Confidence in the Vote

The Left is upset by Trump's suggestion that the polls and elections are rigged against him. While this is a serious charge, it is hardly as unusual as the Left pretends.

First there was the 2000 election. Bush won and Gore conceded to him then called back to un-conced. Gore spent the next few weeks insisting that the election-night count was flawed and that he would win once "every vote was counted". Things got out of hand and the Supreme Court finally called an end to the recount when it was obvious that different standards were being used in different counties. Gore was an ungraceful looser and many of his supporters believed that he actually won the election. That was reinforced when Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 911 showed an article claiming that Gore won. This was, in fact, a letter to the editor that Moore typeset to look like an article.

For years the Left referred to Bush as the Resident in Chief, or the Current Occupant of the White House instead of the president.

Admittedly, the fact that Bush won an Electoral victory but lost the popular vote also hurt and there calls that he shold have stepped down in favor of Gore because of that.

Things only got worse in 2004. At a fund-raiser, a Bush supporter said that they would do "whatever it takes" to see Bush reelected. He meant fund-raising but he was also highly-placed in the leading producer of voting machines and many on the Left were convinced that he meant tampering with election results.

After Bush won reelection, the Left went crazy looking for evidence that the vote had been rigged. MSNBC anchor Keith Olberman took the lead on that, pouncing on any report. When someone claimed that it was "statistically impossible" for Bush to have carried sections of northern Florida, Olberman was there (a later analysis showed that Bush's victory was in keeping with voting patterns going back decades). One major embarrassment for the Left during this period was that the cases of suspected fraud never turned out to have the newer voting machines that they suspected.

In the 2006 mid-term election Democratic operatives were still insisting that Republicans were influencing the vote but that this could be neutralized by a large enough turnout of Democrats. After the Democrats swept Congress in 2006 and took the White House in 2008, they stopped claiming that the election was fixed.

But Trump, who was a Democrat during the Bush years, remembers all that talk about fixed elections.