Inside the Modern Elections Casino

Until Further Reform Occurs, ‘Quasi-Elections’ Are About as Peachy as It Gets

I vividly recall being 18 years old and fresh out of high school when my Dad took me down to Gulfport, Mississippi, on the Gulf Coast, for a business trip. Dad always merged business trips with places he could find gaming tables. After dinner that night, I returned to the room and went to sleep, waking up eight hours later to find no Dad. I made my way down to the front of the casino and had him paged, and up he came to the entrance.

It turns out Dad had won a few thousand bucks, hence his decision to stay up all night playing Let it Ride, a poker variant. All was well then, but there were plenty of times when Dad would get wiped out somewhere and come home preaching the need to tighten our belts that month. We always knew about the big wins, but rarely the extent of the gaping losses.

I learned a lot about gambling from him, even though I’m not much of a gambler these days. I’m good at poker, which pits player against player, and understand how to count cards and play perfect Blackjack strategy.

Blackjack, if played properly, gives the player the best odds in the house – 49% (but only if you play textbook strategy every time). What I learned is that while you can hit it big in the casino, those immaculate buildings on the Las Vegas Strip, or even the Mississippi Gulf Coast, didn’t build themselves, and they don’t bring you endless drinks out of charity or kindness. They want you to keep playing, because the more you play, the more mathematics guarantees they’ll keep raking in the cash.

It's not that you can’t win, because clearly sometimes you can. It’s that the system is designed to frequently spit out regularly positive outcomes in favor of the house, and even more favorably than planned when the players show up drunk, bet foolishly, or get too aggressive. This is the same system under which our elections take place.

I realize some of you fine Badlanders are going to take issue with my assessment here, given that it varies from Chris Paul’s assessment that elections are straight-up fake. After all, President Trump also referred to them as fake when he signed his recent executive order on elections; however, I’m not so far down the rabbit hole that I believe Trump won an entirely fake election after dodging years of lawfare, and even bullets, designed to prevent him from becoming President again. Clearly campaigning, vote-getting, and fortune (as Machiavelli would say) played a role, albeit a declining one, in the 2024 presidential race. If you don’t believe that, then we must dig much deeper into the conspiracy well.

Last week, I unleashed an X post that went viral with over 1.4 million views. The Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Show got hold of it and concluded that Crawford would have won anyway, primarily because we don’t have smoking gun examples of what Milwaukee County typically does in close races to pull from, and the count didn’t press on with sudden reversals into the wee hours of Wednesday morning.

I predicted Susan Crawford, the Democrat-endorsed candidate, would win by at least 5 points, and yes, my predictions now factor in the weighted advantages for candidates running with casino-like advantages like Automatic Voter Registration, Universal (or Excessive) Mail-In Voting, and the most important condition of mail-ballot fraud actions on the objective, ballot harvesting, which may or may not be legal depending on the state.

Crawford wound up suffocating her opponent by 10 points in what has become an otherwise competitive state, blowing past Janet Protasiewicz’s previous record for a Wisconsin Supreme Court seat held in a spring election by almost 300,000 votes and smoking Schimel’s new record, set concurrently, in the process.

To say Democrats have mastered mail-ballot turnout in off-year elections, when turnout is expected to be much lower, is an understatement. In fact, 600,000 votes were all it took to win these races in 2018 and 2019 in the same state, which isn’t growing in terms of population by any meaningful numbers.

Elections are like casino games. Yes, you can win, as evidenced by President Trump residing at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue today. But what if we ran the 2024 election 10 times, with slightly different variables each time? Would Trump win it every time?

Almost certainly not. Remember, Harris lagged Biden’s vote count in 44 states, but managed to eclipse him in the following six states:

· Utah

· Maine

· North Carolina

· Wisconsin

· Nevada

· Georgia

Four of the six are critical battleground states, and Maine happened to have a crucial U.S. House race that almost certainly got ripped off in the one district Trump carried for a single electoral vote. Meanwhile, she lagged Biden in California, her own home state, and New York by tremendous numbers, and in large red states like Florida and Texas, driving down her national ballot count substantially.

Take away Georgia, Nevada, Wisconsin, and North Carolina from Trump’s count, and what do you have? Trump at 264 electoral votes, or short of the requisite 270 electoral votes needed to win an election. It is also well known that Trump overperformed with minority voters, which are mostly black in the four states in consideration here, except for in Nevada, where they are mostly Hispanic or Asian (especially Filipino).

