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Already in 2016, there were Democrats who claimed that the election wasn't fair (and therefore wasn't valid). To be fair, all they did was talk...
by AnimalMuppet 3y ago
Already in 2016, there were Democrats who claimed that the election wasn't fair (and therefore wasn't valid).
To be fair, all they did was talk...
- desas 3y agoWasn't that also a thing with the first Obama election? Before that, 2000 had Gore vs Bush and the Florida recount. Is it escalating?
- AnimalMuppet 3y ago> Is it escalating? I think so, yes. Obama's first election didn't have much - just some non-politician named Trump shooting off his mouth. 2016 had actual politicians saying that it was illegitimate. Then came 2020, and Jan 6, and it wasn't just talk anymore. So yes, it seems to be escalating. 2000 was different. The vote was close enough in one state that that there was legitimate doubt about what the actual result was. It wasn't "illegitimate because I don't like the results" the way more recent ones have been.
- dragonwriter 3y ago> Obama's first election didn't have much - just some non-politician named Trump shooting off his mouth Trump wasn't even particularly notable among the Obama birthers, who were quite nunerous, except retrospectively; he also wasn't not-a-politician, having actively campaigned for the Reform Party nomination for President in 2000 (the Reform Party had qualified for federal matching funds, bringing out a lot of nontraditional contenders) before abandoning the effort in February 2000, shortly after Jesse Ventura, who had convinced him the Reform Party was the right vehicle for his political ambitions, left the party. At the time of the Obama election, Trump was a politician who hadn't succeeded looking for an in with a major party core constituency, and grabbing on to the widespread birther conspiracies as a means of achieving that.
- skissane 3y ago> he also wasn't not-a-politician, having actively campaigned for the Reform Party nomination for President in 2000 (the Reform Party had qualified for federal matching funds, bringing out a lot of nontraditional contenders) In the US, if all you've (yet) done is run for a third party, failing to even win its Presidential nomination-you are really (at that point in time) more of a would-be politician than an actual politician.
- rayiner 3y agoI went back and looked at the 2000 election (as a Gore supporter at the time) and I think it was a step on this path. Gore tried to lawyer his way to victory in an unseemly way: https://www.law.gmu.edu/assets/files/publications/working_papers/01-17.pdf https://www.law.gmu.edu/assets/files/publications/working_pa... After losing two automatic recounts, he insisted on hand recounts—but only in precincts that had heavily favored him in the first place. The whole point is that hand recounts find more votes than machine counts (they can read votes the machine would reject). If you only seek hand recounts in precincts where each newly readable vote is twice as likely to be a Gore vote, then you can quickly close the gap Then the Florida Supreme Court completely lost its mind, doing stuff like allowing Gore to count vote gains so far in partial recounts in Gore-favoring states. See pp. 22-24 above the above. The Supreme Court agreed 7-2 that the Florida recount process violated the equal protection law. Democrats invoked that President against Trump after the 2020 election. Nonetheless, they waged a campaign to delegitimize Bush and delegitimize the Supreme Court, based on a mess that arose out of Gore’s own sneaky efforts to litigate his away around a loss in Florida.
- dctoedt 3y ago> Already in 2016, there were Democrats who claimed that the election wasn't fair (and therefore wasn't valid). Those Dems were very few and far between. Hillary Clinton conceded the morning after the polls closed, and pretty much all Dems at least paid lip service to wishing Trump well in his new office.
- skissane 3y ago> Those Dems were very few and far between. Hillary Clinton conceded the morning after the polls closed, and pretty much all Dems at least paid lip service to wishing Trump well in his new office. According to [0]: > Trump’s mendacity is arguably the Second Big Lie. Four years earlier, the Hillary Clinton campaign and leading Democrats refused to acknowledge the outcome of the 2016 election, by claiming Donald Trump was not a legitimate president. These actions, while certainly not as dramatic or as immediately damaging as the events leading to Jan. 6 (and today), helped bring us to our current situation. > “He lost the election and he was put into office because the Russians interfered on his behalf,” ex-President Jimmy Carter said in 2019, continuing to deny Trump’s victory three years after the election. > “He knows he’s an illegitimate president,” said Clinton, also three years later. She repeated this sentiment in 2020, telling The Atlantic the election “was not on the level,” and again when she called Trump’s win illegitimate. She piled on to this by saying, “You can run the best campaign, you can even become the nominee, and you can have the election stolen from you,” clearly referring to how she saw her 2016 campaign. That's an opinion piece, but it isn't making up these quotes from Carter and Clinton (and it goes on to reference remarks in similar spirit by Jerry Lewis, Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff, Dianne Feinstein, Bernie Sanders, Chuck Schumer, among others.) [0] https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/trumps-denial-second-big-lie-ask-hillary-clinton-rcna55764 https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/trumps-denial-second-b...
- dctoedt 3y agoThat was years later, after more details of Russian interference had become public. The salient point is that Hillary conceded the election within hours after the polls closed — and Obama (the then-incumbent) didn't try to sabotage the Electoral College's vote to keep Trump from taking office.
- rainworld 3y agoThe events of 2020 were more than talk. Tears in the rain.