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Democrats everywhere should say Thank you to President Trump for believing them capable of stealing the presidential election. His accusations imply a grand organizational genius that many would have thought was beyond them. As we all know, it took a mastermind to enlist innumerable people to alter millions of votes in multiple states under the noses of thousands of poll watchers and election officials, many of whom were Republicans. And in total secrecy without one single co-conspirator breathing a word!

Ill bet the Democrats wish they had paid as much attention to fixing the down ballot races. Then they wouldnt have lost so many House seats and would have retaken the Senate.

The president hasnt spoken this highly of his opposing partys abilities since he described the coronavirus pandemic as a Democratic hoax. Its hard to believe that they were able to cancel the Olympics, shut down whole countries and tank the worlds economies, just so they could hinder the presidents reelection effort. But, the president said it. So, it must be true, right?

If the Democrats are capable of everything the president says, maybe we ought to vote for them. If they can pull off these plots, imagine what they could do with the economy, global warming, immigration and world peace.

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Your View: Democrats should thank Trump for believing them capable of stealing election - Bristol Herald Courier

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All but one of the Republicans running statewide campaigns in Texas this year beat their opponents by 8 to 11 percentage points. The one? President Donald Trump, who beat Joe Biden by 5.8 percentage points.

Statewide, Texas Republicans outperformed the leader of their ticket.

In several places along the Texas border, the opposite happened. Much has been written about Trumps strong performance in the persistently blue counties on the Texas-Mexico border. His border supporters were numerous and enthusiastic. The New York Times sent reporters to Zapata County, which flipped from its customary spot on the Democratic side of the aisle to a seat on the Republican side. The Wall Street Journal went to Starr, where Trump improved dramatically on historical Republican results.

But its not like those blue counties switched sides altogether. Voters there supported Trump in most cases that meant he still lost, but by less than in his first race in 2016 but then many of them went back to voting more or less like they usually do.

Start with Zapata County. Chrysta Castaeda, a Democrat running for a seat on the Texas Railroad Commission, beat Republican Jim Wright in Zapata by 531 votes. (Wright won statewide, by almost 10 percentage points.) At the same time, Trump was beating Biden in Zapata County by 212 votes.

Castaeda wasnt the odd duck on that countys ballots. Trump was. While he was winning, the same Republican candidates who outperformed him statewide were often losing. U.S. Sen. John Cornyn landed 363 votes behind MJ Hegar. Nathan Hecht, the chief justice of the Texas Supreme Court, lost to Democrat Amy Clark Meachum in Zapata by 512 votes. The chief got 53% of the statewide vote, but in Zapata County, he only got 41%.

Its both interesting and not that consequential. Only 3,279 people voted in Zapata County. Many of the border counties are rural, and a change in a relatively small number of votes can produce outsized percentage shifts.

Even so, this election marked a significant and unusual change of direction. If Trump had performed like the rest of the Republican ticket, the border votes wouldnt be a topic of conversation. And in some ways, the numbers point to a result thats more complicated than a county moving from one party to the other.

Several of these counties only did it for the president.

Some actually flipped, like Val Verde County, where Del Rio is the county seat. Trump won by 1,438 votes. Cornyn won by 1,454. Hecht didnt hold the same margin, but he finished 612 votes ahead of Meachum.

In others, Trump closed the gap but still lost to Biden. In Starr County, where Rio Grande City is the seat, Trump lost by 875 votes or 5 percentage points. Thats a remarkably good showing for a Republican in a statewide race. At the same time, Wright, the Republican in the Railroad Commission race, was losing by 3,581 votes to Castaeda, the Democrat. Thats a 25-percentage-point gap. Hechts numbers were similar the kind of results Republicans have come to expect in what has been a reliably Democratic part of the state.

Statewide, more than 447,890 people who voted in the presidential race didnt vote in the lowest race on the statewide ballot, a contest for a seat on the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. By that point, voters had looked at all of the statewide races and their local race for Congress. They were just about to enter the section of the ballot for seats in the Texas Legislature.

Some wore out even faster: 172,135 fewer people voted in the second race on the ballot for U.S. senator than in the presidential race.

