We will be returning to our regularly scheduled blogging next week, god and heating pads permitting. Nonetheless, Thursday’s edition of Politico had a couple of pieces worth discussing before I go elbows-deep into the Christmas leftovers. First, it seems that Democratic “insiders” are catching on to the elephant that’s been lounging in the room before them all these weeks.

For months the Vermont senator was written off by Democratic Party insiders as a candidate with a committed but ultimately narrow base who was too far left to win the primary. Elizabeth Warren had skyrocketed in the polls and seemed to be leaving him behind in the race to be progressive voters’ standard-bearer in 2020. But in the past few weeks, something has changed. In private conversations and on social media, Democratic officials, political operatives and pundits are reconsidering Sanders’ chances...

...Democratic insiders said that they are rethinking Sanders’ bid for a few reasons: First, Warren has recently fallen in national and early-state surveys. Another factor, they said, is that he has withstood the ups and downs of the primary, including his own heart attack. At the same time, other candidates with once-high expectations, such as Kamala Harris, Cory Booker and Beto O’Rourke, have dropped out or languished in single digits in the polls. “I believe people should take him very seriously. He has a very good shot of winning Iowa, a very good shot of winning New Hampshire, and other than Joe Biden, the best shot of winning Nevada,” said Dan Pfeiffer, who served as a adviser to former President Barack Obama. “He could build a real head of steam heading into South Carolina and Super Tuesday.”

I am dubious about that last part, although a major Super Tuesday split is more possible than it ever has been, what with California in the mix. And it is true that, for all their complaints about a Bernie Blackout, if they have the brains god gave geese, the stalwart Sanders base voters should be happy with a relative lack of attention, given the nitpicking to which Senator Professor Warren has been subjected since she began rising in the polls.

Sanders speaks during a rally in Venice Beach on December 21, 2019. ROBYN BECK Getty Images

I’ve thought all along that, given its druthers, the Democratic establishment “ referred" Sanders as the progressive alternative to Joe Biden simply on a devil-you-know basis. In addition, the idea that two progressive candidates might contest the nomination among themselves, leaving behind Biden and other more centrist alternatives like Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar, always was the scenario that gave the Democratic donor class the vapors. And it’s pretty plain that, on that basis, Warren has taken most of the incoming. Nevertheless, the numbers are what they are. Sanders’s support has been solid throughout the process thus far. (I mean, the man had a heart attack, for pity’s sake.) Barring a catastrophic event, it shows no sign of moving to any of the other candidates and I think we know from experience that Sanders is in this all the way to the convention in Milwaukee next summer.

Of course, a lot of this might just be moot, as our second Politico report makes clear. I maintain that we yet don’t know half of the effect of the Russian ratfcking on the 2016 election, particularly in the area of tampering with the voting infrastructure, except that, report by report, we seem to be inching closer to a conclusion that nobody in the political and media establishments seems to want to believe—that there was some monkey-wrenching done to the actual numbers. From Politico:

To this day, no one knows definitively what happened with Durham’s poll books. And one important fact about the incident still worries election integrity activists three years later: VR Systems had been targeted by Russian hackers in a phishing campaign three months before the election. The hackers had sent malicious emails both to VR Systems and to some of its election customers, attempting to trick the recipients into revealing usernames and passwords for their email accounts. The Russians had also visited VR Systems’ website, presumably looking for vulnerabilities they could use to get into the company’s network, as the hackers had done with Illinois’ state voter registration system months earlier.

But significant questions remain about what happened in Durham and just how close the Russians actually came to hacking the 2016 election. North Carolina state election officials say Durham County’s investigation was incomplete and inconclusive, and they cannot say with certainty that the problems were due to human error. Indeed, there’s no indication the investigators looked for malware or even contemplated the possibility of foul play. And VR Systems bases its assertion that it was not hacked on a forensic investigation of its computers that was done by a third-party security firm nearly a year after the Russian phishing campaign—plenty of time for any Russian hackers to have erased their tracks in the meantime. There are also questions about the thoroughness of that investigation...

...the government has also suggested in one report and asserted outright in others—among them a 2017 National Security Agency document leaked to the press, a 2018 indictment of Russian intelligence officers, and the Senate Intelligence Committee report and Mueller report—that the hackers successfully breached (or very likely breached) at least one company that makes software for managing voter rolls, and installed malware on that company’s network. Furthermore, an October 2016 email obtained recently by POLITICO, sent by the head of the National Association of Secretaries of State to its members around the country two weeks before the election, states that the Department of Homeland Security “confirmed” to NASS at the time that a “third-party vendor” in Florida that worked with local jurisdictions on their voter registration systems “experienced a breach.”

The story describes a plethora of really weird happenings in and around election day in 2016. It also makes quite plain that almost nothing has been done to solve many of those weird happenings this time around. It has been the general position here at the shebeen that all it will take is proof that three votes were changed in, say, Raleigh by some guy at a console in St. Petersburg to collapse the country’s faith in its elections entirely. Which may be partly why so many important people are timid about exploring the possibility that it’s already happened.

If DHS looked only at the Durham laptops and did not also have mirror images preserved in 2016 of VR Systems’ own computers and the Durham County workstation that experienced problems the days before that election, its investigation might resolve the questions about what occurred with Durham's laptops in 2016—but not the question of whether VR Systems was hacked. Those questions could be resolved if the FBI and the intelligence community were to provide more transparency around the assertions made in the Mueller report, the Justice Department indictment and the NSA document. But three years after the fact, no one in government seems prepared or willing to provide that clarity.

Democracy is not for cowards. We used to know that.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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