The Rigged System

donald-trump-face-teethIncreasingly over the last several weeks, Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump has been on the stump talking about the “rigged system” that he is running against. A Trump cynic would say merely that he has started to prepare his narrative in advance of a likely defeat on Election Day. After all, Trump is a “winner.” The only way he could possibly lose this election is if it were stolen from him.

We don’t know yet what the outcome will be on November 8th, whether Hillary Clinton will score a resounding victory, whether Trump will stage the comeback of the century to pull out a win or whether Clinton will emerge victorious by a narrow margin. If Hillary wins by the nearly 5 million popular vote and 126 Electoral College vote margin that represents Barack Obama’s win over Mitt Romney in 2012, only the most hard core Trump supporters will believe that their champion was robbed. But what if the election is close? What if it’s as close as Bush-Gore or Bush-Kerry, in which one state determined the ultimate outcome? Would there be any validity to a claim that the election was rigged?

In this post, I’m going to talk about the “rigged system.” In the totality of American politics, there is quite a bit of rigging over a variety of platforms. I’m going to delve into the rigged system as it relates to nine different areas that are relevant to the 2016 election.

  1. How the media is rigged
  2. Whether there’s any validity to the notion that the election itself might be rigged
  3. Whether there’s any validity to the claim that the polls are rigged
  4. How the Democratic party nomination was rigged
  5. How the Republican party nomination was rigged
  6. How the debates are rigged
  7. How the composition of the U.S. House of Representatives is igged
  8. How the party in power rigs the system
  9. How the tax code is rigged

I’m going to focus primarily on #1, #2 and #3, with brief comments on the others.

1. The Rigged Media

Even more than his rants about the election itself being rigged against him, the bombastic billionaire turned politician rails against the “crooked media” tilting the scales.

“Without the media, Hillary Clinton couldn’t get elected dog catcher.”

— Donald Trump (at a rally in Wilkes-Barre, PA on October 10th)

To the extent that the mainstream media is favoring Clinton over Trump in this election, that’s undeniable. The majority of media outlets in our country favor Democrats over Republicans in general. When The New York Times endorsed Clinton that was hardly news but, in an act of surprising transparency, their website had a link to their past endorsements. The last Republican candidate to be endorsed by the Grand Old Lady was Dwight Eisenhower in 1956.

According to Wikipedia (not always the best source but the only one here), 147 daily newspapers have endorsed Clinton, 6 have endorsed Gary Johnson and just two have endorsed Trump, the Santa-Barbara News-Press and the St. Joseph News-Press (St. Joseph is about 50 miles north of Kansas City). Among those same 155 papers, 56 endorsed Obama in 2012, with 40 touting Romney. The others didn’t endorse anybody. So the scales are tilted generally, but this year it’s off the charts.

I’ll offer an other statement about the role the media played in this election. This is not an original idea. The mainstream media may be heavily invested in electing Clinton but, earlier, that same media helped to rig the Republican primary by giving the bombastic billionaire nearly 2 billion dollars of free air time, dwarfing the time accorded to his sixteen rivals. Whatever you may think about the Donald’s controversial message, the media really helped to get that message out to the populace.

Beyond the clear desire of the vast majority of the news media to see Trump NOT elected next month, he has often said that the media is dishonest and tells lies about him. He’s called reporters “slime” and “disgusting people.” I see no evidence of this. I sample cable news programs from Fox News, CNN, MSNBC and Bloomberg Politics as well as the Sunday shows on all four major networks; I read articles online from the New York Times, Washington PostThe Wall Street Journal, The Hill, Politico, National Review and The Weekly Standard. The point is that I am personally a very well informed voter. It’s true that the collective body of writers and commentators at the aforementioned news organizations are not crazy about Trump but all of the TV networks include Trump supporters in their round-table discussions so it’s not as if somebody watching “the shows” doesn’t get perspective from both sides. When either Trump or Clinton lie in the debates, I usually know it before the fact checkers take a look. I see no evidence whatsoever that these media outlets are lying about Trump. They are clearly tilted in the proportion of negative coverage they allocate to Trump’s issues as opposed to Hillary’s, but they’re simply not making stuff up. I’m not saying that it never happens, but it’s rare.