That means 98.5% were still around for the Senate race, and 97.3% of the presidential voters stuck in there until that judicial race. Statewide, fewer than 3% quit the ballot before voting in the legislative races.

Some of the presidents border voters hung in there. In Val Verde County, 96.5% made it from the presidential race down to the chief justice of the Texas Supreme Court. But in Zapata County, just under 85% did, and in Starr County, about 79% made it.

The rest voted in the top races and then went on about their business.

Disclosure: The New York Times has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

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Analysis: Many in South Texas split their vote between Trump and Democrats - The Texas Tribune

The recent HBO film 537 Votes, about the Florida 2000 election mess, offers one overarching message: Democrats refusal to sound a clear alarm about the slow-motion heist in process ultimately let the election be stolen.

In that debacle, Democrats seemed to think things would break their way with well-honed arguments inside the cloistered confines of the legal system they never understood how public-facing politics can play a role in what ended up being a pivotal political brawl outside the courtroom.

Now, 20 years later, the lesson of that debacle isnt being heeded. Donald Trump and his cronies are quite clearly waging a public-facing campaign designed to create the conditions to pull off a coup in the electoral college process.

This is a full-scale emergency and yet the Democratic strategy seems to be to try to pretend it isnt happening, in hopes that norms win out, even though nothing at all is normal.

In the week since the election, Donald Trump and his Republican allies have waged a public campaign to call the election results into question not just in the courtroom, but in the publics mind. Their lawsuits and Attorney General William Barrs recent memo are designed as much to to generate headlines as they are to win rulings and initiate prosecutions. Their tweets asserting fraud, and their high-profile promises of financial reward for evidence of fraud, are all designed to do the same thing.

Most ominously of all, Republican lawmakers in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan and Arizona are already insinuating the results may be fraudulent, even though they havent produced any evidence of widespread fraud.

Why is public perception so important? Because as the Ohio State University law professor Edward Foley shows in a frighteningly prescient 2019 article, legislatures could use the public perception of fraud to try to invoke their constitutional power to ignore their states popular votes, reject certified election results and appoint slates of Trump electors.

In an article that predicted almost exactly what has already happened in Pennsylvania, Foley imagined Trump seeming to be ahead at first, then losing his lead as votes are counted, then making allegations of fraud, setting the stage for this:

At Trumps urging, the states legislature where Republicans have majorities in both houses purports to exercise its authority under Article II of the Constitution to appoint the states presidential electors directly. Taking their cue from Trump, both legislative chambers claim that the certified popular vote cannot be trusted because of the blue shift that occurred in overtime. Therefore, the two chambers claim to have the constitutional right to supersede the popular vote and assert direct authority to appoint the states presidential electors, so that this appointment is in line with the popular vote tally as it existed on Election Night, which Trump continues to claim is the true outcome.

The states Democratic governor refuses to assent to this assertion of authority by the states legislature, but the legislatures two chambers proclaim that the governors assent is unnecessary. They cite early historical practices in which state legislatures appointed presidential electors without any involvement of the states governor. They argue that like constitutional amendments, and unlike ordinary legislation, the appointment of presidential electors when undertaken directly by a state legislature is not subject to a gubernatorial veto.

Foley notes how public-facing politics outside the cloistered legal arena could then come into play.

It might be too much of a power grab. One would hope that American politics have not become so tribal that a political party is willing to seize power without a plausible basis for doing so rooted in the actual votes of the citizenry, he writes. If during the canvass itself, Trump can gain traction with his allegation that the blue shift amounts to fraudulently fabricated ballots along the lines of his 2018 tweet about Florida then it becomes more politically tenable to claim that the legislature must step in and appoint the states electors directly to reflect the true will of the states voters.

To be sure, pulling this off would be complicated.

Republicans would have to get not one but many of the five Biden states with Republican legislatures to try to ignore the popular vote.

Congress would also have a role to play in deciding which electors to recognize, which gives the House Democratic majority some leverage.

And its not clear that any of the maneuvers would hold up in court (though lets remember: the supreme court now includes three Republican-appointed justices who worked directly on the Bush v Gore case that stole the 2000 election for the Republican party).

