"We´ll see."
When Trump uttered those two words when asked if he would accept the election results if he lost, he revealed exactly what he was going to do. Or certainly could do. Nobody -- forget CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post -- in the mass media has figured it out.
How can Trump win when he is losing? Election models today (September 30, 2020) give him only a 1 in 5 chance of regaining the presidency.
Flash back to the 2016 election. Trump lost the popular vote by 63 million to 66 million. He won anyway, by winning 304 Electoral College votes. 270 are required to win the presidency; the College consists of 538 members.
The allocation of members per state is determined by the numbers of senators plus House members. Thus, New Mexico, which has 2 senators and 3 House members, has 5 Electoral College votes.
But how do states pick the individuals who will be College members? Here things get interesting.
If you want to be an Electoral College elector, my advice is to first be a recognized political party stalwart. Political parties do most of the choosing; however, it is left to each state to make that decision in its own way. In New Mexico the College electors´ names appear on the ballot alongside the presidential candidates. The electors pledge to vote for a particular presidential candidate. Thus, the College electors are popularly elected, just like any other official. In practice they are, as indicated, well-known party stalwarts.
I will skip over the usual election scenarios and go straight to the intriguing one nobody is mentioning.
Let us say Trump loses the electoral college vote. He is out of the White House, right?
Better think again.
Enter the Faithless Elector.
A Faithless Elector is an Electoral College member who does not vote for the candidate he pledged to support. It is not a common occurrence; there have been only 165 cases. The most common method of keeping members true to their pledges is that a Faithless Elector faces the undying wrath of his party back home. I remember a governor´s nephew who was an elector. A few days after the presidential election he announced he "wasn´t sure" if he would vote for the candidate he was pledged to support. Silly boy. Presto, bang-o, a potential political career went speeding down the toilet. He became a pariah; I´ll bet that decades later he still can´t go unaccompanied to the supermarket.
Besides ostracism, Faithless Electors face fines in many states, often $1,000.
All of which brings me to a hypothetical scenario which could easily turn out to be the real one in a few months:
Trump loses the Electoral College vote by the same amount as he defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016. That is to say, Biden wins 304 College electors. If just 35 of them prove to be Faithless Electors and switch to Trump, he would be back in the White House saddle again regardless of everything you will be seeing or hearing, thinking or wanting. Money would be no problem; the Republican Party is awash in it. As for the integrity factor, forget it. During my decades in politics I witnessed lots of men sell out for a baked potato at the palace.
The media will pound on the desk, foam at the mouth about corruption. Trump will simply shrug: the Electoral College chose the president in 2016. What difference does it make now, in 2020?
The media will then do what they always do: go whining into that dark night.
As for the Democrat response to the Trump Faithless Elector ploy..
.
In 2000, outsmarted and outworked, Al Gore lost Florida and with it the presidency to George Bush. If Trump´s game plan is enacted, you will see the Democrats do exactly what they did twenty years ago:
Piss and moan.
#faithlesselector #electoralcollege #trumpgameplan