Election 2024 Category

A collection of quotes from pro- and anti-Trump voices. First, from Trump supporters:

Arngrimr notes that if the Left had gotten their way with National Popular Vote, Trump would have won 520-18.

This tyranny of the majority has served them well in the states where they took control, but the US Constitution and its balanced system prevented them from destroying it outright. In an attempt to circumvent the Constitution, the initiative of the National Popular Vote Act was born. Their stated goal: "The National Popular Vote law will guarantee the Presidency to the candidate who receives the most popular votes in all 50 states and the District of Columbia."

All 18 states that have approved the NPV compact went for the Democratic nominee this year, with the exception of one congressional district in Maine. The map would've been red except for Virginia, New Hampshire, and one congressional district in Nebraska. But NPV isn't triggered until states representing at least 270 electoral votes approve it.

Julie Neidlinger is very happy, and she wants to enjoy her joy:

I don't often feel joy as I am a sort of introverted downer person. I have had moments of joy where my face won't stop grinning...

It's not the same as joy that comes through faith.

It might be closer to happiness but on a high-octane level. It's a coursing, shocking feeling. Senses and ideas are all overwhelmed, and experience is so much more than the expectation that the mind is short-circuited.

I have so much excitement flowing through me that I don't know how to process it. I am absolutely unused to feeling this up, this hopeful, this surprised, this gobsmacked. I have, apparently, learned to function in a world of disappointment and down-ness....

I know Jesus is on the throne, I know he's my Savior, I know God sets up leaders and takes them down, I know Trump isn't perfect, I know there could be some crazy stuff ahead and things won't go as we think. I know Jesus comes first, not our nation, and making our nation great again can't happen without people turning to God.

I know. I do.

But let me have some joy, unapologetically, without a lecture.

Let me be ecstatic without tempering it with caveats.

The strange masochistic tendency of modern Evangelical Christians to turn a win of any sort into an admonishment to downplay it is strange to me. Let this Gen-Xer have her good day before we get back to low-key "whatevs" business. A joyless life is like solitary confinement, and today's little taste of joy won't last very long. So let me have it.

Thanks.

Watching the 2024 Republican National Convention from Milwaukee brought back memories of my two times attending the RNC, as a delegate in 2004 in New York City and as a reporter in 2008 in St. Paul, Minnesota. Those links will lead you to BatesLine coverage of those two conventions.

On X (Twitter) on the opening night of the convention, Lafayette Lee complained:

There's widespread frustration with the RNC right now because everyone is craving something more... they just witnessed a miracle, and all the fluff and cringe feels like an insult.

I replied: Conventions are always fluff and cringe. Stage-managed to the Nth degree. No spontaneity allowed. Entirely under the control of the presumptive nominee's team. He dictates platform, rules, who speaks and when. National conventions are fun, but delegates are really just a studio audience for a four-day infomercial.

Officially, the Republican National Convention conducts serious business. Each state elects the number of delegates allocated to each state by the previous convention's rules, according to the rules of each state party. In Oklahoma, each congressional district convention elects three delegates and three alternates, the state chairmen and two national committee members are automatically delegates, and the state executive committee proposes a slate for the remaining delegate and alternate slots which is ratified by the state convention. Each state designates two members each to serve on the Rules Committee (which includes party rules for the 2028 presidential nominating process and convention), Platform Committee, and Credentials Committee. The committees convene the week before the convention to debate and approve a report to the convention. At the convention itself, the delegates vote to approve the committee reports and for nominees for president and vice president. The convention delegates could, theoretically, amend or reject the committee reports.

In reality, the convention is not a deliberative body, and I can't think of a minute of the convention sessions that hasn't been stage-managed since 1976. Some debate has occurred in the Platform and Rules Committee meetings, but because fundraising for national and state party typically depends upon the charisma of the nominee, the nominee's team dictates terms. States run by the grassroots tend to send principled conservatives (e.g. Morton Blackwell of Virginia, head of the Leadership Institute, on the Rules Committee; Tony Perkins of Louisiana, head of the Family Research Council, on the Platform Committee) to these committees, but most states, particularly the states with withered, top-down parties, send placemen who will do what they're told.

