my math is pretty terrible but uh what? Kemp won re-election with a 7.6% margin. Any “standard” Republican should win with about the same margin. MAGA Walker trail by 0.9%. That’s a gap of 8.5%.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/left-e...ocrats-11668112073?mod=hp_opin_pos_3#cxrecs_s For the Left, ‘Election Denial’ Is Like Hindsight—Always 2020 The New York Times gives a free pass to Democrats’ false claims from 2000, 2004, 2016 and 2018. By Barton Swaim Nov. 10, 2022 6:18 pm ET The 2022 midterm election brought an army of Republican “election deniers” into office, or so claims the New York Times. Its website features a list of “more than 210 Republicans who questioned the 2020 election.” They “have won seats in the U.S. House and Senate and in state races for governor, secretary of state and attorney general.” That is, they won elections. The term “denier” is an allusion to Holocaust denial. In the 1990s, activists and pundits exercised about global warming, or what is now called climate change, began calling their adversaries “deniers.” Those “deniers” included many people who accepted the reality of global temperature change but rejected the proposed remedies. Nonetheless, in an effort to delegitimize their views, their “denialism” was tacitly associated with a form of demented bigotry. Now we have election “deniers.” They don’t deny the existence of elections. In fact, as the Times laments, many of them have just won elections, and even more have run in them. Most of them, according to the Times’s own criteria, don’t deny the legitimacy of the 2020 election at all. The Times defines election “deniers” as those who “said inaccurately that the 2020 election was stolen or rigged.” Its page also lists election “skeptics,” people who “stopped short of that falsehood but nonetheless criticized the election.” I’m not sure the distinction matters to the Times’s intended readers. The deniers and skeptics are all listed together, the only difference being a pink versus a red background to the head shot. But is it reasonable or fair to associate people who merely “criticized” an election with people who denied the legitimacy of the winner? Recall that we are talking about the historically anomalous election of the pandemic year, in which election rules were changed in the middle of the race, in many cases without legislative approval. You could find yourself on the list of 210 miscreants, the Times explains, if you “embraced a narrow procedural argument that it was unconstitutional for states”—meaning state judges or officials other than lawmakers—“to bypass state legislatures when they changed voting procedures during the pandemic.” The Supreme Court will consider precisely that question in Moore v. Harper next month. Among the list’s election “skeptics” is Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia. Mr. Kemp rejected Donald Trump’s demand not to certify his state’s electors for Joe Biden, who carried the state by 11,779 votes. Two years earlier, Mr. Kemp defeated Stacey Abrams by 54,723 votes, only to see Ms. Abrams lionized by the Times and other media outlets for refusing to concede the race. Ms. Abrams, who ran for governor again in 2022 and lost to Mr. Kemp by almost a million votes, doesn’t make the Times list of election deniers for two reasons: She didn’t win, and she denied the wrong election. This last point exposes the panic over election denialism as the rankly partisan exercise it is. It is true that Mr. Trump and his most sycophantic allies spread falsehoods about that election. But the list of 210 deniers might have been expanded to include current lawmakers who, “without evidence,” as the Times would say, denied the 2004 election of George W. Bush. That election hinged on Ohio. On Jan. 6, 2005, Sen. Barbara Boxer and Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones objected to the certification of the state’s electors because some voting machines allegedly didn’t work and long lines prevented some voters from casting their ballots. Of the 31 representatives, all Democrats, who voted not to certify Ohio’s electors, 10 will be members of the new Congress that convenes Jan. 3: Jim Clyburn of South Carolina (now the third-ranking House Democrat), Danny Davis of Illinois, Raul Grijalva of Arizona, Sheila Jackson-Lee of Texas, Barbara Lee of California, Ed Markey of Massachusetts (now a senator), Frank Pallone of New Jersey, Jan Shakowsky of Illinois, Bennie Thompson of Mississippi and Maxine Waters of California. Four years earlier several Democratic representatives, including Ms. Jackson-Lee, Ms. Lee and Ms. Waters, attempted to object to the certification of Florida’s electoral votes for Mr. Bush and were gaveled down by Vice President Al Gore for lack of a Senate supporter. Many elected officials would later assert that Mr. Bush wasn’t the rightful winner. Mr. Grijalva, Ms. Jackson-Lee, Ms. Lee and Ms. Waters also attempted to object to the certification of Trump electors in 2017, as did Reps. Pramila Jayapal of Washington, Jim McGovern of Massachusetts and Jamie Raskin of Maryland. The Times also excludes members of Congress who characterized the 2016 election as illegitimate—the result of Russian meddling or “collusion” between the Trump campaign and