An article by: Martin Sieff
Learning from Past Experience

Two candidates, both over 77 years of age, are struggling for the White House where both have been earlier. Traps, dirty games, and pitfalls of the race, with results possibly fabricated. An analysis by Martin Sieff, US observer and a “veteran” of covering many US presidential elections.

I am an old hand at this game. This is my seventh consecutive US presidential election covered from start to finish as a political reporter and analyst since and including 2000, the first three of them (200, 2004 and 2008 as chief political analyst for United Press International (UPI).

And I was a senior foreign correspondent for The Washington Times working in and out of Washington for the three previous campaigns and elections of 1988, 1992 and 1996.

In each of those 10 presidential election cycles, by this point in each campaign, a combination of polling trends and close study of the leading candidates had made clear who was going to win. But not this time.

In 2016, I bucked the unanimous trend of US correspondents and predicted from the very beginning that Republican candidate Donald Trump would clearly defeat Democratic standard bearer Hillary Clinton.

Being Irish helped. American journalists, especially the most prestigious ones, I have observed to be sheep, easily rounded up and herded in the right direction and incapable of critical thought or questioning the mind-numbing assumptions they witlessly swallow day and night.

The other reason for my confidence was that I had already covered Mrs. Clinton in the 2008 campaign where she humiliatingly lost the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination to a then-inexperienced young candidate coming out of nowhere: Barack Obama.

On that occasion Mrs. Clinton had wasted an unprecedented quarter of a billion-dollar campaign chest painstakingly gathered in advance. It was clear to me that if she was such an inept loser then, she would be again.

Indeed, I compared Mrs. Clinton’s long, laborious, plodding, inexorable trudge toward the Democratic presidential nomination as akin to Admiral Zinovy Rozhestvensky’s Second Pacific Squadron joylessly trudging 33,000 kilometers (18,000 miles) around the world and using half a million tons of coal to do it before being blown out of the water by the Japanese Navy at the Battle of Tsushima on May 27-28, 1905.

US presidential election and brainwashing

In 2020, I predicted former vice president Joe Biden’s victory over then incumbent president Donald Trump. Again, the crucial data points and keys to analysis were simple, once identified and studied.

Trump commanded enormous passion and support from his energized base. But the independent, floating middle ground of US voters had been conditioned – one might unkindly say brainwashed – to regard him by then with terror, loathing and fear.

And so, despite being the first US president in 40 years not to start or foster a new war during his term of office (the previous one being President Gerald Ford from 1974 to 1977), Trump went down to defeat.

There were, however, other factors that superficially confused the outcome and prediction of results in both 2016 and 2020.

False accusations against Russia of “interference” in U.S. election

In 2016, the Russian government was falsely accused of successfully intervening to “steal” the election from Mrs. Clinton. This claim was, quite simply, a bald-faced lie. No credible evidence to support or verify it has ever been found anywhere.

I may add that I spent the election night in 2016 monitoring the results in the newsroom of the Sputnik News Agency in Washington DC where I worked as a reporter and analyst at the time. And I was the only person in that newsroom of the dozens there who expected Trump to win.

Every Russian – as well as American – journalist present was convinced Clinton’s victory was a done deal. Far from anticipating or gloating over Trump’s triumph, they were all astonished and perplexed by it.

In 2020, the story was the opposite. Biden was likely to have won anyway because of the – false and spurious, but nevertheless very widely felt – fears that had been stirred up against Trump, largely because of his determination to improve relations and defuse tensions with Russia.

However, virtually all the pre-election polls showed a close race on the lines of Republican George W. Bush’s wafer-then victory over Democrat Al Gore in 200. Instead, Biden won by a sweeping seven million vote margin, unanticipated by the pollsters. And his margins of victory in almost every key battleground state followed the same pattern.

Biden fell behind by large margins at first as the rural vote came in first in state after state. Then hours later, the urban inner city and suburban votes came in across the nation and systematically obliterated Trump’s early leads.

This pattern should have inherently raised suspicions about the electronic voting machines and the lack of any documented paper trail.

The fight for voters in big cities and rural areas is a vast field of manipulation

Normally, rural votes under democratic elections almost always come in later than urban, inner-city ones because the voting centers are far more isolated and usually with less sophisticated and slower counting equipment and communications. However, the Democratic Party regimes that have controlled the inner cities for well over 100 years wait until the conservative majority votes come in across their states, so they know how many votes they need to fabricate in their returns from the inner cities. This practice is taken for granted, for example, in the state of Pennsylvania, where the returns from Philadelphia routinely decide the outcomes.

For the same pattern of early Republican leads to be methodically and systematically obliterated in precisely the same sequence of events state after state is an insult to common sense, as well as the laws of statistical probability and the history of national and regional fluctuations in voting patterns.

