- [Presenter] Legal Eagle is sponsored
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- (laughs) Liberals want to evict an elderly,
financially troubled COVID survivor and his family
from inner-city public housing.
I mean, that's only a bad take because it doesn't say
that the liberals also want to take away
that elderly COVID survivor's healthcare as well.
(upbeat drumbeats)
Well, we're finally on the other side
of an incredibly momentous election.
But at times, it was a little touch and go.
And while we know the outcome now,
along the way, there were some...
How do I put this charitably?
Bad election takes.
But now that hindsight is 20/20,
why don't we engage in a little schadenfreude
and let's make fun of some really bad election opinions.
Because not all election opinions are created equal.
So let's take a look
at some of the worst election takes out there.
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Yeah, so many of my friends were completely thirsty
for chart-throb himself, Steve Kornacki
or Korsnacki, as I heard him referred to many times.
- [Leslie] Steve, you are doing it for me doug.
With these numbers.
Wait a minute.
- Let's take out the old trusty calculator.
- [Leslie] Did this mother (bleep) just pull out a calc?
(laughing) Steve, hey Steve, hey Steve,
you ain't gotta do it all, 'cuz.
- I'm not in any place to opine on that.
I'm not saying that Steve Kornacki is not hot.
What I am saying is that lawyers are familiar
with a phenomenon called the deposition effect.
Deposition is where you're stuck in the same room
for hours where you're questioning a witness.
There is opposing counsel and the stenographer,
usually in the same room.
Back when we could do things in the same room
and it wasn't all virtual.
And one of the effects of the deposition
is that because you're locked in a room with that person,
multiple people for many hours at a time,
you build up an affinity for these people.
Whether it's opposing counsel or the stenographer,
and they might seem more attractive
than they did when you first entered that room.
Look, I'm not saying that that's the case
with Steve Kornacki
but I'm just saying, you know, sleep on it
and ask yourself if you still feel that way in the morning.
(laughing)
(dramatic percussion)
- We want the law to be used in a proper manner.
So we'll be going to the U.S. Supreme Court.
We want all voting to stop.
- [Host] All right,
the king of bad election takes himself,
Donald Trump, saying that he's going to go
straight to the Supreme Court.
And I hate to break it to him
but as avid viewers of this channel know,
that's generally not how these things work.
The U.S. Supreme Court is the highest court
in the federal system though when it comes to state law,
often it is the state Supreme Court that is the highest
and last word on the subject.
But generally you don't go
straight to the United States Supreme Court
and it can take a very, very long time to get there.
In fact, even when the court is moving fast,
like we saw with Bush versus Gore in 2000,
it can take over a month
before it actually gets to the United States Supreme Court.
Though interestingly, Donald Trump is not as off
as he usually is in this respect.
Because occasionally under extremely rare circumstances,
the court can weigh in on emergency relief applications
and here Justice Alito did issue an injunctive order
saying that the state of Pennsylvania should follow
basically the guidance of the secretary of the Commonwealth
which seems like everyone was doing anyway.
(dramatic percussion)
But of course, this order from Justice Alito
on the Supreme Court engendered its own bad take
in the form of this tweet from Sean Spicer,
who is saying that basically this order from Justice Alito
was a game changer and will basically change the outcome
of the election in Pennsylvania.
That's not how that happens.
And in fact, it seems like there are a very, very small
number of ballots that came in after the statutory deadline
that might be in this small grace period
created by the courts.
And in fact, it seems like the state of Pennsylvania
was already doing it.
That they were segregating the ballots,
they were counting the ballots
but not adding them to the cumulative total for the state
and waiting for the courts
to figure out what they're going to do
with these provisional ballots.
So, it's not going to change the outcome.
Sorry, Sean Spicer.
(dramatic percussion)
- [Crowd] Stop the counts! Count those votes!
Stop the votes! Count those votes!
Stop the count! Count those votes!
- Ah yes, who could forget the near simultaneous chanting
from the crowds of Trump's supporters.
Some saying to stop the count
and others saying that we needed to count the votes.
Look, they have a first amendment right
to protest the things that they are aggrieved about.
But at the same time it seems ironic
at the very least that they would,
at least some would argue for this anti-democratic measure
of stopping the counting of the actual ballots,
or at least the processing of the ballots.
Now, in fairness,
I think this is a little bit blown out of proportion
because the laws of different states are different.
There is no universal election law throughout this country.
So what's legal in one state
might not be legal in another state.
But still it's a bad look
when you're out there protesting against the counting
of the votes themselves
while at the same time,
another group of Trump supporters
are arguing the exact opposite thing.