Vladimir Putin. That was as powerful a denial of an election as could be imagined, but including the purveyors of that act of denialism would land two thirds of the Democratic Party on the list—not to mention, if we included non-officeholders, some of the Times’s own journalists. None of this is to say that the repudiation of the 2020 election was insignificant or didn’t happen. Some election-winners on the Times’s list of deniers, among them Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, deserve to be there. Others such as Don Bolduc of New Hampshire and Kari Lake of Arizona, would be rightly on the list if they won. But it is not amiss to recall that 2020, the year to which the Times unaccountably limits its attention, was a year of rife unreason. Many Americans, including prominent people in academia and media and the entertainment industry, said and did unbelievably stupid things while confined to their homes and hiding their faces from each other. Some fashioned elaborate theories about how an election was stolen. Others circulated idiotic theories about the virus and demanded the closing of businesses and schools. Still others legitimized mass violence because an arrest went bad in Minneapolis. By all means let us consider every American election fair and legitimate, absent overwhelming evidence to the contrary. But if the exponents of elite opinion wish to stop election denialism, they might consider abstaining from it themselves. Mr. Swaim is a Journal editorial page writer.
Hindsight revisit Damn, I completely forgot that Gore legitimately has a strong case that the election was stolen from him. It's too bad he didn't fight back and just let it go.
Stop defending the absolutely illogical nonsense you wrote. Everyone can see that you don't even understand the basics so stfu.
Perhaps the GOP should have tried campaigning on this if they thought they had a good case to make. Instead of complaining about the NYT after the election, WSJ could have tried to make this argument *before* the election.
Gore exhausted his legal options once the USSC ruled against him. His only options then were too to try what Trump did. Gore had too much respect and deference to the Constitution to do that. Plus like with Trump it was unlikely to succeed.
Yeah... I'm not getting his gerrymandering argument at all. While Desantis did a lot of shitty underhanded things to create the gerrymandered districts, that had nothing substantial to do with the number of votes he received.
It’s heartening to see so many deniers not only lose but concede. Doug Mastriano finally conceded during the weekend. Given there still was a protest over the vote in AZ by Lake supporters there still are a lot. It’s going to be a slow process.
Gore actually had a legitimate argument that he had more votes in Florida. It was a matter of whether or not a recount should be done by hand that the Courts squashed. To compare that to Trumpism and the unsubstantiated blanket claims of mass fraud is a bit ridiculous.
I understand your specific point, and actually agree with it--but there is absolutely nothing ridiculous about the premise of the entire essay. Democrats have long cried "foul" when it has suited their purposes. Trump is just continuing the trend.
Exactly. And he would have legit justification to do so since it is 50/50 that the election was legally stolen from him. All of this Dem does it too is laughable when you have two striking examples of Gore 2000 vs Trump 2020. One guy respected the law and put the nation above the party. There are of course some representatives that wanted Gore to push harder. Those are noise and happen all the time - it's parts of an open society with free political speech and diverse viewpoints. We allow them as long as they are just that, mostly venting and noise. What hasn't ever happened is what Trump and the Republican party did in 2020 - 2022 (and possibly ongoing). That is what drives staunch conservatives like Senator Liz Cheney, Judge Luttig, basically all former US Rep AG, and many more calling out the Republican party. But hey, let's do this. If you don't like any of that and see them as equally bad, support democracy and election reform. Never too late to turn around and put your mouth where your fingers are googling.
There has been some speculation that the speaker of the House might be Liz Cheney - that the Speaker does not have to be a sitting member and that all the Dems would support Liz and some of the normal GOP members would - screwing all the election deniers and traitors out of leadership....McCarthy, Jordan etc. DD
DEMS need & use MAGA to divide the GOP. They've (Dems) weaponized the crazy. GOOD LUCK on your next batch of centrists.
I guess I missed the email from Gore in 2000 to show up at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2001 to "FIGHT LIKE HELL!", that "IT WILL BE WILD!" and also that I should try to hang him if he followed the law and certified the election. Apparently I also missed the tweet from Hillary Clinton for the above for Jan. 6, 2017.
I wouldn't use the word "just" there. I don't think it's a mere continuation of a trend. He declared victory well before the voting was even close to being completed and has maintained that he won the election ever since.
