We'll have an abbreviated, single-topic post this week, largely due to other demands on our time here at TWiA World Headquarters. These demands will largely correspond with the remaining 19 days until the election, but we'll post when we're able.
This Week in the Debate
The third and final presidential debate is over, and pundits and the public largely agree that Hillary Clinton was the clear winner of all three. Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post summed up the evening as well as anyone:
Hillary Clinton: This was the Democratic nominee's best debate performance. She finally figured out the right calibration of ignoring and engaging Trump. Given her considerable edge in the electoral map, Clinton didn't need a moment in this debate, she simply needed to survive. But she had a moment, anyway — with a stirring answer in response to Trump's comments about women and the allegations against him of groping nine different women. Clinton, borrowing from Michelle Obama's speech on the same subject, was deeply human and relatable in that moment. Throughout the rest of the debate, she did what we know she knows how to do well: She deftly dropped a series of opposition research hits and sprinkled in a series of attempts to goad Trump into mistakes. She came across as calm and composed in the face of his, at times, tough-to-watch interruptions. ("Such a nasty woman,” Trump said of Clinton as she was speaking toward the end of the debate.) Her performance wasn't perfect; she struggled to defend the Clinton Foundation, for example, but Trump managed to throw her an opening to talk about his own foundation's issues. All in all, Clinton won — a clean sweep of the three debates.
At the New Republic, Brian Beutler writes:
Over the course of 90 minutes, Trump demonstrated a near-complete lack of knowledge of the state of Second Amendment jurisprudence (or any critical aspect of governance). He promised to select “pro life” Supreme Court justices—an ideological fixity nearly all Republicans understand they can’t explicitly impose on their nominees, but that Trump is too dumb to know he’s not supposed to do. He objected to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s criticism of him as a kind of insubordination; he called undocumented immigrants “bad hombres”; he continued to deny his support for the Iraq war and for arming allies with nuclear weapons; and he called the New START arms reduction treaty between the U.S. and Russia the “start up.”
This all transpired in the first 35-40 minutes of the debate, when a subdued Trump was supposedly at his strongest.
At Vox.com, long-time political reporter Ezra Klein shared his perceptions:
The third and final presidential debate has ended, and it can now be said: Hillary Clinton crushed Donald Trump in the most effective series of debate performances in modern political history.
The polling tells the story. As Nate Silver notes, on the eve of the first presidential debate, Clinton led by 1.5 points. Before the second, she was up by 5.6 points. Before the third, she was winning by 7.1 points. And now, writing after the third debate — a debate in which Trump said he would keep the nation "in suspense" about whether there would be a peaceful transition of power, bragged about not apologizing to his wife, and called Clinton "such a nasty woman" — it’s clear that Trump did himself no favors. Early polls also suggest Clinton won.
And it’s not just the presidential race. Betting markets now predict Democrats will win the Senate. Polls have started showing Democrats in striking distance of the House. The GOP has collapsed into a mid-election civil war, with the party’s presidential nominee openly battling the speaker of the House.
This is not normal. As Andrew Prokop concluded in his review of the political science evidence around presidential debates, "There’s little historical evidence that they’ve ever swung polls by more than a few percentage points." In this case, they did. And it’s because Clinton executed a risky strategy flawlessly.
Klein continues:
Two things have been true throughout the debates. One is that Trump has been, at every turn, underprepared, undisciplined, and operating completely without a strategy. In one of the third debate’s most unintentionally revealing moments, Trump said, "I sat in my apartment today ... watching ad after false ad, all paid for by your friends on Wall Street," an inadvertent admission that he was inhaling cable news when he should have been prepping for the debate.
But the other reality is that Clinton has been, at every turn, prepared, disciplined, and coldly strategic. She triggered Trump’s epic meltdown purposely, and kept Trump off balance over multiple weeks that probably represented his last chance to turn the election around. She was ready for every question, prepared for every attack, and managed to goad Trump into making mistakes that became the main story the day after every single debate.
