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For the record, I do find the entire January 6th debacle pretty disqualifying. I don't live in a swing state, so I guess my marginal vote doesn't really matter here, but I do find it a pretty solid reason to decide not to vote for Trump. I think he could have handled it better (without really personally buying into the theories of voter fraud swinging the outcome) if he had accepted the outcome, but channeled right-wing frustration with the trustworthiness of the system into an effort to root out voter fraud, with the aim to produce something disrupting the Biden administration like the entire Russiagate boondoggle dragged his own term. "I'll hand over power, but I'm going to make it my personal effort to make known to the American public how you cheated" is, I think, closer to the Overton window and could have been pulled off.
On the other hand (you asked for a steelman), January 6th is but an incremental escalation over the lawfare that surrounded the 2016 election. Unprecedented campaigns to cause faithless electors, and even attempts by Democrats still in good standing to reject the Electoral votes of the entire states of Montana, Wisconsin, Michigan, West Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida. For all the discussion of having Congress reject specific votes in 2021, motions to do so were made in 2017. Kudos to Biden himself for rejecting those like Pence did, but Jamie Raskin, Pramila Jayapal, Barbara Lee, the late Sheila Jackson Lee, Raul Grijalva, and Maxine Waters literally tried (and failed, although you could accuse them of trying half-heartedly) to overturn an election and nobody seems to care enough that they all have remained politicians in good standing afterwards. That this escalating debasement of federal elections was allowed without any real repercussions seems to raise legitimate questions about whether the concern about the sanctity of elections is truly about the elections themselves, or selectively imposed only when the oligarchs dislike their outcomes. See also implications that we should throw out actual ballot returns because Russian propagandists might have made a few messages that voters might have seen. Once you're convinced it's who, whom? (both sides very clearly do this), it's easy enough to dismiss pretty much any concerns as politically motivated.
It seems like it would have been a good time to run a very clean "return to normalcy" campaign, but Biden was just last night saying "lock him up" at a political rally, and hasn't exactly been the centrist I feel like he campaigned as, which sours me quite a bit on his chosen successor. I'm not going to say exactly how I'll vote, but I'm pretty openly disappointed with both sides here.
I am not entirely convinced the fake elector scheme was merely an incremental escalation, but I still find this argument more persuasive than most.
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