by MATTHEW STEVENSON
What’s the matter with Donald Trump and the Republican Party that they are making such a hash of stealing an election? Why are they making such a mockery of our finest political tradition? Have they no sense of history?
In 2000, even the hopelessly inept George W. Bush (“Is our children learning?”) figured out how, after 18,000 residents in Palm Beach county mistakenly cast their votes for Patrick Buchanan, the Supreme Court could deny an accurate recount of the errantly dimpled chads (“for the sake of our democracy…”) and grant him the presidency, as if part of an inheritance.
In 1960, John F. Kennedy decided that to win the presidency he would need, among his vote counters, Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley (“vote early and vote often…”) and Texas Senator Lyndon Baines Johnson (running as JFK’s vice-president).
In Cook County Chicago in 1960, Kennedy got almost 400,000 more votes than did the Democratic candidate in 1956, who was the former popular governor of Illinois, Adlai E. Stevenson II. Yes, I know: hard to imagine. Kennedy won Illinois in 1960 by a margin of 8,858 votes.
In Texas, Kennedy won by 46,266 votes. As JFK’s father liked to joke, imagining a telegram to his son: “Dear Jack: Don’t buy a single vote more than necessary. I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay for a landslide.” Presumably 46,266 was in line with LBJ’s budget.
And then there was the time, in the 1876, when 101% of the residents in South Carolina voted in the presidential election. In 2020 is Trump even trying?
Democracy in Action
In American history counting votes, honestly anyway, often has had little to do with who becomes president.
George Washington won the first two elections with 100% of the votes cast, and after that, the story of American presidential elections is one long account of sleights of hand, at least around the ballot box.
In 1800, Thomas Jefferson needed a deal in Congress to be elected president, as happened in 1824 with John Quincy Adams (who defeated Andrew Johnson, thanks to the support of Henry Clay).
Rutherford B. Hayes, Benjamin Harrison, and George W. Bush are among those presidents who lost the popular vote but won in the Electoral College, at times through backroom dealings.
Woodrow Wilson, Bill Clinton, and Abraham Lincoln all became president thanks to the presence in their races of third and even fourth party candidates.
When electoral fraud hasn’t worked to detour the results of an election, assassination and illness have done their part to ensure that the United States retains the best democracy that money can buy.
John Tyler, Millard Fillmore, Andrew Johnson, Chester Arthur, Teddy Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson and Gerald Ford all became president after non-electoral events.
In these great games, Trump, whining at the bar in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, looks like an apprentice.
When Voter Suppression Paid Off
In the 2020 election Trump adopted a strategy that pinned all of his comeback hopes on post-electoral lawsuits winding up in the Supreme Court, where presumably Brett and Amy would do him a solid.
Counterpunch for more