It is easy, now, to assume her victory was assured, to read Trump’s collapse as inevitable. But remember that he triumphed over a talented, 17-person Republican field in debate after debate to win the primary — one-on-one contests are unique, it’s true, but there was no particular reason to think Trump couldn’t use his bullying, blustering showmanship to take over the stage and expose Clinton as inauthentic and out of touch. The reason he didn’t is because she never let him.
We aren’t used to this kind of victory. We aren’t used to candidates winning not so much because of how they performed but because of how they pushed their opponent into performing. But the fact that we aren’t used to this kind of victory doesn’t make it any less impressive. Hillary Clinton has humbled Donald Trump, and she did it her way.
Politico.com has a caucus of "activists, strategists and operatives in 11 key battleground states that will determine Trump’s fate." The site polls them and offers the results organized by party, so you can see how Republicans and Democrats judge the results of the debates. Both Republicans and Democrats call Clinton the winner of all three debates, Democrats by 100%, and Republicans by 76%.
Some things were as we'd expect, having witnessed the previous two debates. Donald Trump spent a lot of time interrupting and talking over Clinton and Wallace, and doing things like repeating "Wrong. Wrong. Wrong." into his microphone, which might lead to some confusion in the future as to which is the real Trump: Trump himself, or Alec Baldwin's Saturday Night Live version?
Also notable in that regard was the most Trumpian line of the night, when Clinton called him a puppet for Vladimir Putin (a charge Trump answered by expressing his admiration for Putin--hardly a rebuttal). While Clinton was still speaking, Trump interjected: "No puppet. No puppet. You're the puppet."
He also, tellingly, still refuses to admit what the US intelligence community has confirmed--that the hacking of DNC and Clinton campaign emails has been orchestrated by Putin's Russia. In doing so, he insults the intelligence community, as well as the intelligence of the debate viewers.
Also as expected was Trump's general lack of command off--or is it a lack of interest in?--facts. As WaPo's fact checkers wrote, "The final presidential debate once again demonstrated Donald Trump’s thin grasp of the facts and his willingness to make poorly sourced or inaccurate claims. Hillary Clinton, for the most part, was more factually accurate."
Facts, need we remind our readers, are what the world is made of. For Trump to refuse to acknowledge simple reality is probably his greatest disqualifier as president. He wants to engage with the world he imagines, but that's not the world the rest of us live in. In his world, cutting taxes for himself and his fellow multimillionaires leads to a growing economy. In the real world, trickle-down economics doesn't grow the economy; instead, it grows inequality, leading to more poverty and a cratered middle class. We've had experiments with trickle-down, and we've had the economic growth of the Clinton and Obama years (in the Obama years, of course, relative to the disastrous recession he inherited. GDP growth has not been where we want it, but the streak of private-sector jobs added is unmatched in American history) . History shows us what works.
In fact, according to the previously mentioned WaPo fact checkers: "Mark Zandi, a well-respected economist at Moodys Analytics, did issue a report saying that if Trump’s economic plans were fully implemented, 3.5 million jobs would disappear, incomes would stagnate, debt would explode, and stock prices would plummet. (This compares to an anticipated increase of 6 million jobs under current Obama administration policies.) Zandi, in another report, also said that if Clinton were able to fully implement her economic plans, the economy would add an additional 3.2 million jobs during the first four years of her presidency. Combined with anticipated job creation under current law, that adds up to 10.4 million jobs."
For comparison, here are fact checks by NPR, Politifact, the New York Times and FactCheck.org.
Of course, these fact-checkers don't cite every instance in which Trump denied saying things we all know he said, things that are on tape. As just a few examples of that, from NPR's transcript:
HILLARY CLINTON
I find it -- ironic that he is raising nuclear weapons. This is a person who has been very cavalier, even casual about the use of nuclear weapons. He’s advocated more countries getting them
DONALD TRUMP
Wrong.