An individual delegate can do nothing. In 2004, I wanted grassroots delegates to push for reform of the 2008 primary rules before the 2008 campaign began. But delegates are basically spectators. An individual delegate has no way to reach delegates from other states to organize before the convention. An individual delegate will not be recognized to speak from the floor or even to move for debate prior to a vote or to demand a roll call vote. All I could do was publish a blog entry, like tossing a message in a bottle into the ocean. I seem to recall exactly one reply of interest from a delegate from Iowa.

Delegate "power" is much like the power of the United Kingdom's House of Lords which is much like the life of Schrödinger's cat. It exists theoretically, but if an attempt to exercise that power comes close to success, the Powers That Be will change the thresholds to ensure that the next attempt fails as well.

This year, even committee deliberations were curtailed. Here is how the Platform Integrity Project (archived here) described the RNC Platform Committee meeting:

On Monday, July 8th, 2024, the Republican Party Platform Committee voted to adopt a streamlined national party platform that cut much of the pro-life language that has historically been included, some of it for nearly fifty years since 1976. The process was unprecedented; instead of being allowed to deliberate for two days, the 112 elected Platform Committee members, two from every state and territory, were sequestered without their cell phones. They were not given time to review the draft platform, allowed to form subcommittees, or given the opportunity to offer and openly debate amendments with media present; instead, this year's private meeting proceeded to a short period of speeches followed by a final vote on the platform. The RNC draft was adopted 84-18. You can read it here (PDF).

Tony Perkins spoke to Todd Starnes of Newsmax on July 10th detailing the top-down, dictatorial process imposed by the Trump campaign on the platform committee.

The group circulated a platform committee minority report, which needed to be signed by 25% of the committee members in order to come before the convention as an alternative. What follows is not a minority report as such -- that would be in the form of an alternative platform or amendments to the majority report -- but more of a minority protest of the actions of the majority.

The undersigned, a minority of the committee, elected to the 2024 National Republican Platform Committee, not agreeing in totality with the majority, desire to express our views as follows:

Not having an opportunity to entertain amendments to the "draft" platform document, we submit the following expression for the continued protection of the unborn through support of a human life amendment.

Less than one week ago, our nation celebrated the 248th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. That founding document proved a watershed moment in world history. It planted and reinforced in the minds of men and women everywhere the conviction that each of us is endowed by the Creator with certain unalienable rights, among them the "right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

The Declaration is the heritage of all Americans, always true but likewise always straining to be realized, for the slave as well as for the free, for women as well as for men, for the poor as well as the rich. For Republicans, from the very inception of our party, the words of the Declaration took form in two overarching moral propositions, that is, the rejection and elimination of what our very first platform in 1856 called "the twin relics of barbarism," slavery and polygamy. We note with sober reflection how vast a cost the people of the United States paid for the achievement of that platform's commitments, and how long a period passed before those goals could be achieved.

Today we observe the vitality of a more recent but analogous set of commitments, embodied most prominently in the promise of the Republican Party to preserve the right to life of every human being from conception to natural death. That commitment made its way into the platform of 1976, twelve decades after that original session in Philadelphia. That commitment to a human life amendment and a call for the Fourteenth Amendment's protection application to children before birth has been repeated in every platform since and, by this declaration of principle, we extend it now.

In no season, under no rationale spurred by the exigencies of a political moment, can or should we abandon the high principles that have created and sustained this party, with God's grace, into a third century.

In the coming years, we pledge ourselves to continue to work for the good of every child, every parent, and every family. We rededicate ourselves to the core policy positions endorsed through deliberation and transparency with ever-increasing clarity in previous platforms, with respect to the funding of abortion domestically and internationally, the expansion of alternatives to abortion, support for credits for adoption and all children, ending the exploitation of embryonic human beings, and above all recognizing the application of 14th amendment protections to our developing offspring. These are issues for the ages and not for any single cycle in our national life.

With heaviness of heart but fullness of optimism that the defense of life will inevitably prevail, we resubmit these ideals to our fellow Americans. As before, we do fondly hope and fervently pray that the scourge of abortion will speedily pass away, and to that end we renew our perpetual devotion and ceaseless labor to the cause of life.

Last Friday on X (Twitter), Perkins identified 20 platform committee members who had signed the report. (Archived here.) Mark Allen, one of Oklahoma's two committee members, signed on to the minority report, but the second member, Taylor Broyles, had not.

