(This comment focuses on object-level arguments about Trump vs Kamala; I left another comment focused on meta-level considerations.)
Three broad arguments for why it’s plausibly better if Trump wins than if Kamala does:
I basically see this election as a choice between a man who’s willing to subvert democracy, and a party that is willing to subvert democracy—e.g. via massively biased media coverage, lawfare against opponents, and coordinated social media censorship (I’ve seen particularly egregious examples on Reddit, but I expect that Facebook and Instagram are just as bad). RFK Jr, a lifelong Democrat (and a Kennedy to boot), has now endorsed Trump because he considers Democrat behavior too undemocratic. Heck, even Jill Stein has make this same critique. It’s reasonable to think that the risk Trump poses outweighs that, but it’s also reasonable to lean the other way, especially if you think (like I do) that the neutrality + independence of many US institutions is at a low point (e.g. see the Biden administration’s regulatory harassment of Musk on some pretty ridiculous grounds).
On foreign policy: it seems like Trump was surprisingly prescient about several major geopolitical issues (e.g. his 2016 positions that the US should be more worried about China, and that the US should push European countries to contribute much more to NATO, were heavily criticized at the time, but now are mainstream). The Abraham Accords also seem pretty significant. And I think the fact that the Ukraine war and the Gaza war both broke out under Biden not Trump should make us update in Trump’s favor (though I’m open to arguments on how much we should update).
On AI and pandemics: I don’t like his object-level policies but I do think he’ll bring in some very competent people (like Musk and Ramaswamy), and as I argued in this post I think the EA community tends to err towards favoring people who agree with our current beliefs, and should update towards prioritizing competence. (Of course there are also some very competent people on the Democrat side on these issues, but I expect them to be more beholden to the status quo. So if e.g. you think that FDA reform is important for biosecurity, that’s probably easier under Trump than Harris.)
[This is part 1, I will get to foreign policy and AI-specific questions hopefully soon]
I don’t think it’s fair to put an attempt to overthrow an election on par with biased media coverage (seems like both sides do this about equally, maybe conservative media is worse?) or dumping on opposition candidates (not great but also typical of both parties for many decades AFAIK). Scott Aaronson lays out some general concerns well here.
Trump incited a violent coup/insurrection attempt to prevent the 2020 election from being certified as well as other extremely norm-violating and likely illegal behavior to overturn the 2020 election (see long list here). The Republican party and supporting infrastructure (committees, media, influencers, fans, etc.) have since agreed to support his re-election attempt, punished members of the party for holding Trump accountable, and are touting January 6th insurrectionists as heroes.
Lawfare seems more concerning (though also far from new or specific to Dems) - curious what examples you’re worried about here. FWIW, I think the Supreme Court’s Trump immunity ruling is far and away worse than anything Dems have done in the past several years.
RFK Jr, a lifelong Democrat (and a Kennedy to boot), has now endorsed Trump because he considers Democrat behavior too undemocratic
As far as comments from Stein or RFK Jr., don’t third party candidates always hate their mainstream counterparts? The Democratic party, like the GOP, is going to act in ways which help get their candidate elected. Boosting third party candidates who take votes from them is not something an American party will ever do. Maybe that’s not great but it’s more a systemic issue than an issue with the party itself.
One thing I’ll acknowledge in this vein is the Dems failure to run a real primary this year. I think that was a big mistake. There’s nothing illegal about this though, parties are private entities and can do whatever they want to select a candidate. I consider it more of a strategic mistake than an outright betrayal of Democratic principles. To be clear, I think the DNC is kinda incompetent (probably the RNC too though, Trump’s daughter-in-law is leading it now).
coordinated social media censorship
I don’t think the link you provided on Reddit censorship demonstrates censorship? What I saw was mostly people expressing political views in a space where most people disagree with them getting downvoted as well as posts from subreddits with lots of very lefty people where very lefty posts get lots of upvotes. Non-lefty posts and comments get downvotes there. It’s not great epistemics, sure, but it’s extremely typical of both sides. There are very similar conservative spaces where Dem posters don’t even exist (e.g. patriots.win). Am I missing something on this? (I haven’t read the other link you posted which seems more substantial but very long, might read another time).