Bad election take.
(dramatic percussion)
Yeah, the pollsters got this one pretty wrong.
The polls showed that Joe Biden was going to win
in a landslide and that the Democrats
were going to pick up potentially many seats
in the Senate and take a majority in the Senate.
And that of course never happened.
The pollsters learned from their mistakes in 2016,
where they were off by an average of 5%.
They revised their models, they did their homework
and in 2020, they were off by over 7%.
Now, in fairness, they did get some things right.
Apparently Arizona and Virginia are pretty close
to the way that the pollsters predicted things would go.
But across the country, they were incredibly wrong.
(dramatic percussion)
- The pollsters got it knowingly wrong.
They got it knowingly wrong.
- [Host] Knowingly wrong?
As if they were doing everyone a favor
by suggesting that the Democrats
were going to win in a landslide.
You could argue it both ways I suppose.
That it might suppress the votes
or people might not go out and vote
because they think that it's going to be a landslide.
That's what some people say about 2016.
But...(laughs).
But there's no doubt that the polls in general
saying that it was going to be a complete bloodbath
we're very wrong.
(dramatic percussion)
I feel like I would be remiss
if I didn't include a QAnon as a world-class bad take
because I'm sorry, the military didn't get operationalized.
As far as I know, all my friends were not sent
to Guantanamo Bay and Q has been incredibly silent
now that Trump is no longer going to be re-elected.
You know, frankly,
I miss good old fashioned conspiracy theories
that were harder to debunk.
They weren't making pronouncements
about what would and would not happen on certain days.
It could easily be disproven.
I miss the old conspiracy theories
like the black helicopters and the chemtrails.
I mean, those were at least general enough
that there was no certainty that things
were not gonna happen.
QAnon needs to try harder.
It sad that they got the election so, so wrong
and that no one is in jail.
(dramatic percussion)
Ah, a Donald Trump tweet from 2012
where he says the electoral college is a disaster
for democracy.
I guess this is a bad take with respect to him
losing the election in this year.
But I actually, I think that's absolutely right.
The electoral college is a disaster for democracy
just because the popular vote happened to line up
with the electoral college vote in 2020
does not mean that it's a good institution.
And then there are all kinds of anti-democratic issues
with the electoral college.
I've covered that in several videos in the past.
But frankly, given the fact that it's possible
that faithless electors could screw up the results
and how the votes are wildly disproportionate,
the electoral college definitely needs some work.
(dramatic percussion)
(laughs)This is probably the funniest thing
that has ever happened in American politics,
probably full stop.
Because it was not the case that the Trump administration
was holding a press conference
at the Four Seasons Hotel in Philadelphia.
The Four Seasons tweeted out that in fact,
they were not holding the press conference there.
And then Trump surrogates mobilized
and held a press conference in front of Four Seasons'
total landscaping in a rundown industrial part
of Philadelphia, just on a whim.
Credit where credit is due.
They got their stuff together and held a press conference
in a place that should not have had a press conference.
In between a crematorium and an adult sex toy store.
You literally could not make that up.
If the writers had written that for Veep,
they would have rejected it as too crazy.
- You know what? I kinda love it.
- Probably the funniest thing that has ever happened
in American politics ever.
(dramatic percussion)
- [Crowd] Fox News sucks!
- And they're actually chanting Fox News sucks.
Fox news sucks.
The reason why they're chanting
that is because Fox news called Arizona for Biden yesterday.
And a lot of people are angry about that.
- It's incredible that so many people on the right
were apoplectic that Fox news called Arizona for Joe Biden.
Now, granted it was early on in the process
but it couldn't have had any effect on the election.
They didn't call it until after the polls were closed.
As it turns out, Fox news was right.
So, obviously the damage could not have actually existed
because it turns out that Arizona did go for Joe Biden.
But that's the irony
of the facts don't care about your feelings crowd.
(dramatic percussion)
Pat, to me, the Senator from Pennsylvania,
as well as others were rightfully complaining
that Pennsylvania didn't start counting
the mailed in ballots and other ballots until election day.
And thus the counting process in Pennsylvania
was long and drawn out.
And that's, that's perfectly fine.
But the reason it was long
and drawn out is because of state law.
State law mandated that they couldn't start counting
those ballots.
A lot of other states, including Florida,
start way ahead of time so that they don't have this backlog
of ballots that are uncounted
and that they can stretch out until long after election day.
And in Pennsylvania,
it was a Republican house of representatives
that refused to pass legislation to change that law.
We're all exasperated about how long it takes
in all the different states, including Pennsylvania,
but you've got to change the law to be able to handle that.
