Presidential contests may be the ultimate exhibition of polarized partisanship, but efforts are bubbling up in several places to put a bit of smoothing bipartisan spin on this election and its potentially messy aftermath. Two new ones, one bold and one narrow, were unveiled Wednesday.
A group of more than 40 formerly prominent Republicans and Democrats declared themselves the National Council on Election Integrity. The group then announced a $20 million advertising campaign to reassure the country the election will be safe and secure despite the coronavirus pandemic — and hammer at the message that all votes should be tabulated before a winner is declared.
And young members of the Wisconsin Legislature unveiled a modest campaign of their own — underscoring that Republican and Democratic politicians are unified in the view that as many people as possible should vote early in that battleground state.
The same premise is implied by both efforts: The rhythm of this year's election will be unique, with the tabulating of an unprecedented number of absentee ballots highly likely to mean a delay of perhaps days for decisive returns in the closest contests.
President Trump says he doesn't believe he should have to wait because the in-person numbers will be sufficient for him to declare victory the night of Nov. 3. He baselessly claims that subsequent shifts from red to blue in battleground states will be evidence of massive fraud. Former Vice President Joe Biden, aware of polling that shows most Democrats plan to vote by mail and most Republicans in person, is counting on the later returns to move the election his way.
The "Count Every Vote" campaign will start with a $4 million TV and digital ad buy in battleground states — with the bulk of the spending in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Laws in all three states will delay the start of processing of perhaps millions of mailed ballots until Election Day, even if they arrive earlier.
Moreover, the group of former elected officials and Cabinet members, retired military officials and civic leaders want Congress to form a special commission to referee post-election disputes — something it seems highly unlikely to do.
"The most urgent task American leaders face is to ensure that the election's results are accepted as legitimate. Electoral legitimacy is the essential linchpin of our entire political culture," said Dan Coats, who was director of national intelligence at the start of the Trump administration and before that a longtime Indiana senator.
"This election is about more than who's on the ballot," added former Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle. "The integrity of our democratic system is at stake."
Others in the group — including 17 Republicans and 16 Democrats who held elected or Senate-confirmed office — include former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, former Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff, former Senate GOP leader Bill Frist and former House Democratic leader Dick Gephardt. (The panel was assembled by the democracy reform group Issue One, which owns but is journalistically independent of The Fulcrum.)
The Wisconsin effort was organized by the Millennial Action Project, a nonprofit that works to incubate a younger generation of pragmatic politicians committed to bipartisan collaboration.
The message of the lawmaker' video is that voting as soon as possible, either by mail or in person, can be both safe and secure — and assures results in a state with potentially crucial 10 electoral votes may be known sooner. "In conversations with leaders from across the political spectrum — young legislators, former and current attorneys general, entrepreneurs and community members — Wisconsinites agreed: conducting free and fair elections is not a partisan issue," their announcement said.
Vote Safe, Wisconsinwww.youtube.com
Eric Trump, the newly appointed ALT5 board director of World Liberty Financial, walks outside of the NASDAQ in Times Square as they mark the $1.5- billion partnership between World Liberty Financial and ALT5 Sigma with the ringing of the NASDAQ opening bell, on Aug. 13, 2025, in New York City.
Why does the Trump family always get a pass?
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche joined ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday to defend or explain a lot of controversies for the Trump administration: the Epstein files release, the events in Minneapolis, etc. He was also asked about possible conflicts of interest between President Trump’s family business and his job. Specifically, Blanche was asked about a very sketchy deal Trump’s son Eric signed with the UAE’s national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon.
Shortly before Trump was inaugurated in early 2025, Tahnoon invested $500 million in the Trump-owned World Liberty, a then newly launched cryptocurrency outfit. A few months later, UAE was granted permission to purchase sensitive American AI chips. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, “the deal marks something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company.”
“How do you respond to those who say this is a serious conflict of interest?” ABC host George Stephanopoulos asked.
“I love it when these papers talk about something being unprecedented or never happening before,” Blanche replied, “as if the Biden family and the Biden administration didn’t do exactly the same thing, and they were just in office.”
Blanche went on to boast about how the president is utterly transparent regarding his questionable business practices: “I don’t have a comment on it beyond Trump has been completely transparent when his family travels for business reasons. They don’t do so in secret. We don’t learn about it when we find a laptop a few years later. We learn about it when it’s happening.”
Sadly, Stephanopoulos didn’t offer the obvious response, which may have gone something like this: “OK, but the president and countless leading Republicans insisted that President Biden was the head of what they dubbed ‘the Biden Crime family’ and insisted his business dealings were corrupt, and indeed that his corruption merited impeachment. So how is being ‘transparent’ about similar corruption a defense?”
Now, I should be clear that I do think the Biden family’s business dealings were corrupt, whether or not laws were broken. Others disagree. I also think Trump’s business dealings appear to be worse in many ways than even what Biden was alleged to have done. But none of that is relevant. The standard set by Trump and Republicans is the relevant political standard, and by the deputy attorney general’s own account, the Trump administration is doing “exactly the same thing,” just more openly.
Since when is being more transparent about wrongdoing a defense? Try telling a cop or judge, “Yes, I robbed that bank. I’ve been completely transparent about that. So, what’s the big deal?”
This is just a small example of the broader dysfunction in the way we talk about politics.
Americans have a special hatred for hypocrisy. I think it goes back to the founding era. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in “Democracy In America,” the old world had a different way of dealing with the moral shortcomings of leaders. Rank had its privileges. Nobles, never mind kings, were entitled to behave in ways that were forbidden to the little people.
In America, titles of nobility were banned in the Constitution and in our democratic culture. In a society built on notions of equality (the obvious exceptions of Black people, women, Native Americans notwithstanding) no one has access to special carve-outs or exemptions as to what is right and wrong. Claiming them, particularly in secret, feels like a betrayal against the whole idea of equality.
The problem in the modern era is that elites — of all ideological stripes — have violated that bargain. The result isn’t that we’ve abandoned any notion of right and wrong. Instead, by elevating hypocrisy to the greatest of sins, we end up weaponizing the principles, using them as a cudgel against the other side but not against our own.
Pick an issue: violent rhetoric by politicians, sexual misconduct, corruption and so on. With every revelation, almost immediately the debate becomes a riot of whataboutism. Team A says that Team B has no right to criticize because they did the same thing. Team B points out that Team A has switched positions. Everyone has a point. And everyone is missing the point.
Sure, hypocrisy is a moral failing, and partisan inconsistency is an intellectual one. But neither changes the objective facts. This is something you’re supposed to learn as a child: It doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing or saying, wrong is wrong. It’s also something lawyers like Mr. Blanche are supposed to know. Telling a judge that the hypocrisy of the prosecutor — or your client’s transparency — means your client did nothing wrong would earn you nothing but a laugh.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.