Alaska: Loran Baxter
Arizona: Alex Kolodin, Susan Ellsworth
Arkansas: Jim Dotson
Georgia: Suzi Voyles
Hawaii: Mark White, Mary Smart
Iowa: Brad Sherman, Tamara Scott
Kansas: Tim Huelskamp, Kristina Smith
Louisiana: Tony Perkins
North Carolina: Kevin Austin
North Dakota: Lori Hinz, Steve Nagel
Oklahoma: Mark Allen
South Dakota: Sandye Kading
Texas: David Barton
Utah: Gayle Ruzicka
Wyoming: Robert "Bob" Ide

Rule 34(a) of the rules approved by the 2020 convention to apply to the 2024 committees not only requires 25% of members to sign a minority report, but requires them to submit that report and signatures within one hour of the committee's vote on the majority report:

(a) No resolution or amendment pertaining to the report of the Convention Committee on the Platform or the Convention Committee on Rules and Order of Business shall be reported out or made a part of any report of such committee or otherwise read or debated before the convention, unless the same shall have been submitted to the chairman, vice chairman, or secretary of such committee or to the secretary of the convention in writing not later than one (1) hour after the time at which such committee votes on its report to the convention and shall have been accompanied by a petition evidencing the affirmative written support of a minimum of twenty-five percent (25%) of the membership of such committee.

I have read somewhere that the rules approved by this year's convention raises the threshold for 2028 to one-third (33.333%).

The effort to present a minority report was dropped in the wake of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump:

"Given today, and everything that has occurred, if the opportunity were there [for a floor fight] we wouldn't take it at this point," Perkins told POLITICO. "Don't take our silence as being indifferent to what took place, it's just timing."

The Tulsa County Republican Party faced a similar platform challenge in 2012. The platform committee that year replaced the one-page Statement of Principles that had introduced our platform for over a decade with a shorter preamble focused on economic issues. Gone were references to the sanctity of human life, public integrity, religious institutions, and the foundational role in society of families and marriage between a man and a woman.

But the County Convention rules (unlike RNC rules) did not prevent debate and deliberation. Steven Roemerman and I managed to get sufficient signatures from his fellow platform committee members to put before the convention a minority report that restored the previous year's Statement of Principles. Steven and I spoke to the convention on the importance of the principles that had been deleted and stayed focused on the substance of the platform. A libertarianish delegate who liked Ron Paul but not his opposition to abortion spoke in favor of the stripped-down preamble; she didn't want Republicans taking a position on the issue. The author and leading proponent for the new desiccated preamble seemed to be driven by a narcissistic concern about his pride of authorship (he had been pushing to replace the entire platform with his preamble since at least 1999) rather than the substance of what was removed from the platform and spent most of his speaking time complaining that the minority report was a personal attack. The minority report was approved by a wide margin.

What we did in Tulsa County in 2012 would have been much more difficult, maybe impossible, if the pressure for the new language had been coming from the party's presumptive nominee and biggest fundraiser, so no disrespect to the national platform committee members who caved to the Trump campaign. As long as unsuccessful and badly run Republican state parties have as much representation on national convention committees as successful state GOPs, we're not likely to see any improvement in the situation. It will take party chairmen from states like Oklahoma, Texas, and Florida to rally enough delegates from enough states to challenge party rules from the floor in 2028.

MEANWHILE: Since I started writing this last week, Joe Biden has been ousted as the presumptive Democrat Party nominee, overthrowing the results of the Democrat primary season ("fortified" to protect Biden from a primary challenge). Without following any sort of democratic process to choose a replacement, party leaders have anointed Kamala Harris as the new presumptive nominee, and the most vocal Democrat voices on social media seem to be OK with that -- Black Lives Matter excepted.

• The DNC refused to host debates during the primary, even though a vast majority of Democratic voters wanted them. This would have likely allowed America to see the decline of Joe Biden in 2023.
• The DNC changed the primary schedule and created rules that made it almost impossible for non-Biden candidates to appear on the ballot, effectively clearing the field of any challengers to the incumbent president.
• Following the primary where millions of Black voters weighed in, after one poor debate performance, the DNC Party elites and billionaire donors bullied Joe Biden out of the race.

Erick Erickson reported a rumor that Bill and Hillary Clinton came to Tulsa to get George Kaiser's help to push Biden out.