But this is quite obviously what the Republicans are aiming for and theyve basically said it out loud. Indeed, Trumps son has promoted the idea of legislatures overturning the election, and so has Trumps staunch ally Ron DeSantis, Floridas Republican governor. Meanwhile, a Republican lawmaker involved in Wisconsins new election fraud investigation suggested his states popular vote could be ignored.

This is why weve seen Republican officials and policies continue pretending that Trump didnt lose the election, and presuming that there will be a second Trump term. This isnt merely infantile behavior or an immature temper tantrum it is part of a cutthroat plan.

They are trying to normalize the idea that regardless of how Americans actually voted, a second Trump term is inevitable because state legislatures and Congress will ultimately hand him the electoral college.

One big takeaway here should be that in the long term, the electoral college has to go it has now become an even bigger threat to democracy, beyond just routinely throwing elections to the losers of the national popular vote. The system is being weaponized by a Republican party determined to thwart the will of voters.

In this particular crisis, a strong and serious response is needed.

We need a vociferous public campaign focused on preventing state legislators from feeling empowered to ignore their own voters. And such a campaign could be successful because at least some of these states legislatures are only narrowly controlled by the Republican party meaning they may be sensitive to a future voter backlash in 2022 that could come from their actions to steal a presidential election.

And yet instead of sounding the alarm, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris seem to have settled on a nothing to see here approach.

The Biden-Harris campaign has been proceeding as if everything is fine, rolling out some transition team names and announcing that Biden has talked to some world leaders. Bidens comments on Wednesday about the election were even more sedated and anodyne than those of Al Gore back during the 2000 Florida recount. The most he could muster was an assertion that the Republicans behavior is embarrassing and might hurt Trumps legacy as if this is a West Wing episode inanely presuming that any single Republican elected official in the country cares about such things.

And yet, weve been taught over and over and over again that real life most certainly is not a West Wing episode. The Republicans do not care about anything other than obtaining and holding power by any means necessary they are T-1000 Terminators ruthlessly focused on winning at all costs.

So where is the call to action? Where is the activism? Where are requests for Democrats in the five Biden states with Republican legislatures to start pressuring their state lawmakers to commit to respecting the popular vote?

Biden may be calculating that any public pushback will only help Trump, and the best strategy is to try to starve the fraud allegations of attention. And sure, we may get lucky things may eventually just sort themselves out with no big hullabaloo.

However, history suggests that it is pretty risky to bank on a passive strategy, leave it all up to fate and simply hope for the best through normal procedures during moments of obviously abnormal circumstances.

Indeed, refusing to wage a much more organized, public campaign to challenge Trumps coup attempt is exactly the kind of strategy Democrats went with 20 years ago in Florida during the Brooks Brothers riot and look how that turned out. We got an illegitimate Bush presidency that gave us the Iraq war and a financial crisis that ended or ruined millions of lives.

This time around it could be even worse the end of whatevers still left of American democracy.

David Sirota is a Guardian US columnist and an award-winning investigative journalist. He is an editor at large at Jacobin, and the founder of the Daily Poster. He served as Bernie Sanders presidential campaign speechwriter

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Republicans aren't conceding and Democrats are bringing a knife to a gun fight - The Guardian

FRANKFORT, Ky. (LEX 18) The Kentucky Democratic Party has elected a new chair, Colmon Eldridge, to lead the party forward.

Eldridge is a Cynthiana native, who served as a special advisor to Governor Steve Beshear during his administration.

He has also served as DNC Outreach Director for the KDP, as a national committeeman for Kentucky Young Democrats, and was executive vice president of the Young Democrats of America.

Eldridge is the first African-American chair of the state's Democratic Party.

"As a Kentuckian, it is an honor to be asked to lead my party into the future. I am grateful to Governor Beshear for his friendship, his guidance, his leadership, and his trust in my ability to lead our party. As a father, it is humbling to be able to live out the prayer my parents prayed for my sister and I, and that Victoria and I pray for our three boys -- that when they grow up, they can be anything they want to be -- including the head of their own state political party. As a black man who was the first person in his immediate family to have been born with the right to vote, it is an honor to be able to make history today. I believe the Kentucky Democratic Party has a strong future ahead of it and I can't wait to apply things I've learned from my experience to help Democratic candidates win in 2022 and beyond," said Eldridge.