HILLARY CLINTON
.. Japan, Korea, even Saudi Arabia.
The truth? Trump has repeatedly said (as recently as the second debate) that those countries should get nuclear weapons. He apparently is unaware of the existence of videotape, transcripts, and human memory.
Back to the transcript:
HILLARY CLINTON
Well, at the last debate we heard Donald talking about what he did to women. And after that, a number of women have come forward saying that's exactly what he did to them. Now what was his response? Well, he held a number of big rallies where he said that he could not possibly have done those things to those women because they were not attractive enough for them to be assaulted.
DONALD TRUMP
I did not say that.
The truth? Yes, he did say that. Over and over.
Once more, to the transcript:
HILLARY CLINTON
Every time Donald is pushed on something which is obviously uncomfortable like with these women are saying, he immediately goes to denying responsibility and it's not just about women. He never apologizes or says he’s sorry for anything. So we know what he has said and what he's done to women. But he also went after a disabled reporter, mocked and mimicked him on national television. He went after Mr. and Mrs. Khan, the parents of a young man who died serving our country, a Gold Star family, because of their religion. He went after John McCain, a prisoner of war, said he prefers people who aren't captured. He went after a federal judge, born in Indiana, but who Donald said couldn't be trusted to try the fraud and racketeering case against Trump University because his parents were Mexican.
So it's not one thing. This is a pattern, a pattern of divisiveness of a very dark and in many ways dangerous vision of our country where he incites violence, where he applauds people who are pushing and pulling and punching at his rallies. That is not who America is and I hope that as we move in the last weeks of this campaign, more and more people will understand what's at stake in this election. It really does come down to a kind of country we are going to have.
DONALD TRUMP
So sad when she talks about violence at my rallies and she caused the violence. It's on tape.
CHRIS WALLACE
During the last --
DONALD TRUMP
The other things are false but honestly I'd love to talk about getting rid of ISIS and I’d love to talk about other things. But those other charges as she knows are false.
The truth? No, they're not false. America was transfixed by the spectacles of Trump attacking the Khan family after the Democratic Convention, and attacking Alicia Machado after the first debate. We couldn't believe he would make fun of a disabled reporter, but he did. We thought his snipe at Sen. John McCain would cost him votes in the Republican primaries, but it didn't. And we all heard him telling the crowds at his rallies that he'd like to see protestors have the crap beat out of them, and that he would pay their legal bills if they did it. These things are well documented. They happened, whether Trump wants to admit it or not.
Of course, it's not just the lies, it's his woeful ignorance. What about his vaunted economic acumen? Matthew Yglesias was paying attention:
On the economy, he said “we’ve lost our jobs,” when in fact total employment is at an all-time high. He said “we don’t make things anymore,” when in fact manufacturing output is at an all-time high. He said NAFTA “didn’t kick in” until Bill Clinton left office, which isn’t true. Nobody knows what he said about Aleppo.
When Wallace asked him why even conservative economists say his economic growth projections are unrealistic, Trump replied that we recently had “a terrible jobs report” — a total non sequitur that also (surprise!) happens to be untrue. He expressed bafflement that the US government hasn’t been forcing NATO members to “pay up,” as if it were a protection racket, and he reversed months of anti-trade rhetoric with a hazy, tossed-off promise that after he renegotiates existing trade agreements “we'll have more free trade than we have right now.”
Given trade’s centrality to Trump’s view of economic policy, you might think he would have some clear ideas here. He’s a businessman, so maybe trade is the time when he’s going to impress us.
Here, in his own words, is his plan: “We will be doing very much better with Mexico on trade deals, believe me, than the NAFTA deal by her husband, one of the worst deals of any kind signed by anybody.”
What does that mean? Your guess is as good as mine.
And of course, there's the small matter that the NAFTA treaty with Mexico and Canada was originally signed by George H. W. Bush, although Clinton signed its ratification into law. Its economic impact is debatable, but probably considerably less significant than its critics on the right or the left claim.
