Does Trump’s Acceptance of the Voter’s Decision Matter?
In the Presidential election, the mechanics of counting the votes, appointing the electors, and adding them up is determined exactly by law, and produces a winner. This takes place independent of the oversight or notification of any of the candidates, or their approval or acceptance. If some state’s results are within 0.5%, for example, recounts are allowed, if needed. Mandatory recounts will be paid for by the state, and optional recounts can be paid for by anybody. If it comes down to a single very close state, as in Florida in 2000 in the Gore-Bush election, there will obviously be a contested recount, again with little direction from the candidates. Whether a candidate wishes to accept the results does not matter, a President is chosen by the process.
If Trump still does not “accept” the results, he will be considered differently by the different voting factions. Democrats, Independents and third party voters will consider him a sore looser, and question his commitment to the democratic process, as they do now. Republicans who voted for Trump only out of party loyalty or out of believing the continuing anti-Clinton rhetoric, may well also consider him a sore looser.
Most enthusiastic Trump supporters already consider that the election process will be fixed, and fixed against Trump. We have already written about how Republicans have “fixed” the vote in their favor by discriminatory voter ID laws, by banning felons, who are mostly blacks, from voting in the Southern states, by making polling booths scarce in inner cities, and by gerrymandering in Republican states. Even when the Courts have overturned the voter ID laws, states like Wisconsin are not following the court guidelines to making voting available. V.P. Republican candidate Mike Pence, Governor of Indiana, put in his own fix by shutting down and seizing the records of an organization registering minority voters. To this date, we have not heard what laws they might have violated. The ruling for unlimited PAC donations in Citizens United was supposed to help Republicans, but has failed Trump.
Today we learned that election trickster Roger Stone is organizing Vote Protectors to conduct exit polls of all voters in Black urban districts. This is as intimidating as possible, and highly likely to lead to violence on video. It directly interferes with the privacy and freedom of the voting process. Trump has called for police officers to turn out to monitor the polls, presumably with their arms. As a matter of fact, the Republican Party is under a 1982 consent decree to not interfere with the voting process, as they did in 1981 with armed off-duty police officers. The consent decree expires in 2017. Democrats have already taken them to court for the monitoring that is being organized.
Considering the conviction of fixing by Trump supporters, nothing is really gained for Trump or his supporters by Trump’s refusing to accept the results. Trump’s growing conspiracy theory against him includes most of the media, international bankers, banks that refused to loan him money, women testifying against him, supposedly now a Clinton plot, most of the polls, that show he is losing, etc. (In ordinary people, this is called paranoia.). He does not have to convince his supporters, since for decades the Republican Party and Fox News have been telling them that government and the Democratic Party can never do anything right, and is always conspiring against them. Everything is a plot to just take their guns away from them. Trump has pivoted from saying that only the identification of voters is faulty, to throwing in everything in the world connected with the election is rigged.
After a year and a half of Trump tossing aside all polite, politically correct, and conventional political norms, what difference does it matter if he continues in this tradition? Trump uses the “suspense” of his future acceptance statement to keep the networks monitoring hours of his rallies, as they have his other phony announcements. Trump’s non-acceptance can keep his followers tuning into whatever network he establishes after the campaign, following his tweets, buying his hats, and buying his Clinton insulting T shirts, that do more to demean the wearers than they do to Clinton. The latest Pence statement that 91% of the media coverage is against Trump, ignores the billions of dollars of uninterrupted media coverage of Trump rallies that he has received. Much of the negative media coverage of both Trump and Pence is just playing a clip of their denials, followed by clips of the statements that they denied making. The fact that news shows have Trump spoxes on all networks shows the news to be fair, even though the spoxes mostly try to reinterpret Trump’s statements to make them reasonable, which Trump doubles down on the same or next day.
If Trump simply agrees to the election results by a one line, bland statement, his followers will know that he was forced to do it, and will not believe his acceptance. This will be like Trump’s bland, one-line reading of a statement that Obama was indeed born in the USA. However, there is nobody left to force Trump to make such a statement, or any motivation to do so. Even if he does make the statement, he will take it back the next day.
If Trump really does reject the election results, the Republican Party and its representatives will be embarrassed. But, in any case, they will have to contend with many of their followers being Trump populists and blue collar workers, rather than representatives of the rich business class, banking class, and fossil fuel magnates. The Republicans have to face a desire for tariff barriers, against the many free trade agreements that they have backed.
Republicans also know that if they lose the Senate now, they will lose one Supreme Court replacement, but they have to retake the Senate in two years to cover any more openings. To do so, they will have to expand the Republican registration to the same groups that Trump has been turning away. Many more Democratic Senate positions will be up for grabs then, and Democrats do not turn out well in midterm elections.