The last couple of weeks, in which the lewd Access Hollywood tape of Trump bragging about groping women exploded into the national consciousness, have really tilted the scales towards the Trump negatives. At the same time, the endless drip of embarrassing WikiLeaks emails regarding Clinton and her campaign have been mostly ignored. This is Trump’s problem and it’s not the media’s fault. When a candidate is on tape bragging about kissing women and grabbing their genitals right as he meets them, that is bigger news than an email from John Podesta lamenting that the San Bernardino shooter had a Muslim name or that Hillary talked about her dream of “open borders” in a speech to Brazillian bankers. When nine women come out of the woodwork to claim that Trump touched or assaulted them in exactly the same way that he describes it on that tape, it’s news. We don’t know for sure if all of the allegations are true but these claims merely validate that Trump has in fact behaved in the way that he described that he behaved. It’s news. Period.

There is no doubt that the totality of the media is and always biased towards Democratic candidates and Trump has offended so many people during this campaign that it’s understandable why a Trump supporter would feel that the deck is stacked against him. That doesn’t change the fact that the billionaire is his own worse enemy and gives the news media an endless supply of negatives to report.

If anybody has the right to complain about the media bias against them, it’s Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson. As I wrote about in an earlier piece, the former New Mexico Governor was completely ignored by the media for the first eight months of the year, even as he managed to get up to 10% in the national polls simply by not being named Trump or Clinton. It was only when he said “What is Aleppo?” that the nightly news programs deemed him to be news-worthy. Somebody getting the support of nearly one-tenth of the population probably deserved a little more airtime than this from those shows:

media-research-center-johnson

There is a point here. The media doesn’t wantonly lie as Trump (and many others on the right) would have us believe. But the mainstream media is inherently biased in what it chooses to cover and how much attention to give to each story. TV news channels and newspapers skew their stories towards the party that they prefer. The reporters often reveal their inherent bias even as they’re trying not to. Case in point is CNN’s Jake Tapper. I’ve always admired him as a straight shooter, going back to his days at ABC News. But it is clear that he is exasperated by some of the nonsense coming out of Trump’s mouth and his true feelings are now revealed.

In the first two presidential debates, it was obvious to anyone paying attention that moderators Lester Holt, Martha Raddatz and Anderson Cooper asked more pointed questions to Trump than to Clinton. Four years ago, CNN’s Candy Crowley turned the momentum of the race around when she backed Obama over Romney over whether the President had referred to Benghazi as a terrorist attack. With the final debate being moderated by Fox News’ Chris Wallace, you can expect that both candidates will be given tough questions and it will be in many ways the most “fair and balanced” debate of the fall.

In this election cycle, the media is clearly biased, not really in favor of Clinton but categorically against Trump. However, that doesn’t mean that they’re just inventing things or lying. So I’m going to provide my own soundbite:

Trump said that Hillary Clinton could not be elected dog-catcher without the media. In fact, Mr. Trump would not have won the GOP nomination without the media and Clinton could not be elected President of the United States without Trump as her opponent.

— Chris Bodig

2. Is there any validity to the idea that the election itself might be rigged?

The simple answer is “no” but, based on recent history, the question isn’t ridiculous. If Trump loses by a large margin then it will be absurd for him to make the claim and will simply make him look foolish. If it’s close, however, he’s going to have his megaphone and he’s going to use it. The fact is, there are many who feel that the presidential races of 1960, 2000 and 2004 were all “stolen.”

First, here’s a very brief history lesson. In 1960, John F. Kennedy defeated Richard Nixon by just 112,00 votes nationwide, which amounted to a 0.17% edge. The Electoral College gave JFK a 303-to-219 victory but the outcomes in Texas and Illinois were disputed, with Illinois in particular being suspicious because the margin was so small (9,000 votes) and Kennedy’s win in Cook County (Chicago) was suspiciously large. Ultimately, despite many GOP members urging him to to so, Nixon took the high road and did not challenge the result because he was worried that it would “tear the country apart” and that he would be forever chastised as a “sore loser.” There was a Watergate-type subtext to this, really fascinating. Some historians believe that some of the opposition tactics used against him by the Kennedy campaign gave Nixon the “green light” (in his mind) to play his own dirty tricks in the future. You can read about it in detail in this Washington Post article if you’re interested.