Biden’s seven million margin of victory and the way in which, state by state, Trump’s early leads magically vanished as the night of counting went on were – and should have been – inherently suspicious.

However, to question the results of the 2020 US presidential election is now as forbidden in public discourse across the United States as it is to question the complimentary myth – or rather Big Lie – about the 2016 election.

It is now de rigueur for a third of a billion people across the United States to completely agree and only be told – repeatedly – that not only did Russia “steal” the 2016 election, when it did not, but also that the result of the 2020 election was not “fixed” against Trump, which indeed it may have been.

After all, that seven million vote margin of victory for Biden came from nowhere. None of the main opinion polls had predicted it. They almost all predicted a very close race, probably but not automatically going to Biden.

Yet within two months of Biden’s supposedly landslide victory, that seven million-vote margin had vanished entirely, before even Biden had had a chance to bungle Afghanistan, Ukraine, relations with Russia, the Middle East, the economy, the energy issue or anything else.

State and federal elections held only weeks after Biden took the oath of office showed his supporters either being defeated or winning by narrow margins precisely by the narrow margins monitored by pre-election polls across the nation prior to the presidential vote.

Internal splits in both “traditional” U.S. parties and fears of new forgeries

So where did Biden’s margin of victory come from and why did it vanish so fast?

Applying the great principle of Occam’s Razor, whereby the simplest hypothesis that explains the greatest number of data points is almost invariably the correct one points to one conclusion: The possibility that the 2020 election was stolen against Trump needs to at least be given the same scrutiny that the entirely false 2016 myth was that he and his followers, or Russia on their behalf, “stole it.”

As it happens, we can even pinpoint the exact location and time to within an hour or so when the great myth of the stolen election of 2016 was created. It was by close associates of Mrs. Clinton and possibly the lady herself on the floor of the Javits Center in Manhattan around 2:30 am in the early hours of Wednesday, November 4, 2016. By the next morning, the hysteria about the alleged “stolen” election was in full flow.

Why is all this history so important in analyzing the course of the coming election? It is because both parties are fielding either incumbent or previous presidents.

Such a condition where both or two out of three leading candidates are in direct competition for the US presidency has not been seen in more than a century since the election of 1912. And then, it was the third candidate, who had never been president before, Woodrow Wilson, that won when incumbent William Howard Taft and his challenger former president Theodore Roosevelt split the Republican vote.

A second factor of confusion is that opinion polls indicate – as they previously did in 2016 and 2020, that in reality the United States remains deeply divided and split almost evenly in terms of population between the liberal-permissive left and the reactionary-patriotic right.

Also, both the traditional parties are deeply divided: The Republicans between the insurgent generation of pro-Trump populists who oppose America’s endless commitments to overseas wars and seek to revive the domestic economic with protectionist policies, and the traditional Reagan- era liberal imperialists who are also passionately committed to both NATO and free trade, as well as to the ideological promotion of American “values” around the world.

Now the Democrats, apparently rock solid for so long, are also splitting.

Widespread outrage among young, black, Muslim and idealistic voters over Biden’s continued support for the Israeli military reduction of Gaza is splitting the party apart. The older Democrats led by Biden remain, as they have all their lives, locked into policies that are viscerally anti-Iran, pro-Israel and anti-Russia. A new generation already appearing in the House of Representatives challenges all those traditional shibboleths.

The Democratic rebellion is far less widespread and less advanced than the Republican one, but it could metastasize dramatically by the time of the party’s national convention in Chicago this August. Chicago, after all, was the historic meeting place where the Democratic Party convulsed and transformed in the campaigns of 1932 which produced President Franklin Roosevelt and in 1968, which ended a 35-year-era of national Democratic domination.

Finally, it is the very fact that this election pits an incumbent president against his predecessor that is so confusing and uncertain, For both candidates are discredited figures who have been on the national scene far too long. Both are passionately hated by their political opponents and widely despised among independents.

Biden supposedly has the Dignitas, bearing and certainly the unabashedly partisan support of the US mass media and its corporate owners. There is also enormous suspicion and skepticism among Trump partisans that the election truly will be free and fair.

And both candidates are exceptionally old: Biden is 81 years old. He will turn 82 less than three weeks after the election. Trump is “only” 77.  But still no spring chicken. Are these truly the best leaders a vast nation of a third of a billion people can come up with? At a time when America’s leaders more loudly than ever insist that their version of democracy is the only credible and deserving way forward for the human race, the election process for the nation’s next president presents a woeful, sorry picture indeed. Many uncertainties remain between now and the final outcome on the night of Tuesday, November 5.

Writer, Journalist, Political Analyst

Martin Sieff