Rumor has it that the Clintons went to Tulsa over the weekend to try to get George Kaiser to commit to helping fund a new path for the Democrats around Biden.

Nothing more democratic then seeking the help of a billionaire banker to override an entire primary season.

I've seen this sort of thing on a small scale: Incumbent that is the prohibitive favorite to win renomination drops out last minute to give his preferred successor a head start over potential opponents. (See J. C. Watts's handoff to Tom Cole in 2002.) Or incumbent school board member wins re-election then quits to allow the insiders to appoint a replacement, who goes into the next election as the incumbent, rather than allow candidates to compete as equals for an open seat. It's not like Democrat leaders were surprised that Biden was losing his marbles.

In my pre-presidential primary post, I provide a detailed explanation of the delegate allocation process for Oklahoma. As I mentioned in the same post, I am voting for Florida Governor Ron DeSantis in the 2024 Oklahoma Republican Primary.

A BatesLine reader asked me why the names of so many candidates are still going to be on the ballot, even though some dropped out weeks ago. The ballot was set in stone shortly after the end of the filing period in early December. It takes time to design and print ballots and to program ballot scanners to correctly tabulate that ballot design. Absentee ballots have to go out early, particularly for Oklahomans serving in the military. There's no time to reprint ballots. Ever year we've had a presidential primary, we've had no-longer active candidates on the ballot, and we often have barely- or never-active candidates running for city, county, and state offices. Even if a candidate isn't sending mail pieces or doing robocalls, you're still allowed to vote for him or her.

You might think that all this is moot. We appear to be headed for a Trump-Biden rematch. All but three of the Republican candidates (Trump, Haley, Stuckenburg) have suspended their campaigns. There hasn't been a serious primary challenge to an incumbent president since 1992, and only in the unusual circumstances of 1976, with an unelected incumbent, did a challenge have a real shot at succeeding. The Oklahoma County Republican Party is hosting an Official Trump Victory Party tomorrow night, a significant departure from the mandatory neutrality expected of party organizations during an active primary campaign.

But in the grand sweep of American history, the idea that you must actively campaign for president is a relative novelty. In 1952, within living memory, Dwight D. Eisenhower didn't give his first campaign speech until June 4, after the last primary had already been held. Eisenhower couldn't engage in partisan political activity until then; he was still on active duty as commander of NATO forces in Europe until May 31.

Democratic Party rule changes after 1968 began the movement toward binding primaries that put a premium on expensive mass media spending, but it wasn't until the advent of Super Tuesday in 1988 that the weight of the nominating process shifted definitively from caucuses and conventions to primaries. It was not unreasonable, as recently as 1968, for the incumbent president not to bother filing for primaries or to actively campaign.

Recently, Tara Ross wrote of the reluctance with which George Washington accepted his election to the presidency. Electors were elected in some states by popular vote and were appointed by the legislature in others, and each elector, at that time, cast two ballots. Every elector cast one of his ballots for Washington, with John Adams winning a majority of the remaining ballots, scattered among 11 candidates. None of the candidates actively campaigned for office. Electors cast their ballots for Washington not knowing if he would accept.

The vision of the Framers of the Constitution was that citizens would choose a trusted and knowledgeable neighbor from their city or region to represent them in the Electoral College, and that electors from each state would deliberate and cast ballots for the public servant best equipped to head serve as Chief Executive of the federal government. No campaigning would be necessary, because the electors would have the solemn obligation and privilege to research possible candidates, their successes and failures, their strengths and flaws. Ideally, ambition-driven campaigning would be viewed as unseemly and disqualifying.

But now presidential candidates must raise tens of millions of dollars and begin campaign efforts as soon as the midterm elections are over. To win the nomination, you must win primaries, which means you must reach a vast number of primary voters who are barely paying attention, and to get their attention you need money for TV ads, direct mail, robocalls and robotexts, and people to manage all of that, plus the ground game. Underperforming expectations in an early state means the money dries up; donors are no longer willing to invest in your future prospects.