Despite these losses, Democrats added more ballots to their presidential count in each of the six focus states listed above than they could come up with for Joe Biden in the COVID-plagued 2020 election cycle. This isn’t even taking into consideration that Harris nearly matched Biden’s tallies in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Arizona.

In 2024, the stars aligned for Trump, and he overcame a system that was concentrated on delivering winning totals in the battleground states only, rather than safe red or blue states, which were also flooded with counterfeit ballots in 2020. I believe, especially in the case of Pennsylvania, this is largely because Automatic Voter Registration (AVR) hasn’t had enough time to fully sink in yet to ensure establishment candidates reap the benefits of casino loyalty.

Automatic Voter Registration, if you’re not aware, is the hallmark of a blue state. They went 18-2 for Biden in 2020 (243 electoral votes to 9), and Harris only won five electoral votes in 2024 that didn’t operate under AVR:

The system didn’t want Harris topping Trump with 86 million votes this time around.

This is why the media unleashed the narrative shortly before the election that she would lose the popular vote, but win the Electoral College – it was teasing the plan to let solid red and solid blue states do what they would do (hence Florida +13, Texas +14 for Trump), while battleground states would be 2020-fied. That possible outcome, if fulfilled, would have also carried the double impact of causing conservatives to curse the Electoral College and beg for a national popular vote, which is antithetical to the wellbeing of the Republic, and another safety measure for the casino to have in the rulebook.

Some candidates win. For now, elections must have believable outcomes, which is why you don’t see effort (after primaries, anyway) to tip elections in Oklahoma or Wyoming. Other candidates enter the elections casino and come up against the full force of the house, which sees ballots spun for two weeks and Kari Lake told to go home – even though her internal numbers only had her running two points behind Trump in a state he won comfortably. This system is designed to work for the house most of the time and, in the event it fails in the most important race, minimize down ballot impacts.

It did this in Senate races in Wisconsin, Nevada, Michigan, Arizona, and in various races for U.S. House seats, like in California – where two Democrats declared victory in December.

Trump counted all the cards, hit on soft 17, doubled down on 10 and 11, took a card on 16, and got up when the table got cold, leaving states like Minnesota, New Hampshire, Virginia, and New Mexico for Harris, who stayed around at the tables way too long and believed all the polls that had her winning states that have been running away from her party for over a decade. He also had a ton of luck, not only in surviving through the end of the election, but in taking the oath of office on January 20, 2025.

The moral of the story is, for the next four years, the deep staters in skimpy skirts and caked-on makeup want to bring Trump’s base a bunch of cheap liquor all night long, hoping to distract us with nonsense narratives meant to ride out the clock, because eventually, someone who is not one of the most famous figures in history will run as the GOP presidential nominee, and will get to see exactly what it is the house has in terms of insurance.

Without major, full-fledged reforms, Americans are doomed to quasi-elections, when in fact, what we need is full transparency, uniform federal rules, and major consequences for those who defy them.

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The Themes in the Casino Story

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The more you play, the more they’ll rake in the cash – the consultants who exist for no other purpose than to serve as blind guides to candidates and suck up the cash of supporters while defending a broken system.

A system designed to spit out favorable house outcomes – play enough Nevada-style elections with Universal Mail-in Voting, Ballot Harvesting, and Drop Boxes, and you’ll figure it out, especially if you mixed in Ranked Choice Voting like Alaska or Maine do.

Players showing up drunk – think Kamala going after Florida or Texas, or conservatives going after modern Virginia or Minnesota when Pennsylvania is more winnable and much more critical.

Coming against the full force of the house – play Blackjack and read the table’s fine print; one table pays what another won’t, another won’t pay you automatically if you hit Blackjack. Little by little, the goalposts move, and then you can’t win an election without a majority and multiple ballots, or the other team will decide to count for weeks with full media cover.

Minimizing down ballot impacts – can’t stop Trump this time around, but we can get 3 or 4 Senate seats while everyone is celebrating and make the U.S. House majority so small nothing can get done. This is like when you’re on a hot streak and you get offered tickets to the musical performance just so they can save their scalps on the floor.

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Badlands Media articles and features represent the opinions of the contributing authors and do not necessarily represent the views of Badlands Media itself.

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Seth Keshel, MBA, is a former Army Captain of Military Intelligence and Afghanistan veteran. His analytical method of election forecasting and analytics is known worldwide, and he has been commended by President Donald J. Trump for his work in the field.

He is the author of the bestselling Captain K’s Corner.

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