In Reply to: Interesting substack about the election posted by russsmith on July 12, 2025 at 18:33:43
that they already lost the election because they (the Trump campaign) had something cooking in the background and Democrats would not even know what hit them (my extremely liberal paraphrase of his exact words that I don't remember).
My reaction to all five pieces: I don't doubt for a moment that everything stated in the series is not only plausible but also very likely. What I am not sure about is how it fared against other factors at play. IOW, I have no doubt that this whole set up was part of the equation that gave us the outcome we saw, but what was its weight at the end of the day.
The reason I'm saying this is that in the first article, you can see that there is that AI component provided by Palantir. Everything listed in the first article is a facilitator. They're the backdoor, they're the access, they're the cover and all that, but the Palantir piece is the piece that did the heavy lifting. And my question is not whether it was in operation, but how much change it had to introduce and where.
The goal of that component is of course to put Trump on top in the states with a delta that's above the recount threshold. And given that the system is fully aware what the vote count in the rural and solid red areas are (or will be) it needs to calculate how many votes it had to flip, maybe just a few, maybe thousands, or maybe none at all. It may have been that in some (Or all) cases it had to flip a big chunk of votes to achieve that, or only a handful just to get the difference over that threshold. I'm comfortable with assuming that it was somewhere in the middle and a mixture of two in different districts.
The reason I'm not going all in how determinate this was is that there were plenty of other factors going into the election, social, political, psychological, historical, etc. And a lot of what was happening was pointing towards a visible advantage for Trump. I did not get into the night thinking Trump was toast. I did so with a sense of dread that, even though it makes no sense at all, by that point momentum was on Trump's side. He was already declared immune, he "survived" two assassination attempts (to what extent they were genuine is questionable of course), white males were freaking out that Democrats had put up a non-white female candidate, someone who was their demographic opposite. So non-technological factors were already aligning in his favor.
And in that context, even though it seems very likely that this system was set up to do just what these articles suggest they were intended for, what remains unknown at this point is to what extent it had to be utilized in what state, which is not a trivial question, politically.
(May I add my mandatory note that Democrats slept through all that bullsh*t that was going on at the time, and apparently no one had any idea whether what was going on or what could be done about it -- so I don't come out of this with the slightest thought that the Democratic Party consultant class is somehow remotely vindicated).
(BTW: Before we place our eggs into the Michigan undervote basket, we need to take into consideration the Arab/muslim vote rates; the "Dearborn factor", if you will.)
So I'd place this as highly suggestive claims that pass the smell test, but would be very hard to verify the extent to which it was determinate of the outcome. The bigger question is where do we go from here? I don't think we need to spend too much effort trying to relitigate 2024. We can't get into election denialism trap after all that happened in 2020. What we need to do instead is what any basketball team that played Duke has had to do for years: makes sure you win by such a wide margin that their tampering is no longer an ambiguity, but a blatant move any blind person can see.
And stop electing weak Democrats who are not sure how power works.