In 2022, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis managed to win re-election by 20 percentage points in what had been a purple state (remember 2000?), while the expected "Red Wave" failed to materialize anywhere else. DeSantis used his power as governor effectively to accomplish a conservative agenda, removing two Soros-backed district attorneys who refused to prosecute crimes, dismantling DEI bureaucracies at the state's universities, re-creating the state's New College as a classical liberal arts college with a governing board filled with conservative thinkers like anti-woke campaigner Christopher Rufo, and defied the mighty Disney Corporation. While Trump was celebrating the vaccine he fast-tracked, DeSantis's appointed state Surgeon General, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, issued a caution for young men because of a higher risk of heart-related adverse effects.

At the heart of all of these DeSantis successes was a focus on results: understanding and wielding the authority that the voters had granted him to accomplish the priorities that he had promised the voters, hiring and appointing people with the intelligence, diligence, and character to accomplish the goals he set. You do not hear DeSantis or his fans making excuses for failure, mainly because he hasn't had many failures; DeSantis just gets things done.

DeSantis's polling lead began to disappear as partisan prosecutors began filing case after case attempting to put former president Donald Trump in prison or at least off of the ballot. Understandably but mistakenly, many Republican voters felt that the only way to defy politically motivated misuses of the justice system was to rally behind Trump. Trump and his allies attacked DeSantis's admirable record, minimizing his achievements and even making wild and ridiculous false claims (e.g., the guy who ousted two Soros DAs is somehow Soros's puppet). Trump ran to DeSantis's left on abortion, transgenderism, and woke Disney.

Trump and his followers asserted that Trump did not need to earn the 2024 GOP nomination but was owed it. DeSantis was accused of what seems to be the greatest crime in the opinion of too many: Being disloyal to Trump. To these people, it doesn't matter who would be the most effective Republican nominee and conservative chief executive: Loyalty, not to principle, not even to a party, but to one man, is the supreme virtue and disloyalty the unforgivable sin.

I rarely take time to watch movies -- I tend to unwind with a classic sitcom episode -- but a couple of months ago during a business trip, I took the time to re-watch a film I had seen and enjoyed, The Death of Stalin, Armando Ianucci's dark comedy about the power struggle around the demise of the murderous Soviet leader, starring Jeffrey Tambour as Gyorgy Malenkov and Steve Buscemi as Nikita Khrushchev. I followed it up with Downfall, a German-language dramatization of the final days of Hitler in his Berlin bunker, based in part on the account of the young woman who was the genocidal dictator's personal secretary.

Shortly after the latter film was released, there was a frequently recurring video meme that repurposed the scene where Hitler has a conniption after the generals tell him that the remaining armies are unable to come to the rescue; new subtitles were added to adapt the scene to imagine various famous people reacting to bad news, for example, Hillary Clinton learning that she is about to lose the 2008 Democratic nomination for president to Barack Obama (language warning). Hilarious adaptations aside, Downfall is an enthralling, thought-provoking film.

The common element in the two movies is that, despite the terminal weakness of Dear Leader -- Stalin has had a stroke and lost control of his bladder and bowels, Hitler reigns over less than a square mile of territory and will soon kill himself -- his minions fall all over themselves to affirm their loyalty. These appear to be men of intelligence and leadership, they see that Dear Leader is leading the nation to disaster, there are enough of them to band together and push him out of power -- and yet they cannot break free. In Death of Stalin, Vyacheslav Molotov (played by Michael Palin) loudly denounces his wife for crimes against the state and justifies dead Stalin's decision to imprison and presumably execute her, right until the moment she walks back through the door of their flat.

Now, Donald Trump is no genocidal autocrat, and he did a great deal of good during his term of office, but these movies brought to mind the cult of personality that has surrounded him and which he actively encourages. Nothing Trump does is ever a mistake. It may seem like a mistake that he appointed numerous cabinet members whom he now denounces as disloyal idiots, but really he is playing 10-dimensional chess and only seeming to fail in order to expose the swamp. Elected officials, hoping for a share of the public adulation Trump enjoys, fall all over themselves to praise Trump, to claim his endorsement, and to make excuses for him. Trump made many unforced errors, but he does not show any indication of having learned from his mistakes to become a more strategic, focused, and self-disciplined leader.

The November election may very well end up as a rematch between Trump and Biden (or more likely, the Democrats will replace Biden after Trump is officially nominated by the Republican National Convention), but for now we have a much better choice on tomorrow's primary ballot.

If enough of us who understand that Ron DeSantis is the best choice vote for him, he can win delegates to the national convention. Maybe God will bless us, as He has blessed Florida, with better leadership than we deserve.