Official Biden vs. Trump 2020 General Election Thread (Biden WINS 306 Electoral College Votes)

Who wins?

  • Joe Biden, Vice President of the USA (2009-2017)

    Votes: 440 81.6%

  • Donald Trump, President of the USA (2017-present)

    Votes: 99 18.4%
  • Total voters
    539
  • Poll closed .
FAH1223

FAH1223

Go Wizards, Go Terps, Go Packers!
Staff member
Supporter
Hall of Fame
Joined
May 16, 2012
Messages
74,043
Reputation
8,612
Daps
222,825
Reppin
WASHINGTON, DC
19 No Covid said:
i thought the result of 1876 was because both parties struck a deal - republican victory for the end of reconstruction. could hayes have won without the democrats agreeing in order to end reconstruction?
Click to expand...
That was the compromise, yes. But look at the road to get there:
_____

Trump Constitutionally Could Remain President Even if He Loses 2020 Popular and Electoral Votes, and He Knows It. Thom Hartmann Explains. — Buzzflash
The U.S. House of Representatives Decides (and Trump Wins)

Another way Trump could lose both the popular vote and the uncontested electoral vote is found in the election of 1876.

Democrat Samuel Tilden won the popular vote nationwide but, with 184 electoral votes, was one vote short of the necessary 185 electoral votes to become president.

Republican Rutherford B. Hayes not only lost the popular vote but had only 163 electoral votes.

Ohio’s Republican Congressman James Monroe (not related to the president of generations earlier of the same name) wrote the definitive summary of that election and how it played out in Congress, a narrative he published in the Atlantic in October 1893.

Pointing out that “the votes of Florida, Louisiana, Oregon, and South Carolina, with an aggregate of 22 electors” would turn the election to either Hayes or Tilden, Monroe (who was there) wrote, “From the States just named there were two sets of returns, one favorable to General Hayes, the other to Mr. Tilden.”

The dispute had to do with three of those four states then being occupied by the Union Army (this was just 11 years after the Civil War ended, and Reconstruction was in full swing). At the same time, the Klan was riding high in all four states.

Formerly enslaved African Americans were trying to turn out large numbers of voters for the Republican candidate, but there was also widespread Klan activity suppressing that black vote. On the other side, Democrats in Congress charged that Union soldiers had intimidated Southern Democratic voters, suppressing their vote.

Monroe wrote that the Democrats charged, “that these returns [in those four states for Republican Hayes] were a product of fraud and dishonesty; that, in preparing them, the vote of whole precincts, parishes, and counties had been thrown out in order to secure Hayes electors… [and] they did not represent the people of those States, but were themselves the product of fraud and corruption, and were kept in place only by what was called the ‘moral influence’ of Federal bayonets.”

The nation nearly exploded, wrote Monroe: “The feeling of mutual hostility had been greatly intensified by party leaders, orators, and presses. In some of our cities it took all the terrors of the police court to keep Democrats and Republicans from breaking the peace.”

The 12th Amendment, ratified in 1804, had a simple solution to the problem of neither candidate winning a majority of electoral votes. “If no person have such majority,” the 12th Amendment says, “then… the House of Representatives shall choose immediately, by ballot, the President. But in choosing the President, the votes shall be taken by states, the representation from each state having one vote…”

Because all the Southern states had now been re-admitted to the Union, a majority of the House of Representatives that year were controlled by Democrats, as were a majority of the states. With each state’s delegation having only one vote, the Democratic-controlled House representing a Democratic majority of states would end up making Democrat Tilden the president, something the Republicans wouldn’t go along with.

Republicans added that because the 12th Amendment also says that “The President of the Senate shall, in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the certificates and the [electoral] votes shall then be counted…” that the president of the Senate should be the one to make the call as to which state’s contested votes were legitimate.

The Constitution provides that the vice president shall be the president of the Senate, but President Ulysses Grant’s veep, Henry Wilson, had died the previous year and Grant hadn’t replaced him; the president of the Senate in 1876 was Senator Thomas Ferry of Michigan, a Republican.

“It would have been as unsatisfactory to Republicans to have the vote declared by the House,” wrote Monroe, “as it would have been to Democrats to have it declared by the President of the Senate.”

“The situation was serious,” Monroe wrote. “Some thoughtful men felt that perhaps the greatest peril that the Republic had encountered was not that of the Civil War” but that “within a hundred days, people would be cutting each other’s throats.”

Senator Banning of Ohio, “My colleague,” Monroe wrote, “declared in a speech, that, if the Republicans should attempt to carry out their theory of the election, and if a part of the army with eighty rounds of ammunition, and the navy, should be ordered to support them, the people would put them all down.”

In response, Virginia’s Congressman Goode stood up and loudly asked his colleagues if they were willing to essentially restart the Civil War.

“A shout of ‘Yes’ went up from the Republican side of the House,” wrote Monroe.

Cooler heads ultimately prevailed, and both sides worked out a compromise that gave the GOP the White House but only on the condition that the newly minted President Hayes would remove Union troops from the Southern states, ending Reconstruction.

The republic was saved, but only by selling out Southern black people for the next hundred years.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top