In 2000 of course, Bush beat Gore in Florida by just 500 votes and there was the “hanging chad” controversy. And then in 2004, Bush’s narrow Electoral College win over John Kerry was due to his win in the state of Ohio. To this day many Kerry supporters feel the election was stolen by rigged voting machines in the Buckeye state.

What these three stories have in common is that, in all three instances, the vanquished candidate did not create a Constitutional crisis over the outcome. It took longer for Gore in 2000 (because it was sooooo close) but ultimately each man chose to move on and accept the result. If the 2016 election is close, if there are one or two super-tight races in states with large Electoral College allocations, it is hard to conceive of Donald J. Trump quietly accepting the outcome. He will huff and puff with all of his bluster and declare that the election was stolen from him.

But let’s assume that the polls are correct (more on that in a moment) and predict a significant win for Secretary Clinton. If she wins by several million votes with an multiple-state Electoral College advantage, will Trump go quietly into the night? That’s unclear. In the first debate he said he would accept the result of the people but, to me, that simply means that he won’t waste millions of dollars mounting a legal challenge. Instead, he and Steve Bannon will launch the Trump News Network on the conspiracy theory that the election was stolen from him and he will have a large base of voters subscribing to that notion. A recent Politico/Morning Consult poll found that a whopping 73% of Republicans feared that widespread voter fraud could be used to steal the election.

Practically speaking, the idea that our presidential election can be rigged on a nationwide basis is fundamentally preposterous. It’s not as if every citizen is voting online and the results can be altered by a computer hacker. There is a paper ballot or paper record virtually nationwide and the entire process is decentralized, with thousands of individual precincts running their local elections. In addition, most of the swing states that matter in this election (Ohio, North Carolina, Iowa, Nevada and Florida) are run by Republican governors. The level of conspiracy that would be required to achieve a manufactured result throughout the country is simply not possible in our political system.

That’s not to say that there still aren’t problems. Many voter rolls still include the deceased, it’s easy in many states for illegal immigrants to vote and the Democrats fight efforts to require voters to identify themselves at every turn. But if this election isn’t close, there’s no rational basis to claim that it was rigged.

3. Is it possible that the polls are rigged against Donald Trump?

Below is the average of all polls taken after both the lewd Access Hollywood tape and also the 2nd presidential debate. I’ve included the national polls and many of the swing state polls, most of which Trump will have to win in order to prevail in the Electoral College system.

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With most of the polls against him, Trump has started arguing that the polls are wrong. I haven’t heard him specifically say that the polls are “rigged” specifically but just that they’re “wrong.” His chief argument about the polls being wrong is that he gets massive turnout at his rallies compared to the smaller crowds going to see Secretary Clinton. He also cites the polls regarding the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom which incorrectly predicted that the UK’s citizens would choose to remain in the European Union instead of leaving it.

party-id-graphicThere is a “polls rigged” narrative from Trump supporters that point to the fact that the polling organization for the NBC News/Wall St. Journal poll has ties to a pro-Clinton Super-PAC and that the owner of the Reuters News Service is a donor to the Clinton Foundation. It is true that the NBC/WSJ polls have shown Clinton with a bigger lead than most others but the Reuters/Ipsos polls are in line with the rest. There are also complaints that the polls over-sample Democrats and under-sample Independents, who are breaking more for Trump than Clinton. The problem with that narrative is that this is normal. In the history of polling, going back to the 1950’s, more people self-identify as Democrat vs. Republican and that’s why all pollsters take that into account when weighting their poll results. (graphic attached)

In totality, the notion that all of the polling organizations are rigging their results towards Secretary Clinton is just silly. The real people who run these polls make their living by forecasting election results as accurately as they can. Four years ago Dick Morris, a Fox News contributor, repeatedly told the network’s viewers that Romney would handily defeat Obama. He posited that the polls that called it close or the ones in Obama’s favor were incorrectly predicting the turnout. When he was wrong, the viewers were mad at him specifically and Fox News informed Morris that his services were no longer needed.

