“It depends on if it’s fair or not.” You may have heard 3-time Republican presidential nominee Donald J. Trump say this in response to a very typical establishment media query as to whether he would accept the election outcome after it’s announced.
It’s a question that Trump has invited literally since he entered politics, probably because he knows his standard response will evoke gasps of horror and panic among the questioners, many of whom are searching for a more predictable “Sure. I will pledge to honor the outcome” retort. The reactionaries will then proceed to challenge the result themselves, or worse, they’ll use their soapbox to claim the whole thing was illegitimate and that the new president (Trump) isn’t a “real president” at all.
Trump was asked at virtually every stop during his first party primary campaign whether he would accept the winner of each individual state, and, true to form, refused to give an outright “yes” or “no.” Political observers with good memories may recall that Trump said there were irregularities in Iowa’s vote tallying when Ted Cruz came out ahead of him there in January, 2016.
Trump congratulated Cruz as the narrow caucus winner that night, but also left the matter open by suggesting that some of his voters weren’t allowed to cast their ballots, or that the whole thing wasn’t done properly, and he may have actually won but would move on to New Hampshire without creating too much of a stink.
And it’s been that way ever since. Trump tends to go along with the states where he wins narrowly but isn’t content to sit by and leave a loss, no matter how slim, to linger without leaving some degree of doubt in the people’s minds. To suggest that Trump just doesn’t like losing is an understatement, but having watched him all these years during the political portion of his storied career, Trump will never, ever, admit that he lost at anything.
I can’t say for certain, but Trump must not be the best one to invite to family game night at Mar-a-Lago, because he invariably would ruin the evening by griping and kvetching about a rule interpretation that might have tipped the outcome to someone else.
So why are Trump’s detractors feigning shock that Trump’s supporters won’t answer the “will you accept the outcome” question this time around, either?
In an article titled, “Almost half of Republicans say they won’t accept election results if their candidate loses: Study”, Ashleigh Fields reported recently at The Hill:
“A new report shows that 46 percent of Republicans would not accept the election results as legitimate if the Democratic nominee wins, and 14 percent of all Republican respondents said they would take action to overturn the outcome if the opposing party won. On the Democratic side, 27 percent said they would not accept the 2024 results as legitimate if the opposing party won, and 11 percent of Democrats said they would take action to overturn results.
“The World Justice Project surveyed 1,046 Americans across the country to predetermine their response to the 2024 presidential election. It conducted the poll in June, before President Biden withdrew from the election and endorsed Vice President Harris as the Democratic presidential candidate.
“The findings show that after the 2020 election, the general population still has a large distrust for the electoral process and will ultimately question the results presented in November. One-third of Republicans and two-thirds of Democrats believe election officials are trustworthy.”
None of these findings should shock anyone. It’s not as though anything that’s happened since the tragically unfair 2020 election has improved things. Democrats have gone out of their way to besmirch and smear Trump and his supporters after the 2020 results were certified by the Electoral College and the fight’s been on without interruption.
Meanwhile, several state legislatures have passed elections integrity measures in the interim only to have the new laws challenged and derided by Democrats and liberals as “suppression” measures. It wasn’t all that long ago that cackling Kamala Harris and senile Joe both went down to Georgia to spread falsehoods and lies about the Republican legislators who’d passed a very tame, common-sense law the Democrats labeled as bringing back “Jim Crow”.
In Democrat-land, merely proposing the ballot be protected by signature requirements brings insinuations of racism and favoritism. And Republicans are supposed to automatically assume that the 2024 vote will be on the up-and-up?
The distrust runs deep. I’m frankly perplexed that slightly more than 50 percent of Republicans indicated they would accept the outcome this time if/when Trump loses. Why? Because many of the lingering questions remaining from four years ago haven’t been answered. That, plus the arrogant Democrat efforts to impeach Trump a second time and then run him through the lawfare wringer have only invited more bad blood between the two sides.
Democrats have revealed themselves to not only be poor winners, but bitter adversaries to the rule of law and basic fairness that are the cornerstones of our republic.
Therefore, there are several reasons why conservatives and Republicans aren’t anxious to accept a 2024 outcome that shows cackling Kamala Harris and Tim Walz as winning the national referendum:
First, every legitimate public opinion survey shows cackling Kamala Harris and “Tampon Tim” Walz deep underwater when it comes to the issues that Americans purportedly care about the most this year, yet Trump’s support always lags the Democrats’. This means that poll respondents are either lying to pollsters as to the issues they favor, or the poll tabulations are fixed.
