I’m going to crawl way out on a limb.
Hillary Rodham Clinton is going to win several states this fall that normally vote Republican in presidential elections.
I won’t suggest that Texas will be one of them. There are some others, though, that appear vulnerable to an electoral flip: Arizona comes to mind; Missouri, too; maybe North Carolina; and, yes, even Utah. Let me throw in Montana and the Dakotas just for giggles and grins.
Which brings to mind the weird prediction that Republican nominee Donald J. Trump has leveled at the electoral process. He says the election will be “rigged.”
My question centers on how you “rig” a national presidential election in which each state awards its Electoral College votes in a system run by state politicians.
The state’s I’ve mentioned have substantial Republican majorities in their legislatures. Missouri is governed by a Democrat, but it has gone Republican for several election cycles.
Trump, though, suggests that Clinton is going to manage to “rig” the election.
Trump provoked a strong response from President Obama, who today called the “rigging” accusation “ridiculous.”
The president mentioned that it’s impossible for him to understand how a candidate can suggest something like that would happen before the results are in. If the GOP nominee were leading by 15 points on Election Day and still lost, the president said, then he might have reason to question the results.
My point here, though, is that presidential elections aren’t really managed at a single location. They are managed in 50 state capitals, with its hefty share of Republican-controlled legislative chambers and governor’s offices.
Trump’s weird prediction, therefore, sounds like the whining of someone who knows he’s going to lose badly in about 96 days.
