By Philip Bump
October 11
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/10/11/donald-trump-warns-that-other-communities-are-poised-to-steal-the-election/Donald Trump said at least two untrue things in Pennsylvania on Monday. The first was that he would bring back steel manufacturing. The second was that the election was at risk of being stolen by people in “other communities” — specifically, Philadelphia. Trump was making the same claim, really, through two lenses: Everything and everyone is working against him and his supporters.
His comments about alleged wide-scale voter fraud on Monday — comments which, we cannot emphasize frequently enough, are not supported by any evidence — were direct in their implications. In the past, he's said that “certain sections” of the state might commit fraud to swing the results, an obvious reference to long-simmering (and long-debunked) rumors about voter fraud in Philadelphia. On Monday, he simply said it.
“So important that you get out and vote. So important that you watch other communities, because we don't want this election stolen from us,” Trump said in Ambridge, Pa., northwest of Pittsburgh. “We don't want this election stolen from us. We do not want this election stolen.”
Later, he spoke from Wilkes-Barre. CBS's Sopan Deb transcribed:
Honestly, folks, you know I went to school in Philadelphia and I love Philadelphia. I love Philadelphia and I hope we're going to do great in Philadelphia. I went to school there. I love the school. I loved everything but I just hear such reports about Philadelphia. And we have to make sure we're protected. We have to make sure the people of Philadelphia are protected that the vote counts are 100 percent. Everybody wants that, but I hear these horror shows. I hear these horror shows and we have to make sure that this election is not stolen from us and is not taken away from us. And everybody knows what I'm talking about.
If anybody doesn't know what he's talking about, we wrote about it when Trump first raised the subject in August. Four years ago, a number of precincts around Philadelphia recorded no votes for Mitt Romney. The places where that happened were, in the words of the Philadelphia Inquirer “clustered in almost exclusively black sections of West and North Philadelphia" — places where most of the residents were members of one of President Obama's most loyal voting constituencies. (Nonwhite voters in Pennsylvania prefer Hillary Clinton by 56 points in a recent poll from Franklin & Marshall College.)
“Other communities” is probably not an intentional phrase from Trump, but it's a loaded one. Those other people. Ambridge and Wilkes-Barre are both three-quarters white. Most of the crowd at both rallies was also white. It was the other communities where there was a problem. Communities that happen to be mostly black. Those communities are going to steal the election from “us.”(more at link)