What about foreign policy? In response to a question about Aleppo, Trump said:
Well, Aleppo is a disaster. It's a humanitarian nightmare. But it has fallen from any standpoint. I mean, what do you need, a signed document? Take a look at Aleppo. It is so sad when you see what's happened. And a lot of this is because of Hillary Clinton. Because what has happened is by fighting Assad, who turned out to be a lot tougher than she thought, and now she is going to say, “Oh, he loves Assad.” He's just much tougher and much smarter than her and Obama. And everyone thought he was gone two years ago, three years ago. He aligned with Russia. He now also aligned with Iran, who we made very powerful. We gave them $150 billion back. We give them $1.7 billion in cash. I mean cash, bundles of cash as big as this stage. We gave them $1.7 billion.
Now they have aligned, he has aligned with Russia and with Iran. They don't want ISIS. But they have other things because we're backing, we're backing rebels. We don't know who the rebels are. We're giving them lots of money, lots of everything. We don't know who the rebels are. And when and if, and it's not going to happen because you have Russia and you have Iran now. But if they ever did overthrow Assad, you might end up as bad as Assad is, and he is a bad guy.
But you may very well end up with worse than Assad. If she did nothing, we'd be in much better shape. And this is what has caused the great migration where she has taken in tens of thousands of Syrian refugees who probably in many cases, not probably, who are definitely in many cases ISIS-aligned. And we now have them in our country and wait until you see this is going to be the great Trojan horse.
And wait until you see what happens in the coming years. Lots of luck, Hillary. Thanks a lot for doing a great job.
To which Vox.com's Zack Beauchamp responds:
This answer contained a number of blatant falsehoods. The US has never outright fought Assad’s regime, and our support for the anti-Assad rebels is not what has caused the massive humanitarian disaster in Aleppo — that was largely caused by Assad and Russia besieging and bombing the city indiscriminately. Furthermore, Assad was aligned with Russia and Iran well before the Syrian civil war, not as a consequence of it as Trump says. There is also no evidence that refugees are a “Trojan horse”: The odds of being killed by a refugee terrorist are 1 in 3.6 billion.
But the most fundamental issue here isn’t specific statements. It’s that Trump’s answer to a deeply important policy questions is stream-of-consciousness blather, a nearly indecipherable string of nonsense that jumps from a brief discussion of Aleppo to Russia to ISIS to the refugee crisis. He never once says anything of substance about Aleppo, anything at all to indicate that he actually understands what’s happening in the city and has an iota of an idea of what to do about it.
When you read it, it becomes clear just how ignorant about policy Donald Trump is.
But as bad as all this is--his constant lying, his willful ignorance on matters of actual and important policy, his half-baked ideas, and his history of comments that would get a 2nd-grader put on time out--the worst thing he has said during this entire campaign came late in the evening, in response to a direct question from Fox "News" moderator Chris Wallace (who was, incidentally, the best moderator of the four debates, including the lackluster VP debate--his worst mistake was in using his final segment to talk about the national debt, which is about as meaningful to real economic analysis as Funyuns are to a discussion of haute cuisine.):
CHRIS WALLACE
Mr. Trump, I want to ask about one must question in this topic. You have been warning at rallies recently that this election is rigged and that Hillary Clinton is in the process of trying to steal it from you. Your running mate Governor Pence pledged on Sunday that he and you, his words, will absolutely accept the result of this election. Today your daughter Ivanka said the same thing. I want to ask you here on the stage tonight, do you make the same commitment that you will absolutely, sir, that you will absolutely accept the result of the selection?
DONALD TRUMP
I will look at it at the time. I'm not looking anything now I will look at it at the time. What I've seen, what I've seen it so bad. First of all the media is so dishonest and so corrupt and the pile on is so amazing that the New York Times actually wrote an article about it that they don't even care. It's so dishonest and they poison the minds of the voters but unfortunately for them I think the voters are seeing through it.
