In every losing campaign's postmortem, the analysts insist that the candidate should have gone where he or she did not. There were many complaints about Vice President Al Gore spending time in California late in the race when he should have been stumping in Florida in 2000 and I'm sure everyone recalls that Hillary Clinton was excoriated for taking Wisconsin and Michigan for granted in 2016 by failing to hold events there in the closing days of the campaign. Certainly, it's a general rule of thumb that in close elections the candidates are supposed to live in the battleground states, especially in the final weeks to eke out every last vote in the Electoral College.
So why in the world is Donald Trump holding rallies in the blue enclaves of California, New York and Colorado during the month of October? As far as we can tell, the swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona and Nevada are all close and various combinations of those states will be required to get to 270 electoral votes. Yet, for obscure reasons, Trump will be wasting time in the final few weeks of the campaign in these other states.
One explanation that's been offered is that Trump just wants to have rallies in highly populated areas because he gets bigger crowds simply because of the population density and he just loves those bigger crowds. After all, he's not going to win New Jersey but he had a giant rally there last summer that he can't stop bragging about. (I think the size of the crowd in his mind is probably up to a million people by now but it was actually about 30-40,000.)
As a New York boy, Madison Square Garden has no doubt always been on his bucket list. And it is a natural choice since it was the site of a famous America First Nazi rally in 1939 featuring a huge picture of George Washington surrounded by Nazi flags. It's the perfect place for a sequel. I'm sure some very fine people will be in attendance. Coachella, on the other side of the country, is renowned as a major music festival and Trump likes to say he draws more than Elvis or Springsteen so if he manages to get a good crowd he can brag about that on a loop too. And Aurora, Colorado is the site of the alleged migrant "invasion" with MK47 Mutant rifles so he figures the optics will be awesome.
A Trump advisor told NBC News:
“Choosing high-impact settings makes it so the media can’t look away and refuse to cover the issues and the solutions President Trump is offering. We live in a nationalized media environment and the national media’s attention on these large-scale, outside-the-norm settings increases the reach of his message across the country and penetrates in every battle ground state.”
Maybe they're right. But a whole lot of money, time and effort will go into those three events, things that are precious resources in the last weeks of the campaign all for what amounts to an experiment. Sometimes you get the feeling that Trump is just in a YOLO frame of mind and nobody can stop him.
After all, Trump may just see himself in a win-win situation. If he manages to eke out an electoral victory, it will naturally be the greatest victory the world has ever seen. And if he loses, it will also be the greatest victory the world has ever seen except it will have been stolen by the Democrats. Everyone in America knows that he believes these are the only two possibilities.
And he has persuaded the official Republican Party, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, to parrot his fatuous disclaimer that he will accept it if it's "free and fair."
.@PabloReports: Mr Speaker, do you commit to observing regular order in the certification process of the 2024 election, even if Harris beats Trump?
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 24, 2024
MIKE JOHNSON: Well of course -- if we have a free, fair, and safe election we're gonna follow the Constitution, absolutely pic.twitter.com/IsASJnIyYD
And who decides that it was a free and fair election, one might ask? Well, first it will be Donald Trump and we know it can only be free and fair if he wins. He has said that outright:
Donald Trump: “I will totally accept the results of this great and historic presidential election… if I win" https://t.co/fNELXx3c8t pic.twitter.com/eIIVfifIn9
— CNN (@CNN) October 20, 2016
Trump and his henchmen are working overtime to suppress the vote and may have enough saboteurs in place in some places to delay the counts and disallow some legal votes if things don't go their way. But it's inevitable that he will contest the results regardless of the evidence.
The Electoral Count Reform Act (ECRA) foreclosed some of the shenanigans from 2020 and put in place some other procedures that will make the cases go quickly and fit within the deadlines. Even the Supreme Court is required to comply within a certain period of time if they're dragged into it, which is not unlikely.
But there may be ways that Mike Johnson, should he remain in charge of the House, can have some input into this as well. That may also explain why Trump is doing the two big rallies in New York and California. Some very tight House races in those two states may very well be decisive as to whether Johnson or Democrat Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York, currently the minority leader, will be the speaker in the next Congress. The Manhattan Borough President argued as much on Thursday:
If you’re confused that Trump is doing a rally at MSG…this is about CONGRESS.
— Mark D. Levine (@MarkLevineNYC) October 10, 2024
There are 7 competitive house races in NY, they will likely determine the majority. Trump needs control of the House to contest electors.
If that scares you (it should), then help us win these races.
A new Congress is always sworn in on January 3, so the speaker will be seated before the day the electoral votes are counted on January 6. And that day could unfold in very different ways depending on who has the gavel.
You'll recall that Mike Johnson, then just another GOP congressman, wrote a Supreme Court brief in 2020 that had the court agreed to take it up could have overturned the election results. When asked if he would do the same this time, he told Politico that his narrow concern at the time had to do with legislatures being usurped by officials who changed the rules to accommodate the pandemic and that it was no longer operative since the legislatures have made all the rules this time.
That does not answer the question as to whether he would file a different amicus brief on another issue such as the hysterical complaints this cycle that undocumented immigrants are voting, which they are not. But if the Trump people are able to gin up enough chaos around this issue, it's possible that Johnson could decide to take some action.
But Politico asked the big question to which they had no answer: "Does Johnson believe that the Electoral Count Act itself is constitutional and binding on Congress? Trump’s allies in 2020 said it was not, and Johnson has not made his position clear." One could also ask if Johnson thinks the ECRA, which reformed the original and somewhat archaic law, is as well. Can any of us feel confident that he won't say it isn't?
All of this is to say that Trump seems to have a Plan B in mind if he loses the election again and he wants to make sure he'll have a Republican House and Senate on January 6, 2025 just in case they want to contest the transfer of power again. It's almost as if he's looking forward to it.
Remember, his campaign manager Chris LaCivita made it clear that they were prepared to contest all the way. He said, “It’s not over until he puts his hand on the Bible and takes the oath…. It’s not over on Election Day. It’s over on Inauguration Day, ‘cause I wouldn’t put anything past anybody.” I assume the Democrats understand this and are prepared for everything, right?
