Supreme Court Poised to Undo Election Results Nov 3. Call to Action

By paulgibson51 on October 29, 2020 • ( 1 )

The Supreme Court could invalidate all votes counted after Nov 3 even if this hands the election to Trump & despite a clear Biden win. Between now & Nov 3, all we can do is GOTV & ensure a Nov 3 win. But a nationwide Nov 4 action is being planned .

Ooops. I made a small change in the headline to this post and didn’t check it. I should have. It is corrected now, but it will only fix the headline on the home page, not in the email you’ve received. Apologies. Headlines should make sense.

After a couple announcements and an election update, we provide analysis of recent SCOTUS decisions and then at the end of the post, a wonderful short video of an a capella song by The Bengsons, “The Keeping Going Song.” I don’t know if I’ll get it done by tomorrow, but I’ve read two outstanding pieces on very different topics that somehow coalesced for me. One article on the historic roots of anti-socialism sentiment in the US (a bunch I had not known here) and a second piece sent to us by Greg Corning on the impact of psychology, culture and parental upbringing on the formation of political ideology. It should be a most illuminating piece. Look for it tomorrow….or maybe this weekend. Hang on, friends, five days to go. We will not soon forget this summer and fall. But we CAN give it meaning. Let’s do this!

Thursday, Nov 5, 6:30-8pm Election Zoom De-Brief, with Five New NM State Senators: Neomi Martinez Parra, Harold Pope, Pam Cordova, Carrie Hamblen, Siah Correa Hemphill and Eric Griego. Hopefully all five of these candidates will have won their races and readying for their first legislative session. They will be key factors in decriminalizing abortion, passing the Health Security Act, putting NM on a path to having a state public bank and putting the Green Amendment on the ballot. You can meet them all, ask questions about their priorities and positions. Before we hand the stage over to these great candidates, we will debrief on the national and state election with Eric Greigo, Working Families Party and Retake will lay out our 2021 Legislative Priorities (very briefly). Find out what will be possible with a fixed NM State Senate and meet the heroes who will make it possible.

Click here to register.

Election Update

News in Briefs

From NPR: “The 13 Races That Will Determine the Senate Majority”.. This is a great article to print out for viewing election night resullts as it outlines the key races at your fingertips. It is looking very promising for retaking the US Senate.
From 538.com “Today’s Poll Results.” If you are having trouble sleeping, like we are, this may be something to look at before you go to bed tonight. Poll after poll with Biden with 7-8% or double digit leads in national polls and winning by 3-5% in Florida, leading in Georgia, leading substantially in WI, MI, ME, and PA and are you sitting down….leading by 10% in Texas! That is definitely an outlier poll, as most TX polls have shown either candidate with 1-3% leads, usually Trump. But the Dems must smell blood, as they are sending Harris to Texas today. I also saw a piece on line this morning headlined “Texas Republicans Sound Post-2020 Alarm Bells.” Flip Texas and Florida blue and continue to hold the Rust Belt and the GOP will have a very tough time regaining the upper hand. Keep pushing, friends, we can bring home a landslide and then pray the SCOTUS doesn’t usurp the results.

Supreme Court Sends Mixed Messages

Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh reveals he is willing to throw out millions of legitimate mail-in ballots to help Trump win

If there has been any shift in polls over the last few days, it has been in the key swing states where Biden’s margin is widening with an ABC poll indicating Biden leading Trump by a whopping 17% in Wisconsin and with other polls showing growing leads in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Maine and some other swing states showing more narrow Biden leads (e.g. North Carolina & Florida) and still other states once seen as not even in play (e.g. Texas and Georgia) suddenly being toss ups. But all those polls assume that all the votes will actually are counted.

As part of an awful decision blocking Wisconsin from counting mail-in ballots that were mailed on time but arrive after Election Day, Kavanaugh flatly stated that any ballot not counted on election night should not be counted at all. The Supreme Court was not weighing in on whether early and mail in votes arriving on time should be counted, so his view on this may not represent the whole court, but I sure wouldn’t want to bet on it. This creates far dicier election viewing on the evening Nov 3. Let’s just say, I’d far rather hear Fox call it for Biden at 11:30pm ET than wait to find out what the Supreme Court would do a few days later. And for good reason.