CHRIS WALLACE
But, sir.
DONALD TRUMP
I think they’re going to see right through it. We will find out on November eighth but I think they’re going to see through it. Excuse me Chris if you look at your voter rolls you will see millions of people that are registered to vote, millions, this isn't coming for me this is coming from Pew Report and other places millions of people that are registered to vote that shouldn't be registered to vote so let me just give you one other thing.
I talk about the corrupt media I talk about the millions of people I’ll tell you on other thing. She shouldn't be allowed to run. It’s -- she's guilty of a very very serious crime. She should not be allowed to run. And just in that respect I say it's rigged because, Chris, she should never have been allowed to run for the presidency based on what she did with e-mails and so many other things.
CHRIS WALLACE
But sir, there is a tradition in this country, in fact one of the prides of this country, is the peaceful transition of power and that no matter how hard fought a campaign is, that at the end of the campaign, that the loser concedes to the winner, not saying that you are necessarily going to be the you loser or the winner, but that the loser concedes to the winner and that the country comes together in part for the good of the country, are you saying that you are not prepared now to commit to that principle?
DONALD TRUMP
What I'm saying now is I will tell you at the time. I will keep you in suspense, okay?
This is, not to put too fine a point on it, a refusal to accept one of America's central tenets. Elaine Kamarck writes for the Brookings Institution: "'Will you accept the result of this election?' The entire 2016 presidential campaign was encapsulated in this one question by the moderator, Chris Wallace, to Donald Trump. Trump’s answer, 'I’ll look at it at the time,' sent shivers throughout America. From the founding of the nation, what made America the 'shining city on the hill' was the fact that it achieved what no other nation in the world had at that time managed—the peaceful transition of power. Only once, in 1860 when the nation descended into civil war, did the nation not change power peacefully. This is why Trump’s debate answer was so chilling. It ran counter to everything we have stood for—Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative—for centuries. As Chris Wallace said, 'Peaceful transition of power is a tradition in this country.'"
This isn't just virtually unprecedented and wrong-headed, it's un-American. The "peaceful transition of power" is one of the central ideas of America. It's not a liberal or a conservative concept, not a Republican or a Democratic issue, it's a fundamental precept of our country and our way of life. The Washington Post's editorial board called it "Trump's breathtaking repudiation of American democracy."
We've been the gold standard for elections for decades. Much of the world has shifted toward democratic procedures, following our example (and coming to us for advice on how to do it right). Trump's stance challenges all that. At The Atlantic, the Hoover Institution's Larry Diamond explains the danger Trump poses to American democracy:
In his desperate bid to win the presidency, Donald Trump has increasingly embraced the rhetoric and logic of the extremist far right in American history. The elements were there for all to see from the beginning of Trump’s campaign—the fanning of fears about illegal immigration, about Mexicans bringing drugs and crime, about Muslims bringing terrorism; fears of outsiders, of globalization, of difference. Trumpism is modern-day McCarthyism—stoking hysteria about treason and betrayal, fomenting ever-more outlandish theories of an establishment out to get the ordinary people that he “alone” can save, and denying the legitimacy or even decent intentions of opposing politicians. But prior to Trump no extremist movement or politician ever captured the nomination of a major political party. And none ever had the masterful command of communication media that Trump has had of television and the internet.
As a result, we now enter the final three weeks of this distressing presidential election campaign with Trump relentlessly warning that the election will be rigged, with his most vociferous surrogate, Rudy Giuliani, asserting that this will mainly happen in the “inner cities” (meaning by racial minorities), and with 41 percent of all voters (and nearly three-quarters of Republicans) agreeing that the election could be stolen from Trump. All of this is planting the seeds for a potentially traumatic and unprecedented challenge to the legitimacy of the election outcome and the new president if Trump does not win. And that is not to mention his promise to, if elected, prosecute Hillary Clinton and “lock her up,” and his repeated allusions to (gun) violence as the only way that the people—betrayed by the elites—might have left to deal with Clinton as president. As the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman noted in August, it was this kind of inflammatory incitement and denial of legitimacy that fed the extremist atmosphere in which Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated in 1995.
