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Notes -
To be clear, unlike apparently many Democrats, I'm actually relatively unafraid of so-called "lawfare". Even if it turns "against" Biden. I trust the courts, at least broadly speaking, to deal in facts and weigh evidence. Still, I'm a realist. I know not all the decisions will be perfect, and not all judges are either. See for example Judge Cannon in the Florida case, which seems to me to be a very, very open-and-shut, slam dunk case, tricky procedural classified stuff notwithstanding. I don't like how she has been treating the case. I won't lose sleep over it, just be a little disappointed. This legal aspect is not something I consider to be an existential threat from Trump, even in the Democrat's worst case on this issue.
Parts of the system you can see working even now. The House investigated Biden a million times, as is their right, even if the left complained about it loudly. Guess what? They really didn't find anything at all. The best they could do was an attempted ouster of Garland, which was pretty flimsy, and the vote margins demonstrated that. Even Trump not being removed from office after impeachment I begrudgingly think is the system working. The two party system is pretty flawed but still delivers roughly expected results. I still agree with Mitt Romney's vote and speech on the issue, but if Trump had tried an even more blatant or flagrant bribery scheme than he did, he would have been removed, GOP reluctance or not. I don't love the threshold we've established, but one exists.
Still, a single term is still relative weak evidence. I already agreed about how Trump's first term is evidence for his constitution-abidingness, even though it's weak. We're talking about an inherently rare event, which is tricky from a statistics perspective. My whole thing is, the best we can do is watch the rhetoric. I don't see Biden making inflammatory claims, other than a brief flirtation with court packing, which he ended up sidestepping and burying. I do see Trump making inflammatory claims and ones that seem to violate several constitutional principles. Grains of salt are needed of course. We're not in wartime, so that helps. And I think most attempts to totally defy the Constitution would fail. I'm just explaining one aspect of my vote that I think other people share, even if they haven't thought about it in the same detail. They don't like gambling with existential risk! Saying "oh the risk is low" is not an effective counter-argument and misses the whole point of the objection.
I'm also unafraid of lawfare, because the vast, vast, vast majority of Democrat's have not committed anything close to Trump, and even the most wacky Trump +80 rural county in the middle of Texas or Oklahoma actually will have issues finding 12 jurors (that any Biden/Hillary/Obama/etc. defense team will basically six of) to convict random Democratic officials of whatever crimes people want to charge them with.
Like, there are actual laws about classifield documents or falsifying business records, regardless of your belief of Trump's guilt or innocence. There's not the laws on the books for the random stuff the Right is upset over - and hey, as with good ole' Gold Bars Menendez, if there are actually corrupt Democrat's so be it - as a left-wing social democrat, the more corrupt ones are usually more moderate. Menendez is being replaced with a much more progressive nice Asian-American 41 year old who will be in that seat for the next 30 years.
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