Trump and the Republicans want to stop counting the votes

Anita Kumar summarizes the current unfolding of Trump's political-judicial coup process in Trump's Supreme Court vow was what he planned all along Politico 11/04/2020. At this point, we do not have a complete vote count. Trump in his usual bombastic, reality-TV style attempted to paint a deliberately false picture of massive fraud by the Democrats, a position he's ben prepping for weeks. And his legal team is trying to prevent the counting of ballots, on the theory that a full count would be more like to benefit Biden.

Kumar writes:

[Trump's] decision to discredit the election results before the ballots are fully counted in several battleground states shattered yet another norm in American politics as he closes out his first — and perhaps only — term in office. But given the months Trump spent demeaning the electoral system, it was an unsurprising move.

“He’s not going to go gently into the night,” said presidential historian Douglas Brinkley. “Trump will look for ways to contest it because for him everything is at stake in this election. He goes from being the most powerful person in the world to being an outlaw figure.”

On Tuesday night, Trump did win important states like Florida, Iowa and Ohio. But Biden won Arizona, while the race was too close to call in key states the president flipped in 2016, including Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.

Officials in Detroit, Philadelphia and Milwaukee said they would continue to count votes Wednesday as they work through a backlog of paper ballots. Trump’s team is bracing for a delay in results until the end of the week.

In a statement, Biden campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon described Trump’s Supreme Court vow [aiming to block counting votes] as “outrageous, unprecedented and incorrect.”

“Nearly 100 million people cast their ballot before Election Day in the belief — and with the assurances from their state election officials — that their ballot would be counted,” she wrote. “Now Donald Trump is trying to invalidate the ballot of every voter who relied on these assurances.” [my emphasis]

The election results, once they are fully known - barring the courts blocking significant numbers of legal votes being counted - will be endlessly parsed, of course. But it does seem on Wednesday morning that Trump votes were underestimated in the polls.

The critical thing for the Democrats is to stick to their insistence on counting the votes and call out a judicial coup attempt for what it is. Trump's judicial ploy will likely succeed if Biden and the Democratic establishment pursue the passive approach that failed with the Florida vote count in 2000. A Republican-packed Supreme Court cannot be allowed to decide the election.

The Democrats also have to respond effectively to the mobilization of the Republican base - including violent white-supremacist groups - that Trump and the Republicans are undertaking.