Arguably Musk is doing something worse with Twitter right now (though I haven’t looked into it). FB is the go-to place for conservatives and conspiracy groups, I really don’t think it’s a haven for liberal censorship.
From the linked comment:
The strongest case for Trump is that the Democrat establishment is systematically deceiving the American people (e.g. via the years-long cover-up of Biden’s mental state
I think it’s really bad that top Dems covered up Biden’s mental state (which is why I pushed hard to get him to step down) and it reduces my trust in the party. I think this pales in comparison to Trump’s willingness to silence critics (e.g. via hush money and threats).
generally growing the power of unaccountable bureaucracies over all aspects of life
To be honest, I’m sympathetic to this concern and I’d be happy to have a reasonable Republican (if we get one) take a swing at reducing over-regulation in 2028. To the extent this is a cost of electing Harris, I will happily pay it.
I think this pales in comparison to Trump’s willingness to silence critics (e.g. via hush money and threats).
If you believe that Trump has done a bunch of things wrong, the Democrats have done very little wrong, and the people prosecuting Trump are just following normal process in doing so, then yes these threats are worrying.
But if you believe that the charges against Trump were in fact trumped-up, e.g. because Democrats have done similarly bad things without being charged, then most of Trump’s statements look reasonable. E.g. this testimony about Biden seems pretty concerning—and given that context, saying “appoint a Special Counsel to investigate Joe Biden who hates Biden as much as Jack Smith hates me” seems totally proportional.
Also, assuming the “hush money” thing is a reference to Stormy Daniels, I think that case reflects much worse on the Democrats than it does on Trump—the “crime” involved is marginal or perhaps not even a crime at all. (tl;dr: Paying hush money is totally legal, so the actual accusation they used was “falsifying business records”. But this by itself would only be a misdemeanor, unless it was done to cover up another crime, and even the prosecution wasn’t clear on what the other crime actually was.) Even if it technically stands up, you can imagine the reaction if Clinton was prosecuted on such flimsy grounds while Trump was president.
The Democratic party, like the GOP, is going to act in ways which help get their candidate elected. … There’s nothing illegal about [not hosting a primary] though, parties are private entities and can do whatever they want to select a candidate.
If that includes suing other candidates to get them off the ballots, then I’m happy to call that unusually undemocratic. More generally, democracy is constituted not just by a set of laws, but by a set of traditions and norms. Not hosting a primary, ousting Biden, Kamala refusing interviews, etc, all undermine democratic norms.
Now, I do think Trump undermines a lot of democratic norms too. So it’s really more of a question of who will do more damage. I think that many US institutions (including the media, various three-letter agencies, etc) push back strongly against Trump’s norm-breaking, but overlook or even enable Democrat norm-breaking—for instance, keeping Biden’s mental state secret for several years. Because of this I am roughly equally worried about both.
Scott Aaronson lays out some general concerns well here.
I don’t really see much substance here. E.g. Aaronson says “Trump’s values, such as they are, would seem to be “America First,” protectionism, vengeance, humiliation of enemies, winning at all costs, authoritarianism, the veneration of foreign autocrats, and the veneration of himself.” I think America First is a very reasonable value for an American president to have (and one which is necessary for the “American-led peaceful world order” that Scott wants). Re protectionism, seems probably bad in economic terms, but much less bad than many Democrat policies (e.g. taxing unrealized capital gains, anti-nuclear, etc). Re “vengeance, humiliation of enemies, winning at all costs, authoritarianism”: these are precisely the things I’m concerned about from the Democrats. Re “the veneration of foreign autocrats”: see my comments on Trump’s foreign policy.
I don’t think the link you provided on Reddit censorship demonstrates censorship
Sorry, I’d linked it on memory since I’ve seen a bunch of censorship examples from them, but I’d forgotten that they also post a bunch of other non-censorship stuff. Will dig out some of the specific examples I’m thinking about later.
Re Facebook, here’s Zuckerberg’s admission that the Biden administration “repeatedly pressured our teams for months” to censor covid-related content (he also mentions an FBI warning about Russian disinformation in relation to censorship of the Hunter Biden story, though the specific link is unclear).
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.
