Louisiana Voice

Yes, Joe Biden has what appears to be a comfortable 9-point lead over Donald Trump in national polls going into the final week of the 2020 campaign.

And yes, Joe Biden retains a fairly consistent lead in the so-called swing states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona, and North Carolina.

And yes, some of the braver (or more reckless) prognosticators even give him a slight edge in places like Texas, Florida and Ohio and a fighting chance in states like Georgia and Colorado.

And granted, early voting appears to be astonishingly top-heavy with Democrat voters, which should certainly be good news for Biden.

One hopelessly optimistic observer even gives a whopping landslide, or tsunami advantage in electoral votes of 411 to 127 (270 are needed to win) to Biden.

Biden, meanwhile, keeps urging his supporters to think like they’re behind and needing votes. He’s pushing for a groundswell of support to win in such a way that Trump can only slink away into oblivion and console himself on Twitter.

To become overconfident at this point could be a critical mistake of monumental proportions.

For a lesson of what can happen in the dark corners on election night, one need only look to the 2002 gubernatorial contest in Alabama.

Don Siegelman was the popular Democratic governor with an eye on seeking the Democratic nomination for president in a few years. He had been elected to all four of the top statewide offices – secretary of state, attorney general, lieutenant governor, and governor. After 26 years in state government, there was nowhere for him to go but up.

But then the unspeakable happened. An unspeakable named Karl Rove. Yep, that Karl Rove, the same one who helped to minimize the vote in Democratic areas of Florida in 2000, keeping thousands of people from voting (sound familiar?) and who engineered an Ohio victory for George W. Bush in 2004 when it appeared that W was on the ropes in his own reelection bid.

Siegelman led in all the polls against U.S. Rep. Bob Riley, whose biggest claim to fame was his abysmal attendance record in Congress and his failure to pay taxes for several years (does that sound familiar?).

W came to Alabama twice, once raising more than $4 million for Riley. Some of that $4 million was suspected to have come from Jack Abramoff’s Indian casino client, the Mississippi Choctaw Indians.

Be that as it may, on election night, Riley refused to concede, proclaiming the results from Baldwin County (located on the eastern side of Mobile Bay) were not in yet.

When those results were finally reported, Riley polled 31,052 votes to Siegelman’s 19,070 but with the statewide lead Siegelman already had, the networks called the race for the governor.

At 4 a.m., Siegelman, who had gone to bed victorious, was awakened by an urgent call for him to come to his office because “they’re trying to steal the election.”

Someone had changed the Baldwin County totals after the courthouse closed and 6,000 votes for Siegelman had somehow found their way into the Riley column. It was explained as a “computer glitch,” a glitch that occurred, incredibly, in only one precinct.

But it was enough to propel Riley into the governor’s office in a classic case of a stolen election. Siegelman had few options, what with a Republican State Supreme Court, a Republican attorney general, Republican federal judges hand-picked by Rove and appointed by W, and Alabama’s Republican U.S. senators (again…sound familiar?).

Fast forward to the 2020 presidential election. We have a Democrat who is leading in all the polls and who is favored to win. But we have a Republican Senate, a Republican Supreme Court and a Republican attorney general every bit as devious, if not as skilled and subtle, as Karl Rove.

There’s more to the Siegelman story, of course. He tried a comeback four years later but thanks to Rove and a highly partisan Republican U.S. attorney, he was instead indicted tried and convicted of taking bribes even though he never accepted for his own benefit a penny of the money raised to support a state lottery designed to pay college tuition for every Alabama kid who wanted to attend an Alabama college or university.

Siegelman spent most of his federal prison term at the federal minimum-security prison in Oakdale, Louisiana, where he became friends with another prisoner of some renown – Edwin Edwards, four-time governor of Louisiana.

Siegelman has written a book about how the 2002 election was stolen from him by Rove and about his trial before a judge he had investigated while attorney general – a judge later forced from the bench after beating the hell out of his wife.

The book, while accurate by all accounts, might seem somewhat self-serving to some who might also think it could have had more impact had it been written by someone who was unbiased and detached from the emotion-packed events of the inner workings of the Alabama political machinations.

But then, someone not so involved in the day-to-day details of those tumultuous events could never have done the story justice.

Still, the book, Stealing Our Democracy: How the Political Assassination of a Governor Threatens Our Nation, is an eye-opener into the realities of American politics and as such, is an important work that should be required reading for all political science majors everywhere, not just in Alabama.

Alabama and the 2002 gubernatorial election could well be a microcosm for the 2020 U.S. presidential campaign and election and Siegelman’s book is an extraordinary primer for what we’re now going through as a nation.

And whatever you do, don’t take your eyes off William Barr.