This news comes after the KY Democratic Party lost additional seats in the House and Senate during the November 3 election. Five of the six Congressional seats continue to be held by Republicans, and GOP Senator Mitch McConnell won re-election once again.

Democrats only captured one statewide office victory in 2019, which would be Gov. Andy Beshear along with Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman. Gov. Beshear endorsed the election of Eldridge.

"I've known Colmon for a long time and I can't think of a better person to continue to build the Democratic Party here in Kentucky. Colmon is a devoted father and husband who is committed to trying to build a better world for his kids and all of Kentucky's kids. As chair, Colmon will work every day to elect Democrats committed to public education, access to quality and affordable healthcare and good paying jobs," said Gov. Beshear.

Eldridge follows outgoing chair Ben Self, who will resign from the position at the end of the year. Self says he is excited to see Eldridge lead the Kentucky Democratic Party into the future.

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KY Democrats elect new chair to lead the party - LEX18 Lexington KY News

The carefully calibrated unity of the Democratic Party lasted about six months. After a summer when moderates and progressives joined together to elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. president, his victory has now given permission for the party to expend time and energy on the difficult task of sorting out its ideological core.

House Democrats, reeling from unexpected losses in competitive races, wasted no time. Moderates have blamed progressives for pushing policies such as Medicare for all and defunding the police, which are unpopular in swing districts.

But progressives, rallying to influence Mr. Biden on cabinet appointments and initial policy, have pushed back. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York has pinned those House losses on poor digital campaigning, saying members made themselves sitting ducks for Republicans.

Conor Lamb, the 36-year-old Pennsylvania Democrat who beat back a Republican challenge in a district that President Trump won in 2016, is one of those moderates who believes the left is costing Democrats in key areas. In an interview with The New York Times, Mr. Lamb said he expected the incoming administration to govern as it had campaigned: with progressives at arms length.

This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Q. Whats your expectation of Joe Bidens Democratic Party? How do you expect him to fall on the moderate vs. progressive divisions we see in the House?

A. I think that he means what he says when he says, I ran a Democrat, but Im going to serve as an American president. And what that means, I believe, is that every single day, and on every issue, hes going to be working to get as many people around the table and singing from the same sheet music as you can. And sometimes that will be everyone in the Democratic caucus. Sometimes it will be some people in the Democratic caucus and some Republicans. I think thats going to change by the issue, but hes a person that really believes our actual job in Washington, D.C., is to work with each other, compromise to get the best deal we can and then get the thing done. And I believe that too.

What went wrong for House Democrats when they were supposed to pick up seats?

Im giving you an honest account of what Im hearing from my own constituents, which is that they are extremely frustrated by the message of defunding the police and banning fracking. And I, as a Democrat, am just as frustrated. Because those things arent just unpopular, theyre completely unrealistic, and they arent going to happen. And they amount to false promises by the people that call for them.

If someone in your family makes their living in some way connected to natural gas, whether on the pipeline itself, or you know, even in a restaurant that serves natural gas workers, this isnt something to joke around about or be casual about in your language.

Thats what were trying to say: that the rhetoric and the policies and all that stuff it has gone way too far. It needs to be dialed back. It needs to be rooted in common sense, in reality, and yes, politics. Because we need districts like mine to stay in the majority and get something done for the people that we care about the most.

Lets take that issue. Joe Biden did not support defunding the police. Almost all the members of the Democratic Congress, even folks like Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, came out against it. What is the party supposed to do that it didnt?

I think we can do it much more clearly and repetitively and show it with our actions. We need to have a unified Democratic message about good law enforcement and how to keep people safe, while addressing the systemic racism that I do believe exists and the racial inequities that absolutely do exist. And when we passed the George Floyd Justice and Policing Act, thats exactly what we did.