I basically see this election as a choice between a man who’s willing to subvert democracy, and a party that is willing to subvert democracy [...] It’s reasonable to think that the risk Trump poses outweighs that, but it’s also reasonable to lean the other way
Which things that Democrats have done are as bad as the following actions from the GOP ticket?
It’s plausible to worry that if Trump wins in 2024, and then a Democrat wins the 2028 election, Vance will simply not certify the election results until states send illegitimate Republican electors, which Republican members of the House would then have the opportunity of choosing.[1] This isn’t a conspiracy theory, it’s what Vance said on TV that he would’ve done in 2020.
So we could be in a situation in 4 years in which only one party is allowed to win major elections. I believe the technical term for this is “dictatorship.”
I believe the examples of undemocratic activity by Democrats that you’ve listed in your comment pale in comparison to those actions and statements. But even if they don’t, it’s unclear why they’re relevant to your argument, when Republicans have done approximately all of the things you listed. For example:
massively biased media coverage
Have you read Breitbart or watched One America News Network? Can you name one media company whose staff is largely right-wing which produces better and less biased content than the NYT? If not, why does “massively biased media coverage” count against Democrats but not Republicans?
lawfare against opponents
Do you actually expect Trump to be better on that front? As the WP reported, “In public, Trump has vowed to appoint a special prosecutor to “go after” President Biden and his family. [...] In private, Trump has told advisers and friends in recent months that he wants the Justice Department to investigate onetime officials and allies who have become critical of his time in office. [...] To facilitate Trump’s ability to direct Justice Department actions, his associates have been drafting plans to dispense with 50 years of policy and practice intended to shield criminal prosecutions from political considerations.”
coordinated social media censorship (I’ve seen particularly egregious examples on Reddit, but I expect that Facebook and Instagram are just as bad)
Trump has called for “a Senate investigation into news outlets for publishing unflattering stories about him” and for journalists to be jailed.
I also wanted to address this sentence from your comment:
RFK Jr, a lifelong Democrat (and a Kennedy to boot), has now endorsed Trump because he considers Democrat behavior too undemocratic.
Secondly, the Democratic Party has evolved a lot over time. And a meaningful change that occurred in the last few decades is that conspiracy theorists are much less common in the party now. Both Richard Hanania and Matthew Yglesias recently wrote about how, whereas conspiracy theorists used to be roughly equally divided between the two major parties just a few decades ago, educational polarization booted Democratic conspiracy theorists into the GOP. RFK Jr is an example of this phenomenon.
This could happen even if Democrats control the House, since the Constitution says that each state should count equally were such vote to be held:
The Person having the greatest Number of Votes shall be the President, if such Number be a Majority of the whole Number of Electors appointed; and if there be more than one who have such Majority, and have an equal Number of Votes, then the House of Representatives shall immediately chuse by Ballot one of them for President; and if no Person have a Majority, then from the five highest on the List the said House shall in like Manner chuse the President. But in chusing the President, the Votes shall be taken by States, the Representation from each State having one Vote
You’re framing the situation as a choice between ‘Trump, who is willing to subvert democracy’ and ‘the Democratic Party, who is willing to subvert democracy’. This framing implicitly acknowledges that Harris is not (especially) willing to subvert democracy.
It’s very plausible to believe that both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party are roughly equally willing to subvert democracy, especially given the significant influence Trump has on the Republican Party.
It then becomes a choice between:
Trump and the Republican Party, who are both willing to subvert democracy
vs.
The Democratic Party, who are willing to subvert democracy, and Harris, who is not.
In this comparison, Harris’s apparent commitment to democratic norms becomes the deciding factor in how you evaluate the overall democraticness of the choices.
I accept that I should talk about “Trump and the Republican party”. But conversely, when we talk about the Democratic party, we should also include the institutions over which it has disproportionate influence—including most mainstream media outlets, the FBI (which pushed for censorship of one of the biggest anti-Biden stories in the lead-up to the 2020 election—EDIT: I no longer endorse this phrasing, it seems like the FBI’s conversations with tech companies were fairly vague on this matter), the teams responsible for censorship at most major tech companies, the wide range of agencies that started regulatory harassment of Elon under the Biden administration, etc.
If Trump had anywhere near the level of influence over elite institutions that the Democrats do, then I’d agree that he’d be clearly more dangerous.