The GOP-packed Supreme Court is forcing states to throw out mail-in ballots that the U.S. Postal Service doesn’t deliver in time, and not just in Wisconsin. Republicans are pushing lawsuits to stop late-arriving legal ballots from being counted in Pennsylvania and North Carolina, and Kavanaugh’s opinion on Monday suggests that the Court may force states to stop counting ballots everywhere if necessary.

We can wring our hands and bemoan what is transpiring, but that will not change a damn thing. And we can protest on Nov 4, but that also won’t change much. But what we can do is implement Retake’s GOTV strategy which has been revised to reflect this new reality. We are now encouraging anyone who can possibly safely vote in person on Nov 3 to do so. We are asking all of you to return to the lists you created two to three weeks ago, the lists with all your friends and family and write to them again, pasting in the language to make sure they have a plan to vote. But this time the language much more strongly encourages your friends to forward the email to all their friends and for those friends to do the same. Tomorrow, we will ask you to write to your friends again, repeating the message. And again on Saturday. This is an all-hands-on-deck action. We can leave NOTHING to chance.

I know it may be annoying for me to continually cajole you to act and if you have been writing your friends and now write again, that too may be a tad annoying. But annoyance is one thing, four more years of Donald Trump is unbearable to even consider. As it is, we can’t remove him until Jan 21 and by then it is estimated 300,000 more Americans could die from Covid and that estimate seems to go up daily and it will go up still more after the election because regardless of whether Trump wins or loses, you can bet that the day after the election is decided Dr. Fauci will be fired, along with anyone who has ever offered anything but vigorous praise for every Trump offense. We must prevent four more years.

Click here to get to our NEW GOTV language and please, spend an hour or so reaching out. To reinforce the theme of our need to keep on going, at the bottom of the post is a short video with The Keeping Going song from The Bengsons accompanied by some excellent mime. We gotta keep going, my friends.

A Ray of Hope: Two Much Better SCOTUS Decisions

I generally write the post the day prior to publication around 8-9 am the next morning. In the morning, I scan the news and polling data to see if anything new might be relevant to the main theme. Well, last night the SCOTUS stunned me and likely most others, including Donald Trump. They ruled against two GOP cases seeking the courts to curtail vote counts in Pennsylvania and North Carolina. After the decision above and the commentary from Kavanaugh that was part of it, this decision was just stunning and most hopeful, especially given that Kavanaugh sided with the majority in both cases. Fingers crossed, but maybe better than just hoping for good results, we need to create them.

Call To Action: Wednesday, Nov 4 Time TBD, but likely 3pm MT

National organizations are plannning national “Protect the Vote” rally on November 4. There is a rally planned for ABQ through the Center for Peace and Justice and one in Santa Fe from Indivisible national. Both are car rallies. The rallies could wind up being wild celebrations, if Biden prevails on Nov 3 or they could be more somber, angry rallies if the votes are being challenged. In either case, we will rally. We will keep you posted as plans unfold.

Critical Call for Support for Neomi Martinez Parra

The word I am hearing is “the numbers don’t look too good for Neomi…. we need to pull out all the stops.” So friends, if you have time over the next 5 days, it is time to support this courageous candidate. Neomi took on John Arthur Smith and defeated arguably the most powerful man in the state and our biggest impediment to social and racial justice. We owe her now that she is running a far more challenging campaign against a strong candidate with huge amount of gas and oil money and in a district that voted for Trump by 10%. And yet, she is close enough that with a big GOTV effort, she can win. That would be HUGE and that is why she has been our # 1 campaign priority since day one. Go to neomi4nmsenate.com to make a donation and to learn how you can get involved with the campaign. LET’S DO THIS. We need this one.

The Keeping Going Song

Two versions offered, with the first being one with mime and then below it the original version by The Bengsons. There is one part in the song when they reflect on how much they thought they knew about the world…and didn’t that broke Roxanne and I up, but the rest of the song is very uplifting. We Can Do This.