But the people that I was on the phone with, when we were passing that at the time, were not the freshmen members who are criticizing us today. It was Karen Bass and Cedric Richmond and Colin Allred and I was listening to them. And, you know, pretty much most of our moderate conservative Democrats all voted for that bill. We listened, we compromised and we got something done. And thats what this job is really about.

Is it the view of moderate Democrats that the progressives or the so-called Squad has taken up too much space in the national conversation?

I wouldnt put it that way. Because that really focuses on them as individuals and their personalities. And that is not what were trying to do. Were trying to have a discussion about policy, not personality. And I want to be really clear on that, because I respect every one of those members and how hard they worked to get elected and how hard they have worked to stay elected and represent their constituencies. But the fact is that they and others are advocating policies that are unworkable and extremely unpopular.

So I would just say that our view is more that we want to have a clearer, sharper, more unified message on policy itself, regardless of who gets the credit or who is in the limelight for that.

In the Democratic primary, even as progressive candidates lost, polling showed that their issues remained popular among Democrats. Even things like single-payer health insurance or things like the Green New Deal. Whats your response to that?

At the end of the day, its individual candidates that have to win races, and then work with their fellow officeholders to pass bills into law and change peoples lives. So you can tell me all the polling you want, but you have to win elections.

And Ive now been through three very difficult elections in a Republican-leaning district, with the president personally campaigning against me. And I can tell you that people are not clamoring for the two policies that you just asked about. So, thats just what probably separates a winner from a loser in a district like mine.

On Saturday, I interviewed Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez and she mentioned you and how some House moderates ran their campaigns. I wanted to get a fact check quickly: Did you all spend just $2,000 on Facebook the week before the election?

She doesnt have any idea how we ran our campaign, or what we spent, to be honest with you. So yeah, her statement was wrong. But theres a deeper truth there, which is this that our districts and our campaigns are extremely different. You know, I just leave it at that.

She said the way moderates ran their campaigns left them as sitting ducks. What was your reaction?

I have to be honest and say that I was surprised about the whole interview on the day when Vice President and now President-Elect Biden was having the election called for him. I just dont think it was a day for people to be sniping at other members, especially in districts that are so different from their own.

I respect her and how hard she works. And what she did in an extremely low-turnout Democratic primary. But the fact is that in general elections in these districts particularly in the ones where President Trump himself campaigns over and over and over again, and attacks members within their own Republican-leaning districts, like me and Representative Slotkin and Representative Spanberger its the message that matters. Its not a question of door knocking, or Facebook. It matters what policies you stand for, and which ones you dont. And that is all that we are trying to say.

The American people just showed us in massive numbers, generally, which side of these issues that they are on. They sent us a Republican Senate and a Democratic president; were going have to do things that we can compromise over.

You mentioned sniping. Are progressives leading that or are moderates also doing so? Im thinking of all the anonymous quotes attacking members of the left, something that she mentioned.

Thats just honestly a hard question to answer, because I dont know who the anonymous people are. I believe we should put your name behind those types of comments and thats generally what I do.

But I got to say, as youve talked a lot about Representative Ocasio-Cortez, she can put her name behind stuff and thats I guess courageous, but when its a damaging idea or bad policy, like her tweeting out that fracking is bad in the middle of a presidential debate when were trying to win western Pennsylvania thats not being anything like a team player. And its honestly giving a false and ineffective promise to people that makes it very difficult to win the areas where President Trump is most popular in campaigns.

You and Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez are on different sides of the ideological spectrum, but the same side of a generational divide among Democrats. House party leadership has said they plan to run again. Does there need to be more youth among Democratic leadership?

The most important thing is that the leadership we have has to listen to the newer, younger members and actually give us some input and help us get accomplishments at the policy level.

But what seems to happen sometimes is when push comes to shove, the younger members who have come from these really tough districts and tough races dont always feel that the leadership takes our input as seriously as we would like. And I think thats something they need to improve, and I would bet that Representative Ocasio-Cortez would feel similarly even if it was on different issues.

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Conor Lamb, House Moderate, on Bidens Win, the Squad and the Future of the Democratic Party - The New York Times