Photo by Kari Sullivan on Unsplash
When I started my @TheDailyEdge Twitter account in 2010, one of my immediate role models was the mysterious @LOLGOP, an account launched in the George W. Bush era (2008) that had by 2010 established itself as a “political influencer” in an age when reaching 10,000 Twitter followers was considered a massive platform.
Today, @LOLGOP has amassed and even massiver 355,000 followers and his secret identity is no longer a secret. He is Jason Sattler, now a regular USA Today Opinion columnist, longtime contributor to the influential Michigan-based Eclectablog and cohost (with @Eclectablog himself Chris Savage) of the podcast The GOTMFV Show.
Lately, Sattler has been less LOL and a lot more WTF!? His August 16 column in USAToday was headlined: Trump has a plan to steal the election and it’s not clear Democrats have a plan to stop him.
While @LOLGOP’s Twitter handle remains the same, his current Twitter name is: “Assume this is America’s last free election.” I reached out to him by email with some questions.
Q&A with @LOLGOP
“Assume this is America’s last free election” is a lot darker than @LOLGOP. How concerned are you?
On a scale of 1-10, I’d say 2,020 or 190,000. Any sense I have that I have any idea how this will work out has been completely depleted by 2016. And Trump and Barr’s telegraphing of their intention to dispute any loss could just be a distraction—or it could be portending the worst few months of the worst year of our lives. It’s hard to see how this ends well—yet we know it’s important to be able to visualize and convey the image of Joe Biden being sworn in and suddenly becoming a mix of FDR and LBJ. Because there is no other hope.
We’re now being warned that Biden could win by several million votes and still lose the Electoral College. How concerned are you that what happened in 2016 will happen again, only worse?
A total possibility—ranging between 20-40% if you believe the models. And it’s the only way Trump can win. I just hope people recognize how ahistorical this is. A popular vote loser didn’t take office once in the 20th century. Now it’s happened twice in less than twenty years. And it’s never happened twice in a row, ever. It easily could. Not just because of voter suppression and the pandemic’s interlocking difficulties. But because there is a careful Trump strategy (juiced by foreign interference) to win just enough of his base to win just enough of the Electoral College that I underestimated until now.
The idea that, given the state of the country right now, that there’s any chance of a Trump victory seems ridiculous to me. What would 4 more years of Trump look like?
I think of Belarus but it would probably look a lot like what we're living through now, but worse—trapped in our homes, frightened of our neighbors, terrified of dying alone. The thing we’ve learned about Trump’s authoritarianism is it resembles other forms of racist authoritarianism we’ve seen in this country in that most white Americans are immune from it. But I’d expect a second Trump term would see a nosedive in the apartheidism, as described by the Washington Monthly’s David Atkins, that Trump has embraced that suggests states or cities that don’t vote for the current regime should expect oppression at worst and indifference at best from the federal government.
Should the Democrats’ success in 2018 make us confident that Dems are organized and ready to turn out in massive numbers? Or has that success made the Democrats too complacent and less focused on election security and fighting dirty tricks?
The success of 2018 was amazing. Largest House Midterm win in American history. But still not enough to take the Senate. We should be emboldened by the numbers and dedicated to overthrowing the system that makes them irrelevant.
Trump’s cheating is now so open and flagrant. Why do you think more people are not speaking up—CEOs, celebrities, foreign leaders, insiders, former Defense Secretaries?
He could win. We may never have a president not named Trump again.
What about potential “October Surprises”? My own secret hope is that someone is sitting on a revelation about Trump that is so bad that even Lindsey Graham would turn against him, which is the only way I can rationalize Democrats acting so casually.
There’s going to be a rushed vaccine—which is terrible because it means people will distrust the distribution of a proven vaccine. But anything that focuses people on Trump’s COVID-19 failures probably hurts him, possibly even his attempt to pretend he “solved” it. So I expect indictments from Barr and a general mishmash of conspiracy theory about Biden endorsed by the Justice Department. I don't know what we could find out about Trump that would be worse than, “He let 190,000-400,000 Americans die.” And it wouldn't sway the diehards anyway.
What’s your prediction for your home state of Michigan and what more can be done there?
I hate optimism. I don't trust it. But I don’t know how Trump wins this state when we can all vote absentee and everyone is getting an application to ask for an absentee ballot thanks to our Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson. I'm more worried about Minnesota, New Hampshire, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania—in that order.
What advice do you have for people in or out of swing states who want to help the Democratic effort between now and November 3rd?
Send all your money to the state Democratic parties of Wisconsin and Ohio. Otherwise, look for the most productive ways to spend your time and money. What that is in a pandemic election is hard to say.
Keep Unprecedented coming! All posts of this ad-free email newsletter will be free through election day, so whether you’d like sign up for $0—or support with a paid subscription—just click here:
Subscribe to Unprecedented
Subscribe to the newsletter and unlock access to member-only content.