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In this new environment, stealing elections, like all other forms of tyranny, is a lot harder to do. The Republicans will steal a lot of votes. They will undoubtedly retain seats in Congress that do not belong to them. They did it in 2006, too—but it wasn’t enough to keep them from losing their shirts.
If I had to guess about the real vote, that is, the one that reflects the intent of all eligible voters, I’d suggest Obama is probably ahead by 12-15%. The more Dem-friendly polls—the ones that include cell phones and adjust less to the red-slanted environment—are not far short of that. That means something like 15-20 million votes. If I’m anywhere close to right, then barring some sudden, genuine shift in the final few days, McCain will need to steal far more votes than Bush did even in ’04. And yet, despite the increasing inroads of HAVA, the continued pervasiveness of hackable electronic voting machines, and the Democratic Party’s refusal to do much about it, the overall environment seems better, on the whole, than it was four years ago. Horrible, but better.
But if the Republicans need to steal even more votes than before, won’t they just do it? Won’t they steal as many votes as they’re behind by plus a few more? I think this assumption rests on a dubious premise. If the Republicans could steal any arbitrary number of votes they wanted to, they could have given W a landslide in 2004, whittling down “blue America” to a few states the corporate media would have spent the last four years making fun of as weird and out of touch. (This is, in fact, exactly what happened after the 1980-88 presidential elections: never underestimate the propaganda value of an electoral landslide, at least when won by a Republican.) Then it would have been far more convincing when Bush claimed a sweeping mandate, and there wouldn’t have been all the talk about a divided America.
More urgently, why didn’t the GOP retain control of Congress in 2006? I have read the landmark paper “Landslide Denied,” which demonstrates pretty well that massive numbers of votes were stolen in that election and that the Democrats probably legitimately won it by a much bigger margin. But that paper has one weak argument: that for technical reasons the Republican vote-fixers had to set up the fraud too far in advance of the election, when the Democrats’ advantage in the polls was smaller; the fixers therefore did not give themselves enough bogus votes to win when events shifted against them later. This does not make sense for several reasons. First off, unlike a presidential election which is, mandates aside, all or nothing, in Congress every vote counts and effects the ideological balance and which legislation can be passed. Why not simply go all out, steal all you can, and try for a bigger majority? Secondly, Rove and crew are very smart schmucks, and they certainly know that polls a month or so before an election are not that reliable, that things may well change in the “wrong” direction before Election Day. Again, why not just steal the most votes possible (or the most votes that could be stolen “safely,” without much danger of detection), even if it’s more than you think you need, including in races where you currently have a modest lead? Finally, why couldn’t they at least in some localities have built in mechanisms by which they could alter the amount of fraud at the last minute—e.g., vote-counting machines that start behaving differently after receiving some specially marked ballot? This allows the whole thing to be set up in advance and still be manipulated at the last minute (e.g., if you need to rein in the fraud because somebody is onto you).
My own conclusion is quite different: the Republicans lost 2006 because, while they have the ability to steal many votes, they either could not or dared not steal enough votes to win. It looks like McCain’s position is similar to Republicans in Congress in 2006, except that the turnout is far higher, making it much harder.
Is McCain in a position to steal, not the roughly 10 million votes by which Obama’s ahead in polls, but the 15-20 million by which he may be ahead in the true, fraud-free vote? We’ll soon find out. But if McCain were really about to do this, it would be a lot better for him if there was a huge PR/psy-op effort going on now to persuade us that he has a good chance to win.
Well, actually, there is such an effort; it’s just that it hasn’t been very successful. McCain surrogates leak out what they claim their internal polls say, showing the race is getting close, and this gets reported as if it were news; Drudge plays up a single day of Zogby tracking polls that show McCain ahead as if it were World War III; Fox and the usual suspects keep talking about how the race is “tightening,” or about to tighten, every step of the way. But all this is just par for the course when a party with significant media allies is way behind.
The fact is, the vast majority of media coverage has been portraying Obama as well ahead and very likely to win. This makes it much more difficult to steal the election. It’s not just getting the vote count they want; it’s what happens afterwards. Though I consider it well established that Bush stole the 2004 election from Kerry, his “victory” was considered plausible, even expected, by most people at the time, including many, many Democrats. That would not be true if McCain comes on top today.
That’s exactly why FOX called Florida for Bush on election night in 2000: to create an expectation on the part of voters that the election is going a particular way, so that, once it’s finally stolen, the less well-informed or less clear-thinking voters in the middle can say, “Well, it was going that way all along.” This impression lingered, even though it had been established and admitted by all that their projection was based on an electronic “error” and should never have happened is the first place.
Gone is the sheeplike mentality of the “left” of 2000, where some people decried Gore as not worth voting or fighting for, while others threw up their hands and sighed, “What can we do?” In 2008, the liberals are reawakened and have refound their strength; a new militancy is in the air; and even middle of the road Americans are very, very angry at the status quo. In this environment, stealing an election is not only harder to do; if successful it would be far more dangerous. Many of the powers-that-be in our society realize this. McCain cannot count on the unqualified support in “the proper quarters” that Bush used to have, so crucial for any large-scale criminal operation.
Change may well be a-coming.
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