This is not politics as usual. This is a different, and dangerous, position for a leading presidential candidate to take.
The blowback to the debate comment--from prominent conservative voices--was immediate and powerful.
On Fox "News," Charles Krauthammer said the American people want change, "but they don’t want a radical that will challenge the foundations of the Republic. Yes, you criticize conditions– you’re going to change Washington, etc. But you don’t challenge the legitimacy of an election and hold up the prospect of actual non-acceptance. And when he did that, I think it was a terrible mistake.”
At the conservative Weekly Standard, Jonathan V. Last writes, "There will be a temptation among Republicans to try to downplay this moment with a tu quoque defense, reminding people that Democrats have been questioning the legitimacy of presidential elections since the hanging chad. But this is a false equivalency. While Democratic (and Republican) functionaries and low-level officeholders have dabbled in electoral illegitimacy in the past, no presidential candidate has raised the possibility himself. And context matters: Trump is questioning the election results a month before the vote and doing so while losing by a large margin. This is a big deal. And to make it even bigger, Trump didn't just question the legitimacy of the outcome but also the peaceful transition of power, which he specifically refused to endorse. 'I'll keep you in suspense' about whether or not Trump will accede to the peaceful transfer of power in the case of defeat? This is not business as usual. It is a difference of kind, not degree."
Republican operative Reed Galen writes, "By refusing to accept the outcome of a free and fair election — and that’s what this will be, Trump once again undermines perhaps the most important underpinning of a republic: The faith its people has in their country’s rule of law and that their vote will be counted. The Donald cannot believe he’s losing, because in his mind he doesn’t lose ergo, if he loses, it must be someone else’s fault."
The director of economic policy at conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute tweeted: "That was horrifying. Based on that answer alone, I hope Mr Trump loses all 50 states. He deserves to. He is attacking democracy itself."
And John Kasich's chief strategist tweeted, "Hillary Clinton will be our next President. Trump further disqualified himself tonight by rejecting the will of America. Temperament matters."
And those are just conservative responses. You can imagine the responses from the left.
Here's Graham Vyse at the New Republic:
Over and over, from the moment he announced his candidacy, Trump has shown not just that he’s unfit to lead the nation but that he’s at odds with the country’s fundamental values. He’s hostile to freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of religion. He’s a casual racist and a vicious sexist who rejects equality and practices prejudice regularly. And now he’s engaged in a dangerous attempt to delegitimize our electoral system that could well end in violence.
This is why, simply put, Donald Trump doesn’t deserve America.
For an example of graciousness in loss, you need look no further than the letter that George H. W. Bush left in the Oval Office for Bill Clinton, after Clinton beat him in 1992:
It's also worth reading Al Gore's concession speech from 2000, after George W. Bush's campaign sued and the Supreme Court halted the final recount. One can't even imagine Trump summoning that kind of grace. It's completely alien to him.
To be clear: the election will not be stolen. The vote is not rigged.
Here's Republican election lawyer Chris Ashby:
Over the past 15 years, as a lawyer practicing campaign finance and election law, I have represented Republican candidates and conservative organizations in the political process, including in multiple close elections, recounts, and election law disputes. I have investigated numerous reports of election fraud: from missing voter registers, to voting machines that were removed from polling places while elections were in progress, to polling places at which it appeared that dozens of voters were voting every 10 seconds.
I believe in election fraud — voter impersonation, double voting, absentee ballot fraud, ineligible voter registrations. It all happens. How much, to what effect, and what should be done about it are subjects of great debate. But it does happen — certainly not anywhere even remotely near the extent that Donald Trump is contending it does — and so we should guard against it.