Another theory about the polls, along the lines of the sampling complaint, is the thought that there is a silent Trump vote, a horde of people who secretly plan to vote for him but are too embarrassed to admit it out loud. The argument against the “silent Trump vote” theory is that, to whatever extent it may be true, the “silent Trumpers” would be canceled out by the vastly superior “get out the vote” ground game that the Clinton campaign has.

One of the biggest reasons that I was personally so anti-Trump during the Republican primaries is because most of the polls showed Trump losing in a one-on-one race against Hillary. From January 4th to May 3rd (the day he sealed the primary win in Indiana), there were 29 polls taken that asked a preference in a head-to-head Trump-Clinton match-up. 25 of those 29 polls predicted a Clinton victory, 3 went for Trump and one was tied. With just one exception, these same polls correctly predicted that Trump was the overall first choice of the GOP electorate and by a wide margin.

During the same period of time, 8 out of 9 polls predicted a Marco Rubio win over Clinton. In addition, 18 out of 18 polls that matched up John Kasich with Secretary Clinton showed a future victory for the Ohio Governor (there were more polls involving Kasich because he stayed in the race longer). As a lifelong Republican, my #1 goal this year was to nominate a candidate who could beat Hillary Clinton and this is why I was with Rubio or Kasich. The logic is compelling. Rubio is young, charismatic and has an appeal to Latino or young voters in a way none of his rivals could. For Kasich, his appeal was unusually strong among independents, conservative Democrats, and African-Americans.

The point of this boring story is that all of the same polls that predicted Trump would win the primary (which we did) also predicted that he would lose to Clinton in the general election (which he is, at least according to the polls that the Donald used to love so much).

There is one way, and only one way, that one can make a vague scientific case that the Trump vote is vastly underrepresented in all of the current polling. What this chart shows is what percentage of the vote the polls predicted for Trump in each of the key states during the primary process and what his actual vote total was. I have only included states in which there were at least four polls taken in the week prior to the actual primary.

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What’s striking here is how accurately the polls generally predicted the outcome until the last few weeks, which encompassed the primaries in New York, Pennsylvania, Indiana (and other northeast states not shown on the chart above). If you’ll remember, at the end, when Trump over-performed his poll numbers, all the talk in the Cruz and Kasich campaigns was about how they would get enough delegates to deny Trump the majority and thus potentially take the nomination away from him at the GOP Convention. Clearly that was not a message that the voters liked. They rejected it outright. The prevailing narrative was that Trump was winning and, in primary contests, there’s often a bandwagon effect to rally behind the person perceived to be the inevitable winner.

Is there any hope in the general election campaign that Trump could significantly out-perform his current poll numbers? Well, we’ve just seen that he’s done it before but he did it that time from the position of being the inevitable front-runner, not the challenger. His claims that the election is being rigged against him may motivate his supporters to go to the polls in greater than predicted numbers but it also could keep them home if they get the message that the race is over and Trump has lost.

Real Clear Politics is showing Trump behind nationwide by 7 points and he’s behind in virtually every swing state he needs. That’s an enormous lift to come behind from that. Take note of the following numbers:

— In 2012, the Real Clear Politics average of polls showed Obama beating Romney by about one point. He won by 3.7%.

— In 2008, the RCP average of polls showed Obama beating McCain by 7.6 points. He won by 7.3%.

— In 2004, the RCP average showed Bush beating Kerry by 1.5 points. He won by 2.4%.

In each of the last three presidential elections, the RCP average of polls called it within 3 points. The biggest differential was in 2012 when the polls under-predicted Obama’s win over Romney. Most political scientists were surprised that Obama’s turnout was as robust as it had been in 2008.

It is possible, just possible, that all of the polls are way off in predicting Trump’s turnout but he would need to close the race to within 2-to-3 points nationwide for this to be a plausible prediction. Unless WikiLeaks drops a real bombshell on Hillary Clinton in the next three weeks (a bombshell vastly more damning than what’s already out there) or she faints on live TV, this election is already over.