You probably know much more about U.S. politics than I do, so I can’t engage deeply on whether these things are really happening or how unusual they might be.
However, I suspect that much of what you’re attributing to the Democratic party is actually due to a broader trend of U.S. elites becoming more left-leaning and Democrat-voting. Even if I agreed that this shift was bad for democracy, I’m not sure how voting for Trump would fix it in the long run. A Trump presidency would likely push elites even further toward left-leaning politics.
(This comment focuses on object-level arguments about Trump vs Kamala; I left another comment focused on meta-level considerations.)
Three broad arguments for why it’s plausibly better if Trump wins than if Kamala does:
I basically see this election as a choice between a man who’s willing to subvert democracy, and a party that is willing to subvert democracy—e.g. via massively biased media coverage, lawfare against opponents, and coordinated social media censorship (I’ve seen particularly egregious examples on Reddit, but I expect that Facebook and Instagram are just as bad). RFK Jr, a lifelong Democrat (and a Kennedy to boot), has now endorsed Trump because he considers Democrat behavior too undemocratic. Heck, even Jill Stein has make this same critique. It’s reasonable to think that the risk Trump poses outweighs that, but it’s also reasonable to lean the other way, especially if you think (like I do) that the neutrality + independence of many US institutions is at a low point (e.g. see the Biden administration’s regulatory harassment of Musk on some pretty ridiculous grounds).
On foreign policy: it seems like Trump was surprisingly prescient about several major geopolitical issues (e.g. his 2016 positions that the US should be more worried about China, and that the US should push European countries to contribute much more to NATO, were heavily criticized at the time, but now are mainstream). The Abraham Accords also seem pretty significant. And I think the fact that the Ukraine war and the Gaza war both broke out under Biden not Trump should make us update in Trump’s favor (though I’m open to arguments on how much we should update).
On AI and pandemics: I don’t like his object-level policies but I do think he’ll bring in some very competent people (like Musk and Ramaswamy), and as I argued in this post I think the EA community tends to err towards favoring people who agree with our current beliefs, and should update towards prioritizing competence. (Of course there are also some very competent people on the Democrat side on these issues, but I expect them to be more beholden to the status quo. So if e.g. you think that FDA reform is important for biosecurity, that’s probably easier under Trump than Harris.)
[This is part 1, I will get to foreign policy and AI-specific questions hopefully soon]
I don’t think it’s fair to put an attempt to overthrow an election on par with biased media coverage (seems like both sides do this about equally, maybe conservative media is worse?) or dumping on opposition candidates (not great but also typical of both parties for many decades AFAIK). Scott Aaronson lays out some general concerns well here.
Trump incited a violent coup/insurrection attempt to prevent the 2020 election from being certified as well as other extremely norm-violating and likely illegal behavior to overturn the 2020 election (see long list here). The Republican party and supporting infrastructure (committees, media, influencers, fans, etc.) have since agreed to support his re-election attempt, punished members of the party for holding Trump accountable, and are touting January 6th insurrectionists as heroes.
Lawfare seems more concerning (though also far from new or specific to Dems) - curious what examples you’re worried about here. FWIW, I think the Supreme Court’s Trump immunity ruling is far and away worse than anything Dems have done in the past several years.
As far as comments from Stein or RFK Jr., don’t third party candidates always hate their mainstream counterparts? The Democratic party, like the GOP, is going to act in ways which help get their candidate elected. Boosting third party candidates who take votes from them is not something an American party will ever do. Maybe that’s not great but it’s more a systemic issue than an issue with the party itself.
One thing I’ll acknowledge in this vein is the Dems failure to run a real primary this year. I think that was a big mistake. There’s nothing illegal about this though, parties are private entities and can do whatever they want to select a candidate. I consider it more of a strategic mistake than an outright betrayal of Democratic principles. To be clear, I think the DNC is kinda incompetent (probably the RNC too though, Trump’s daughter-in-law is leading it now).
I don’t think the link you provided on Reddit censorship demonstrates censorship? What I saw was mostly people expressing political views in a space where most people disagree with them getting downvoted as well as posts from subreddits with lots of very lefty people where very lefty posts get lots of upvotes. Non-lefty posts and comments get downvotes there. It’s not great epistemics, sure, but it’s extremely typical of both sides. There are very similar conservative spaces where Dem posters don’t even exist (e.g. patriots.win). Am I missing something on this? (I haven’t read the other link you posted which seems more substantial but very long, might read another time).