And under COVID,
you would think that they would want to do that,
but of course they did not.
(dramatic percussion)
(laughs) Liberals want to evict an elderly,
financially troubled COVID survivor
and his family from inner-city public housing.
I mean, that's only a bad take
because it doesn't say that the liberals
also want to take away that elderly, COVID survivor's
healthcare as well.
(dramatic percussion)
And back to Donald Trump quoting
the illustrious former acting attorney general,
Matthew Whitaker.
"We need an explanation
as to how these numbers have been running
up for the last two or three days."
Well, that seems pretty simple.
Number one, the president said people should not vote
by mail.
Democrats often said that they should vote by mail.
The vote by mail tends to favor the Democrats
in the first place.
And of course there's the issue that when another vote
comes in, that adds to the counts.
That's called math.
And on top of that, the count continues.
So as a lot of people were pointing out,
on election day we're not going to have a final count.
So it takes a long time to process these things.
And lots of states have laws
that say that as long as the ballot is postmarked
by election day,
that the ballot itself can come in many days or weeks later
and still be counted.
So, that's the answer.
(dramatic percussion)
"No state authority nor FEC has yet to declare the winner
yet Fox News just called it for Joe Biden, wow."
Yeah, that's sort of how that works.
The calling of a presidential election
is mainly just a media thing.
The FEC doesn't make the call nor does Fox News in general.
That's sort of just a projection.
Doesn't actually carry any legal weight with it, so.
Rudy Giuliani was also saying that the court
would have to decide who was the president.
That's also not how that works.
The court might decide the lawsuits,
which is probably what he was hinting at,
but it's not for a court to declare anyone
the president or not.
It's just a media thing that they say based on the results
that who's the projected winner.
(dramatic percussion)
"Funny how CNN has suddenly stopped
it's "COVID COVID, COVID COVID!" drumbeat, isn't it?"
(scoffs)
Maybe my timeline is just different from other people's.
But my timeline on Twitter, at least, was filled
with so many people talking
about 110, 120, 130,000 new COVID cases a day.
Exactly the same time that they were talking
about the election.
And of course the election is relatively consequential
for COVID.
So it makes sense that COVID was sort of crowded
out for like a day or two.
COVID never left my timeline and I'm still stuck at home.
(dramatic percussion)
Ben Shapiro arguing every legally cast vote
should be counted.
Every illegally cast vote should not.
End of story.
Well, everyone agrees with that,
but a lot of the litigation itself,
or at least the posturing over the litigation
is over what is considered a legal vote or not.
You could make the same argument in 2000
in Bush versus Gore
but when you're talking about the law
about whether it permits a recount or not,
or whether a hanging chad
or a vote made with a marker versus a pen
is legally cast or not,
you're changing the rules as with respect
to what is legally cast or not.
So, that's sort of the beginning of the fight
not the end of the fight.
(dramatic percussion)
And what has gotta be one of the worst election takes
of all time,
from former football player
and I think American gladiator participant, Herschel Walker,
says, "Instead of us fighting and going to court,
why don't we have Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina,
Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin vote again?
We can have it done within a week
and maintain our democracy."
My God.
Apart from that violating the election laws
of all of those states,
there would be rioting in the street.
Can we just, can we not be done with the 2020 election?
Which some were saying is a continuation
of the 2016 election.
My God, that's insane. Complete insanity.
(dramatic percussion)
But of course, even that election take can't hold a candle
to the ultimate bad take,
tweeted by none other than the big man himself,
Donald Trump, saying,
"I won this election by a lot, exclamation point."
Spoiler alert, he did not.
I think Donald Trump is just a practitioner of The Secret.
He's just putting it out there,
trying to will it into existence.
But unfortunately, I don't think that's going to be enough
in this election.
- That's the truth.
- So those are the worst election takes that I could find.
And if you're the kind of person that loves
dunking on terrible legal takes,
I tackle a couple more over at Nebula.
This tweet seems perfectly normal.
The only problem is the timestamp, November 10th.
A full week after the November election.
I posted a whole extended version of this video
there on Nebula as well.
Because sometimes even legal issues
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Nebula is a place where creators can do what they do best,
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It's a place where we can house our content ad free
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In fact, almost all the videos I put up on Nebula
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Nebula features a lot
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Real Engineering's incredible multi-part series
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Alex goes bananas, where older millennials try to explain
things to this sheltered, Gen Z kid
like Limp Bizkit, Will Smith,
or the episode that I guest star in,
trying to explain the whole Gwen Stefani thing.
Have you ever heard of scar?
- Not at all.
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So do you agree with my trashing
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