Many experts have said that the so-called mainstream polling operations have over-sampled Democrats and are failing to take other factors into account when compiling their formulas, and therefore their results are off. In the past two elections, Trump consistently outperformed his polls, especially in the swing states. Could it be that pollsters are attempting to dampen Republicans’ turnout efforts by underreporting Trump’s true support?
Only a fool would discount the possibility.
Two, blatant media bias undermines not only the integrity of election balloting – whether it will be reported fairly – but also if more realistic and balanced journalism possibly would’ve led to a different result.
Take 2020, for example, where the Hunter Biden laptop scandal was either ignored by the mainstream establishment media, suppressed by the social media tech barons as “disinformation” or outright lied about by the deep state protectors of senile Joe Biden and the Democrat party. It’s not hard to forget the letter (put together by current Secretary of State Antony Blinken) that was signed by dozens of intelligence higher-ups who testified that the laptop and its contents bore the signs of “Russian tampering”.
Senile Joe himself said the laptop was bogus, that “no one ever said my son did anything wrong” and cited the Blinken letter as proof that the whole story was concocted by Biden’s enemies to discredit him.
There was only one problem: the FBI already knew the laptop was genuine and its information was damaging to Biden’s campaign. But did they say anything? Of course not. It’s a big reason why conservatives and Republicans don’t trust anything that comes out of the government now, and also why nearly half of Trump’s supporters say they wouldn’t accept the outcome of this year’s election as legitimate.
Three, election shenanigans were dismissed without proper investigation in 2020 and the media took the result as legitimate while also claiming that Trump’s – and every other person who didn’t immediately buy into the courts’ determinations -- were “false claims.”
Simply stated, how can the 2020 naysayers be so confident that Trump’s claims were “false” when the matter wasn’t fully litigated in any court? The multitude of challenges were dismissed because of mootness and other legal considerations – or because they were political questions that courts wouldn’t dare touch a few weeks after an election – so therefore, no one knows if the 2020 results will ever be fully investigated and publicized.
How many ballots were rejected compared to the historical norm? What role did Zuckerbucks play? Were those mysterious boxes full of ballots in Georgia ever explained? Why did Democrats bar Republican watchers in Michigan? How many non-citizen voters were there? Have the voter rolls been properly scrubbed ever since? Is mail-in voting properly policed now? Can a reasonable person with knowledge ever trust the U.S. Postal Service, likely Kamala Harris supporters, with handling tens of millions of ballots?
Four, the treatment of the January 6 political prisoners by the establishment media and the Biden Justice Department demonstrates that there was no way that a Trump election objector would or could get an impartial trial in Joe Biden’s America. Conservatives who were captured by Merrick Garland’s goons and tossed in jail haven’t received fair representation.
They were deemed guilty from the start and convicted by DC juries without Constitutional protections. This is a “justice” system? Sounds like a kangaroo court to me.
Lastly, Democrats simply aren’t trustworthy. The immensely unfair handling of Donald Trump has demonstrated that Democrats’ Trump Derangement Syndrome is more than just a theory. They’re desperate to hold onto power and will do everything within their means to ensure that Trump isn’t permitted to upset their carefully constructed scheme to ruin America.
It isn’t just elections, either. What Democrats haven’t been able to win at the ballot box, they’ve taken by executive action, ignored the plain text of laws, smuggled in illegal aliens and transported them across the country and questioned the integrity of the Supreme Court because the justices didn’t agree with the legality of their causes.
In a day and age when there are few certainties, one thing that is virtually guaranteed is distrust will follow this year’s election result. Not even a landslide by one side would dispel the suspicions that have cropped up in the aftermath of the 2016 (Russian collusion, impeachment) and 2020 elections. Democrats want Republicans to trust the system without doing what it would take to make sure people are satisfied with its legitimacy. They reap what they’ve sowed.
Joe Biden economy
inflation
Biden cognitive decline
gas prices,
Nancy Pelosi
Biden senile
Kamala Harris candidacy
Donald Trump campaign
Harris Trump debates
J.D. Vance
Kamala vice president
Speaker Mike Johnson
Donald Trump assassination
2022 elections
Donald Trump
2024 presidential election
Tim Walz