness signatures/etc)— and a lot more likely to face litigation over whether they should count post-election.
PA, for instance, took 3 weeks to count ballots after their primary. There's only about a month before states legally have to certify their results for the electoral college. Doesn't leave much time for potential litigation...
We're already seeing isolated violence in the streets from protests. If Trump claims he's been robbed — or if the left thinks the GOP is stealing the election — that could escalate, esp. if Trump seeks to escalate it, as he did during the BLM protests.
The fact that MI, PA & WI all have Dem govs and GOP legislatures raises chances for them to certify two different slates of electors if the final count. Congress is supposed to resolve it if that happens, but laws governing what happens at that point are murky at best.
And RBG's death could matter - if fighting over ballot counts or (lord forbid) competing slates of electors winds up in the Supreme Court, either a hobbled 8-member court or one with a brand-new justice rammed through by the GOP would be arbitrating the election.
Anyways, I haven't been sleeping well the last week or so.

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More from @cam_joseph

Nov 3, 2023
I spent the last few months trying to get my head around Tommy Tuberville for @RollingStone. Talked to him multiple times, chatted with former players and a bunch of senators.

Very few are happy with him right now.

rollingstone.com/politics/polit…
Many Black former players struggle to square his racially charged comments with the coach they knew.

Deuce McAllister: "Is this truly a front? Or was this who you were the past 20, 30, 40 years?"

Adlai Trone: "I know who the coach was, but I don’t know who the senator is."
And as we saw on the Senate floor this week, many of Tuberville's GOP colleagues are fed up with him. This has been building for months.

@SenDanSullivan: “Xi Jinping is watching this right now...He’s loving this. So is Putin. They’re loving this! How dumb can we be, man?”
Read 4 tweets
Mar 27, 2023
The Claremont Institute's leaders did more to normalize Trump on the right—then help his 2020 coup efforts—than any other think tank.

But now many of them are embracing DeSantis. And he's returning the favor.

It says a lot about his worldview.

vice.com/en/article/y3w…
Claremont recently opened its first state-based office in its history in FL, and DeSantis rolled out the red carpet.

He's involved them in his hostile takeover of New College, his push to end DEI programs and a K-12 civics program.

They're involved in his nascent campaign too.
“On a whole range of issues where wokeness is a threat he has risen to the occasion—rhetorically, but he’s also trying to do something about it legislatively," Claremont Institute senior fellow Charles Kesler, who DeSantis appointed at New College, told me.
Read 7 tweets
Jan 25, 2023
This week's election for RNC chair will likely feature something we haven't seen in some time:

Mike Lindell says he'll admit election defeat.

"Of course I would accept it," he told me. "There’s no machines involved."

vice.com/en/article/m7g…
Lindell has exactly one public supporter at the RNC out of 168 voting members.

I asked him who else is backing him.

“I wouldn’t tell you that in a million years. What, so you could go attack them? I’m not stupid. You guys must really think I’m dumb."
His campaign is drawing eyerolls from nearly all of the other RNC members.

@IowaGOP Chairman @kaufmannGOP (who backs McDaniel) called it a "pseudo-campaign."

“His candidacy for the RNC shows he doesn’t know how to campaign for an office. Do you see the irony here?"
Read 4 tweets
Nov 7, 2022
Get ready for a long, ugly election week(s).

Trump and his allies have spent two-plus years plotting to turn states with slower vote counts into scenes of chaotic protest, last-minute lawsuits and outright rejections of the democratic process.

vice.com/en/article/v7v…
Former DOJ Voting Rights attorney @beckerdavidj:

“I'm very concerned about the possibility of violence in the post-election period incited by losing candidates."
The two swing states where conditions are most ripe for chaos:
Arizona (mail-heavy state, vigilante voter intimidation, a slate of election-denying candidates)
Pennsylvania (slow mail ballot counting caused by intentional GOP intransigence, focus from Trump folks)
Read 8 tweets
Sep 15, 2022
Blake Masters explicitly called to fire all the U.S. military generals at least seven times over a span of eight months.

“I would love to see all the generals get fired. You take the most conservative colonels, you promote them to general."

vice.com/en/article/dy7…
9/22: "You probably want to fire most or all the generals and replace them with apolitical colonels, who will probably have conservative politics."

2/22: "It means purging the military of the left-wing generals..There's a lot of center-right or apolitical colonels"
Masters even cut a campaign video where he proclaimed "our military leadership is totally incompetent," which Mark Kelly already has in ads.

But this goes far deeper than just dissing the generals.
Read 4 tweets
Sep 7, 2022
I took a deep dive into Toni Shuppe, a top Doug Mastriano ally who's rumored to be his pick to run Pennsylvania's election system.

She's repeatedly pushed QAnon-linked conspiracy theories and credits her political awakening to a wild QAnon video.

vice.com/en/article/jgp…
Shuppe in her own words:

“After I pulled an all nighter watching The Fall of the Cabal, I was wrecked. Between the compelling evidence indicating that the migrant caravan in 2018 was totally staged, to the bone chilling saga of Pizzagate..."
"..., to the idea that JFK Jr. could still be alive (which I believe is completely false), my world was rocked."

Shuppe repeatedly used the QAnon hashtag WWG1WGA and referenced "the storm," and seemed particularly alarmed by pedophilia conspiracies (Pizzagate/Wayfair).
Read 5 tweets

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