Arguably Musk is doing something worse with Twitter right now (though I haven’t looked into it). FB is the go-to place for conservatives and conspiracy groups, I really don’t think it’s a haven for liberal censorship.
From the linked comment:
I think it’s really bad that top Dems covered up Biden’s mental state (which is why I pushed hard to get him to step down) and it reduces my trust in the party. I think this pales in comparison to Trump’s willingness to silence critics (e.g. via hush money and threats).
To be honest, I’m sympathetic to this concern and I’d be happy to have a reasonable Republican (if we get one) take a swing at reducing over-regulation in 2028. To the extent this is a cost of electing Harris, I will happily pay it.
If you believe that Trump has done a bunch of things wrong, the Democrats have done very little wrong, and the people prosecuting Trump are just following normal process in doing so, then yes these threats are worrying.
But if you believe that the charges against Trump were in fact trumped-up, e.g. because Democrats have done similarly bad things without being charged, then most of Trump’s statements look reasonable. E.g. this testimony about Biden seems pretty concerning—and given that context, saying “appoint a Special Counsel to investigate Joe Biden who hates Biden as much as Jack Smith hates me” seems totally proportional.
Also, assuming the “hush money” thing is a reference to Stormy Daniels, I think that case reflects much worse on the Democrats than it does on Trump—the “crime” involved is marginal or perhaps not even a crime at all. (tl;dr: Paying hush money is totally legal, so the actual accusation they used was “falsifying business records”. But this by itself would only be a misdemeanor, unless it was done to cover up another crime, and even the prosecution wasn’t clear on what the other crime actually was.) Even if it technically stands up, you can imagine the reaction if Clinton was prosecuted on such flimsy grounds while Trump was president.
If that includes suing other candidates to get them off the ballots, then I’m happy to call that unusually undemocratic. More generally, democracy is constituted not just by a set of laws, but by a set of traditions and norms. Not hosting a primary, ousting Biden, Kamala refusing interviews, etc, all undermine democratic norms.
Now, I do think Trump undermines a lot of democratic norms too. So it’s really more of a question of who will do more damage. I think that many US institutions (including the media, various three-letter agencies, etc) push back strongly against Trump’s norm-breaking, but overlook or even enable Democrat norm-breaking—for instance, keeping Biden’s mental state secret for several years. Because of this I am roughly equally worried about both.
I don’t really see much substance here. E.g. Aaronson says “Trump’s values, such as they are, would seem to be “America First,” protectionism, vengeance, humiliation of enemies, winning at all costs, authoritarianism, the veneration of foreign autocrats, and the veneration of himself.” I think America First is a very reasonable value for an American president to have (and one which is necessary for the “American-led peaceful world order” that Scott wants). Re protectionism, seems probably bad in economic terms, but much less bad than many Democrat policies (e.g. taxing unrealized capital gains, anti-nuclear, etc). Re “vengeance, humiliation of enemies, winning at all costs, authoritarianism”: these are precisely the things I’m concerned about from the Democrats. Re “the veneration of foreign autocrats”: see my comments on Trump’s foreign policy.
Sorry, I’d linked it on memory since I’ve seen a bunch of censorship examples from them, but I’d forgotten that they also post a bunch of other non-censorship stuff. Will dig out some of the specific examples I’m thinking about later.
Re Facebook, here’s Zuckerberg’s admission that the Biden administration “repeatedly pressured our teams for months” to censor covid-related content (he also mentions an FBI warning about Russian disinformation in relation to censorship of the Hunter Biden story, though the specific link is unclear).
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.
Which things that Democrats have done are as bad as the following actions from the GOP ticket?
Calling for the Constitution to be suspended
Saying the President should ignore the Supreme Court
Saying that Pence shouldn’t have certified the 2020 election results
Planning to use the military for domestic law enforcement
Calling for journalists to be jailed
Ending a 220-year tradition of peaceful transfers of power and spending considerable and relentless effort attempting to overturn an election
It’s plausible to worry that if Trump wins in 2024, and then a Democrat wins the 2028 election, Vance will simply not certify the election results until states send illegitimate Republican electors, which Republican members of the House would then have the opportunity of choosing.[1] This isn’t a conspiracy theory, it’s what Vance said on TV that he would’ve done in 2020.