None of that, however, means our system of voting is rigged. It is not.
While government administrators plan our elections, ordinary citizens actually run them. In every election, these ordinary citizens make mistakes, lots of them, in fact. And on the other side of the check-in table are voters, some very small fraction of whom attempt to cheat, and an even smaller fraction of whom probably succeed.
But this does not mean that the election is rigged. To the contrary, our election laws anticipate human error and cheating, and guard against them at multiple levels. The result is a system of voting that is one of the cleanest and best in the world — in which all citizens should have faith and confidence.
Ashby's piece guides readers through the actual electoral process, which is run at every stage at the local level, by representatives of both major parties. He sums it up here:
So the election is not rigged. In fact, it’s anti-rigged. To rig an election, you would need 1) technological capabilities that exist only in Mission Impossible movies, plus 2) the cooperation of the Republicans and Democrats who are serving as the polling place’s election officials, plus 3) the blind eyes of the partisan poll watchers who are standing over their shoulders, plus 4) the cooperation of another set of Republicans and Democrats — the officials at the post-elections canvass, plus 5) the blind eyes of the canvass watchers, too.
Then you’d still have to Jedi-mind trick lawyers, political operatives, and state election administrators, all of whom scrub precinct-level returns for aberrant election results and scrutinize any polling place result that is not in line with what they would have expected based on current political dynamics and historical election results.
For all of these reasons, when Donald Trump implies that his or her followers need to take the law into their own hands on Election Day, he is horribly manipulating them — inciting them to disrupt the election, and setting them up to break laws and be arrested. Which may be exactly what he wants.
Ryan Godfrey is an elections worker in Philadelphia, one of the specific cities where Trump has declared there will be voter fraud. He says it can't happen, and like Ashby, he describes the process and explains why.
As for how much in-person "voter fraud"--the kind that could conceivably be addressed by voter ID laws--there is, that's been studied extensively. The answer? 31 documented cases out of a billion votes cast. The Brennan Center for Justice has been all over the issue; their findings are here, along with further discussion of the topic.
The Washington Post's Dana Milbank observes that Trump supporters have been talking about a "civil war" or a "revolution" if Trump loses. Trump's been stoking this kind of talk for weeks, ever since it became clear that he will, in fact, lose. How serious are these supporters? Are they willing to take up arms against America's lawfully elected government? Trump could put a stop to it. The debate made it clear that he won't.
The problem is that the Republican Party has been telling voters for years that voter fraud is a huge problem. They've been doing so as a political move--trying to pass legislation that depresses minority voter turnout, in hopes of winning elections that they can't win on the issues. Now, a majority of Republican voters believe those lies, and are predisposed to doubt the integrity of the American electoral process. When a high-profile presidential candidate stokes those fears, a large swath of his voters will continue to believe it, even if in the end he does acknowledge Clinton's victory.
The Republicans have brought Trump on themselves in many ways. They own him, and now they own the aftermath. It would be nice if, in these last few weeks, the party's leaders would make a serious effort to reassure their followers of the fact that the election will be honest, not stolen and not rigged.
We don't expect to see it, but we'd like to be surprised.
Side Note: In the four debates, there hasn't been a single question on climate change. Clinton has tossed in a couple of quick comments about it, but there's been no serious discussion of one of the most important issues facing the world today. That's shameful.
This Week in Bears
Koalas aren't bears, but they're close enough for now. Here's a Washington Post video meant to relieve election stress--a koala getting a belly rub.
(In related non-bear, non-election news, here's video of a baby elephant jumping into a river to save the man who rescued her a year earlier. Yes, elephants do have good memories.)
The Katmai National Park Service, which runs one of the best bear-viewing wildlife cams at Alaska's Brooks Falls, has declared Otis the brown bear the "fattest bear" ever caught on camera. Otis probably weighs about 1000 pounds (300 more than the average brown bear--and 700 pounds is still a big animal).