We’re over 3,000 words into this post so I’ll be brief on points 4 through 9:

4. How the Democratic primary was rigged

This was well-documented throughout the primary season. The Dems have a super-delegate system that disenfranchises the voters in each state. In what was a head-to-head competition from the beginning between Secretary Clinton and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, Hillary had a big lead before the first vote was cast. Over 25% of the delegates she would need to win the nomination were already in her pocket in the form of party insiders or elected officials. This was like a football game where one team is ahead 10-0 before the opening kickoff.

Emails that have been WikiLeaked over the past several months have also shown that party chairman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz tilted the scales in HIllary’s favor (she had to resign because of it), that party co-chair Donna Brazille got town hall questions in advance from CNN (Brazile denies this) and that Clinton’s paid speeches to Goldman Sachs contained precisely the “Wall Street friendly” cozy relationship that Sanders warned about.

While it is true that Hillary won more popular votes during the entire primary process, a level playing field may have made this a closer contest.

5. How the Republican primary was rigged

The irony of the Republican primary nominating process is that Donald Trump called it rigged but it was in fact rigged to his advantage. This wasn’t the outcome the party big-wigs intended of course but the way the process was set up worked to the benefit of a strong front-runner in a multi-candidate field. If the GOP had the proportional delegate allocation system that the Dems had, Ted Cruz and others could have stayed in the fight all the way to the convention. But because there were so may winner-take-all states, Trump was able to rack up the delegates he needed by merely winning a 40% plurality.

6. How the debates are rigged

I wrote about this extensively in a previous post, a piece you can link to here. The short version is that the Commission on Presidential Debates is a bi-partisan organization run by operatives of the Democratic and Republican parties. The CPD has mandated a minimum vote threshold of 15% for any candidate to be included in a debate. The virtually unknown Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson climbed to nearly 10% in the national polls but never had a chance to expand on that base. If he had been on the debate stage with Trump and Clinton his visibility would have sky-rocketed and tens of millions of voters might have preferred him to the two disliked candidates. But the CPD never gave him a chance.

7. How the composition of the U.S. House of Representatives is rigged

As the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) continues to unravel, it’s biggest legacy remains how it’s unpopularity before passage tilted the House of Representatives to the Republicans for a decade. With the Tea Party and anti-Obamacare sentiment running high, the GOP flipped a whopping 63 seats in the House in the mid-term election of 2010, elevating John Boehner to Speaker of the House while demoting Nancy Pelosi from that post. With an energized electorate, Republicans also dominated in the state legislature elections. With 2010 being a Census year, the shift of power enabled Republican state legislators to gerrymander the Congressional Districts to their favor. Therefore, even if Clinton trounces Trump by a seven to eight point margin, it’s very likely that the House will remain in Republican hands.

8. How the party in power rigs the system

I could write a book about this but I’ll keep it simple. Let me count just a few of the the ways that members of the Obama Administration have attempted to rig things to their favor:

  1. Evidence is starting to emerge that the entire FBI investigation into Hillary’s use of a private email server may have been rigged to the outcome that the president needed, that his anointed successor not be indicted for a felony. There are recently released FBI emails that include the words “quid pro quo” in which a State Department official was attempting to offer a favor to someone at the FBI in exchange for declassifying one of Hillary’s emails from it’s confidential state. And of course then there’s Bill Clinton’s tarmac meeting with Attorney General Loretta Lynch shortly before the FBI was ready to make their recommendations. Most of us don’t know for sure but I am convinced the fix was in here from the beginning.
  2. The IRS systematically targeted conservative and, in particular, Tea Party groups that applied for tax exempt status.
  3. The Obama Administration narrative to blame the September 11, 2012 Benghazi terror attack on an offensive internet video in an effort to substantiate Obama’s campaign position that Al Qaeda was on the run.
  4. Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes admitted to the New York Times that he was spinning fiction about Iran in order to get a majority of the American people on board with the nuclear deal with that nation.
  5. “If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan. Period.” Enough said about that. 