So we could be in a situation in 4 years in which only one party is allowed to win major elections. I believe the technical term for this is “dictatorship.”
I believe the examples of undemocratic activity by Democrats that you’ve listed in your comment pale in comparison to those actions and statements. But even if they don’t, it’s unclear why they’re relevant to your argument, when Republicans have done approximately all of the things you listed. For example:
Have you read Breitbart or watched One America News Network? Can you name one media company whose staff is largely right-wing which produces better and less biased content than the NYT? If not, why does “massively biased media coverage” count against Democrats but not Republicans?
Do you actually expect Trump to be better on that front? As the WP reported, “In public, Trump has vowed to appoint a special prosecutor to “go after” President Biden and his family. [...] In private, Trump has told advisers and friends in recent months that he wants the Justice Department to investigate onetime officials and allies who have become critical of his time in office. [...] To facilitate Trump’s ability to direct Justice Department actions, his associates have been drafting plans to dispense with 50 years of policy and practice intended to shield criminal prosecutions from political considerations.”
Trump has called for “a Senate investigation into news outlets for publishing unflattering stories about him” and for journalists to be jailed.
I also wanted to address this sentence from your comment:
This isn’t good evidence of issues with the Democratic Party. First of all, RFK Jr is a prolific, long-time conspiracy theorist. He claimed that the 2004 election was stolen, that vaccines cause autism, that it’s not conclusive that HIV is the sole cause of AIDS, that hydroxychloroquine is an effective COVID-19 treatment, that the COVID-19 vaccines are not safe, that secret unidentified participants were involved in both JFK’s and RFK’s assassinations, and so on. I wouldn’t rely on his opinion about which party is better for democracy.
Secondly, the Democratic Party has evolved a lot over time. And a meaningful change that occurred in the last few decades is that conspiracy theorists are much less common in the party now. Both Richard Hanania and Matthew Yglesias recently wrote about how, whereas conspiracy theorists used to be roughly equally divided between the two major parties just a few decades ago, educational polarization booted Democratic conspiracy theorists into the GOP. RFK Jr is an example of this phenomenon.
This could happen even if Democrats control the House, since the Constitution says that each state should count equally were such vote to be held:
Regarding point 1.
You’re framing the situation as a choice between ‘Trump, who is willing to subvert democracy’ and ‘the Democratic Party, who is willing to subvert democracy’. This framing implicitly acknowledges that Harris is not (especially) willing to subvert democracy.
It’s very plausible to believe that both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party are roughly equally willing to subvert democracy, especially given the significant influence Trump has on the Republican Party.
It then becomes a choice between:
Trump and the Republican Party, who are both willing to subvert democracy
vs.
The Democratic Party, who are willing to subvert democracy, and Harris, who is not.
In this comparison, Harris’s apparent commitment to democratic norms becomes the deciding factor in how you evaluate the overall democraticness of the choices.
I accept that I should talk about “Trump and the Republican party”. But conversely, when we talk about the Democratic party, we should also include the institutions over which it has disproportionate influence—including most mainstream media outlets, the FBI (which pushed for censorship of one of the biggest anti-Biden stories in the lead-up to the 2020 election—EDIT: I no longer endorse this phrasing, it seems like the FBI’s conversations with tech companies were fairly vague on this matter), the teams responsible for censorship at most major tech companies, the wide range of agencies that started regulatory harassment of Elon under the Biden administration, etc.
If Trump had anywhere near the level of influence over elite institutions that the Democrats do, then I’d agree that he’d be clearly more dangerous.
You probably know much more about U.S. politics than I do, so I can’t engage deeply on whether these things are really happening or how unusual they might be.
However, I suspect that much of what you’re attributing to the Democratic party is actually due to a broader trend of U.S. elites becoming more left-leaning and Democrat-voting. Even if I agreed that this shift was bad for democracy, I’m not sure how voting for Trump would fix it in the long run. A Trump presidency would likely push elites even further toward left-leaning politics.