BloggeRhythms

Researching material several months before the 2016 presidential election, an undercurrent was sensed that Trump had a very good chance of winning. Various non-mainstream websites, along with two or three polls showed him doing quite well particularly in “fly-over country,” the middle-America basically ignored by the mainstream-media. Trump supporters most often provided insight, noting his platform appealed to basic wishes of typical voters.

Mention of Trump’s possibilities typically resulted in disbelief from others, some choosing to reel off all the reasons a Trump win was impossible. After all he was running against  Bill Clinton’s wife they said, a virtual shoo-in. Others tried humoring, to soften the effects of the upcoming loss, whereas their belief was Trump had no chance.

This is mentioned today, because a couple of articles contain the same kind of indicators observed before the previous dramatic presidential election upset.

Eric Mack writes @newsmax.com, about Attorney General Bill Barr’s appearance on  "The Glenn Beck Podcast," saying: "I think whatever you think of Trump the fact is the whole Russiagate thing was a grave injustice. It appears to be a dirty political trick too. Used first to hobble him, then potentially to drive him from office."

“The Durham investigation reveals the Clinton campaign and related operatives worked to spin a political "narrative" against Trump, according to Barr, who told Beck: "I believe it is seditious, yes."

"Whether that can be proved in court as a crime is one issue, but I think people are now coming to see what actually happened," he continued.
"It was a gross injustice and it hurt the United States in many ways, including what we're seeing in Ukraine these days. It distorted our foreign policy."
"I felt that the president was not getting his due as president. He was entitled, having won the election, to implement his administration, and they worked, they had him on the ropes."

Barr then resigned when he says he “could not stand behind Trump's continued effort to hold Democrats to account for election fraud Jan. 6, which he compared to "intimidation" like Democrats and abortion activists are pushing with the protests outside the homes of Supreme Court justices.”
"One branch of government shouldn't be using a mob to intimidate another branch of government," Barr said.

Despite Barr’s personal misgivings, however, at the time of Trump’s questioning the election results, there was considerable refusal to accept them across the nation whereas voter fraud was suspected.

Fox News host Tucker Carlson put it this way, “doubling down on his pro-Trump narratives, outright accusing the left of rigging the election and peddling Trump’s voting-machine conspiracy theory in his latest election rant.

“Democrats used the coronavirus to change the system of voting. They vastly increased the number of mail-in ballots because they knew their candidates would benefit from less secure voting, and they were right,” he continued.

They used the courts to neutralize the Republican party’s single most effective get-out-the-vote operation, which for generations had been the National Rifle Association. Not enough has been written about this, but anyone on the ground saw it. Thanks to legal harassment from the left, the NRA played a vastly reduced role in the election, and that made a huge difference in swing states like Pennsylvania and others.”

“But above all, Democrats harnessed the power of big tech to win this election. Virtually all news in the English speaking world travels through a single company: Google. A huge percentage of our political debates take place on Facebook and Twitter. If you use technology to censor the ideas that people are allowed to express online, ultimately you control how the population votes, and that’s exactly what they did. They rigged the election in front of all of us, and nobody did anything about it.”

Similarly, although not “rigging,” a similar result is attained through crossover voting where permitted in primary’s. “An Associated Press analysis of early voting records from data firm L2 found that more than 37,000 people who voted in Georgia’s Democratic primary two years ago cast ballots in last week’s Republican primary, an unusually high number of so-called crossover voters. Even taking into account the limited sample of early votes, the data reveal that crossover voters were consequential in defeating Trump’s hand-picked candidates for secretary of state and, to a lesser extent, governor.

“Crossover voting, also known as strategic voting, is not exclusive to Georgia this primary season as voters across the political spectrum work to stop Trump-backed extremists from winning control of state and federal governments. The phenomenon is playing out in multiple primary contests, sometimes organically and sometimes in response to a coordinated effort by Trump’s opponents.

“On the forefront of the crossover movement, Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., has called for an “uneasy alliance” between Democrats, independents and Republicans to take down pro-Trump candidates in GOP primaries whenever and wherever possible. Some states have open primaries like Georgia that allow people to vote in either primary, while other states have more restrictive rules.

 “In an interview, Kinzinger said he was pleasantly surprised by the Democrats’ response in some races. He said he never expected the movement to be an “earth-shattering game-changer” right away.
“Kinzinger’s political organization, Country First, targeted thousands of former Georgia Democrats with mailers and text messages urging them to support Republican candidates for “sake of democracy.”

Beyond the importance of the following text itself, another anti-Trump factor is the clear bias illustrated in the writing’s tone: “Trump warned conservatives about crossover voting while campaigning Saturday in Wyoming, another state where the former president’s opponents are calling for Democrats to intervene — this time to help save Rep. Liz Cheney from a Trump-backed primary challenger. Cheney, like Raffensperger and Kemp, refused to embrace Trump’s lies about the 2020 election. She also voted for his second impeachment after the Jan. 6 insurrection.”

Here, instead of simply reporting about the primary itself, the Associated Press adds their clearly biased ideology in adding the words “Trump’s lies about the 2020 election,” unnecessary to the reporting. Also adding the difficulty of extrapolating what is factual reporting and what is political preference. 

Nevertheless, the data speaks for itself. Because regardless of how Bill Barr believes Trump should have handled his suspicions regarding voter fraud at the time of the election, they were likely correct. Tucker Carlson certainly provided strongly supporting evidence. While at the same time, crossover voting in primary’s produces artificially inflated results for Trump’s adversaries. All in all, developing the same kind of sense arising just prior to Trump’s win the first time, when almost none other than this writer put the array of disparate pieces of victory together.

That’s it for today folks.

Adios