9. How the tax code is rigged

Democrats have long wailed that millionaires and billionaires don’t pay their fair share of taxes and, in many cases, it’s absolutely true. There are hundreds of loopholes and carve-outs created over the decades by lobbyists. People who make a lot of money (even millions) in a traditional job are taxed plenty (between federal taxes, state taxes, sales taxes and property taxes) but there are categories of the rich that are getting away with murder. I’m talking about hedge fund managers and, now we’ve learned, real estate developers.

The New York Times reported that, in 1995, Donald Trump claimed a $916 million loss and that, because of it, he may have avoided paying federal income taxes for a stunning 18 years. Trump has not really denied this and some of his surrogates have called him a “genius” for taking advantage of the tax code. I have no problem with somebody in business being able to carry forward losses to keep their businesses running. But $916 million??  According to the Times piece, a half a million taxpayers took advantage of the same provision in 1995 but the average reported loss was $97,600. In fact, Trump’s $916 million loss accounted for nearly 2 percent of the total nationwide.

So, it seems from these figures that in the mid 1990’s Donald Trump was actually one of the worst businessmen in the entire nation. But we can’t really know because he hasn’t released his tax returns. He says he’ll do it as soon as his “routine audit” is complete. If you believe that, you’ll believe that Mexico will pay for a wall on our southern border.

If any of you made it this far, you have tremendous stamina and thanks for reading!

Chris Bodig

Updated: May 13, 2017 — 9:36 am

5 Comments

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  1. Are you sure it wasn’t $916 million? You’ve referenced billion three times. $916 billion would be 10X more than the highest estimates of his total net worth and he would have to be the richest man in the world to have assets valuable enough to lose that amount. I think you mean to say “millions”. Also, I have taken business losses due to a certain partner situation. Our losses were $100,000. My remaining partners and I are only allowed to take $3,000 per year each until we can recover the losses, which are not actually recovered in cash – just in reduced gross income. Might want to check if Trump is also limited in the amount he can deduct. I know for a fact that I continue to pay federal and state taxes based upon current income minus the limits of loss as a deduction. I would bet it’s the same for him and it frustrates me that all of these smart financial people rarely point it out. They seem to be looking to make a misleading headline instead.

    1. chrisbodig@gmail.com

      Yes, typo, of course it was $916 million, not billion. I don’t know if ANYONE has $916 billion. Glad you made it all the way to the end, Charlie!

    2. chrisbodig@gmail.com

      After 4,500 words, was getting tired and showed my anti-Trump bias by writing billion (three times) as you said. Thanks for the catch. Sam Friedberg caught it too. Fixed it.

  2. More importantly is how business or personal losses can be treated from a tax standpoint. Would be interested in your research to find out the annual limits for deductions that can be applied to past losses. I know that mine are limited to $3,000 for a business loss that occurred several years ago. The media has been reporting (distorting, in my view) that he doesn’t have to pay any tax for 18 years because of this. I know this is not the case for me. I just want the truth and facts. And I’d also like to know the law. If our tax system does allow tax write offs for past losses, which it does, then how can we demonize anyone for adhering to that law? I know of no one who voluntarily gives our federal government more money that it thinks it is entitled to. We do the opposite. We instruct our tax advisors and preparers to look for the maximum legal deductions in order to reduce our tax burden. And yet the media and the Democrats are spinning this as un-American. Give me physical break.

    1. chrisbodig@gmail.com

      I don’t really understand the tax code as it applies to this but it seems as if he was able to “loss carry forward” his $916 MILLION loss for 18 years. How much per year I couldn’t say. I don’t fault Trump for adhering to the law to his benefit. He stated from the beginning of his campaign that he pays as little as possible. That’s fine. But I know hard-working successful people like you get reamed by the tax code and if it’s true that Trump didn’t pay taxes for 18 years that pisses me off and it is Exhibit A about what’s wrong with the tax code. We don’t know this of course because he won’t release his tax returns as every other candidate has done since I was five years old. The excuse that he’s under audit is a dodge. He’s hiding something in those unreleased tax returns just as Hillary is hiding something in her deleted emails.

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