One more point: in Scott’s blog post he talks about the “big lie” of Trump: that the election was stolen. I do worry that this is a key point of polarization, where either you fully believe that the election was stolen and the Democrats are evil, or you fully believe that Trump was trying to seize dictatorial power.
But reality is often much more complicated. My current best guess is that there wasn’t any centrally-coordinated plan to steal the election, but that the central Democrat party:
Systematically turned a blind eye to thousands of people who shouldn’t have been voting (like illegal immigrants) actually voting (in some cases because Democrat voter registration pushes deliberately didn’t track this distinction).
Blocked reasonable election integrity measures that would have prevented this (like voter ID), primarily in a cynical + self-interested way.
On priors I think this probably didn’t swing the election, but given how small the winning margins were in swing states, it wouldn’t be crazy if it did. From this perspective I think it reflects badly on Trump that he tried to do unconstitutional things to stay in power, but not nearly as badly as most Democrats think.
(Some intuitions informing this position: I think if there had been clear smoking guns of centrally-coordinated election fraud, then Trump would have won some of his legal challenges, and we’d have found out about it since then. But it does seem like a bunch of non-citizens are registered to vote in various states (e.g. here, here), and I don’t think this is a coincidence given that it’s so beneficial for Dems + Dems have so consistently blocked voter ID laws. Conversely, I do also expect that red states are being overzealous in removing people from voter rolls for things like changing their address. Basically it all seems like a shitshow, and not one which looks great for Trump, but not disqualifying either IMO, especially because in general I expect to update away from the mainstream media line over time as information they’ve suppressed comes to light.)
Without expressing any views on which allegations against the two major sides are true, it’s clear to me that relatively few people in the US are particularly interested in what we might call nonpartisan electoral truthseeking: making it easy, convenient, and secure for all those (and only those) legally eligible to vote, without unlawful foreign interference or illegal disinformation (like false robocalls about poll location).
I think it’s plausible that Dems turned a blind eye to some of this and that led to a few thousand extra votes here and there. US elections (and elections in general) always have issues like this and AFAIK there’s no reason to believe they played any larger or more important role in 2020 than any other election. In fact, given the amount of highly-motivated scrutiny applied to the 2020 election, I suspect it was cleaner than most previous elections.
Even had Trump received any credible evidence of unusual tampering (you’d think he’d have laid it out by now if he had), his actions were beyond the pale. His own Attorney General refused to recognize any signs of fraud. He tried to cajole anyone he could into not certifying the results in any state or district he could despite no real evidence of wrong-doing. His scheme to create alternate slates of electors was an out-and-out attempt at election fraud. There’s no world in which that was intended to be representative of ground-truth.
This article spells out a bunch of Trump’s actions around the 2020 election. I’m curious what you think of it.
To be fair (kinda) to Trump, I think he really may have thought the election was stolen. He seems extremely capable of deluding himself about things like that. E.g. he just said that, if Jesus were counting the vote, he would win California easily. My hot take is that having a president who is actively trying to delude himself and his followers into believing 2020 was stolen (and that 2024 will be stolen) is bad, that it displays a weakness of character & epistemics that should be disqualifying. It should, e.g., make us question his ability to act reasonably in a crisis situation or when presented with a complicated new risk like AI.
One more point: in Scott’s blog post he talks about the “big lie” of Trump: that the election was stolen. I do worry that this is a key point of polarization, where either you fully believe that the election was stolen and the Democrats are evil, or you fully believe that Trump was trying to seize dictatorial power.
But reality is often much more complicated. My current best guess is that there wasn’t any centrally-coordinated plan to steal the election, but that the central Democrat party:
Systematically turned a blind eye to thousands of people who shouldn’t have been voting (like illegal immigrants) actually voting (in some cases because Democrat voter registration pushes deliberately didn’t track this distinction).
Blocked reasonable election integrity measures that would have prevented this (like voter ID), primarily in a cynical + self-interested way.
On priors I think this probably didn’t swing the election, but given how small the winning margins were in swing states, it wouldn’t be crazy if it did. From this perspective I think it reflects badly on Trump that he tried to do unconstitutional things to stay in power, but not nearly as badly as most Democrats think.
(Some intuitions informing this position: I think if there had been clear smoking guns of centrally-coordinated election fraud, then Trump would have won some of his legal challenges, and we’d have found out about it since then. But it does seem like a bunch of non-citizens are registered to vote in various states (e.g. here, here), and I don’t think this is a coincidence given that it’s so beneficial for Dems + Dems have so consistently blocked voter ID laws. Conversely, I do also expect that red states are being overzealous in removing people from voter rolls for things like changing their address. Basically it all seems like a shitshow, and not one which looks great for Trump, but not disqualifying either IMO, especially because in general I expect to update away from the mainstream media line over time as information they’ve suppressed comes to light.)
Without expressing any views on which allegations against the two major sides are true, it’s clear to me that relatively few people in the US are particularly interested in what we might call nonpartisan electoral truthseeking: making it easy, convenient, and secure for all those (and only those) legally eligible to vote, without unlawful foreign interference or illegal disinformation (like false robocalls about poll location).
I think it’s plausible that Dems turned a blind eye to some of this and that led to a few thousand extra votes here and there. US elections (and elections in general) always have issues like this and AFAIK there’s no reason to believe they played any larger or more important role in 2020 than any other election. In fact, given the amount of highly-motivated scrutiny applied to the 2020 election, I suspect it was cleaner than most previous elections.
Even had Trump received any credible evidence of unusual tampering (you’d think he’d have laid it out by now if he had), his actions were beyond the pale. His own Attorney General refused to recognize any signs of fraud. He tried to cajole anyone he could into not certifying the results in any state or district he could despite no real evidence of wrong-doing. His scheme to create alternate slates of electors was an out-and-out attempt at election fraud. There’s no world in which that was intended to be representative of ground-truth.
This article spells out a bunch of Trump’s actions around the 2020 election. I’m curious what you think of it.
To be fair (kinda) to Trump, I think he really may have thought the election was stolen. He seems extremely capable of deluding himself about things like that. E.g. he just said that, if Jesus were counting the vote, he would win California easily. My hot take is that having a president who is actively trying to delude himself and his followers into believing 2020 was stolen (and that 2024 will be stolen) is bad, that it displays a weakness of character & epistemics that should be disqualifying. It should, e.g., make us question his ability to act reasonably in a crisis situation or when presented with a complicated new risk like AI.