What a crazy wild summer?! The Republican presidential candidate shot by an assassin narrowly dodges the bullet, and then the Democrat presidential candidate is unceremoniously shot out of the nominee saddle by his own party. Bombing a curiously early debate, Joe Biden suffered an inside coup. Panicked Democrats suddenly realized no one would believe a senile Biden won again, so he had to go. Puzzled Americans are wondering, if Biden can’t campaign, how can he govern? Even more bizarre, the singularly most unpopular Democrat politician even with Democrats is suddenly a rising star! As the new media darling, Kamala Harris abruptly and swiftly turned Biden’s sometimes double-digit deficit to Trump into a very tight race.

If you buy that, there is ocean-front property for you in Arizona. Just a couple months ago, there were open conversations about replacing Harris as VP for Biden, because she is simply not very smart and strangely unlikable. Harris was the first Democrat to drop out of the 2020 primaries because she could not get enough traction to get even 1%, but now without earning a single primary vote, how is she a fan favorite?

A worse trainwreck than Biden when off script, Harris has been the nominee for a month and has still not granted any interviews. Repeating her only canned speech at tightly scripted hip-hop concerts masquerading as Harris Rallies, Harris hides from the press more than Biden. Her defenders claim her candidacy is bringing voters so much joy, why detract from that joy with boring policy points? And indeed, she has offered very few specifics.

Last week, Harris finally offered her economic plan, which was a communist manifesto of Soviet price controls and off-the-chart big government spending. It was so impractical and nonsensical that even CNN and MSNBC criticized it as ill-conceived and unworkable. Democrats, particularly elected ones, immediately started backpedaling. They said not to take Harris’s economic plan too seriously and pointed voters back to that warm feeling of joy. Americans don’t need economists to tell them hers is a dumb pandering plan, because they know it and have felt it under the struggling economy and stifling inflation during the Biden-Harris tenure. Yet, the Democrat Media Complex wants you to believe that Americans are now rushing to vote more of the same for four more years.

Biden’s border czar who presided over open borders, literally shepherding record millions of illegal immigrants into America, now swears she will close the border. No one believes this, but that doesn’t matter. She flipped on fracking, because she needs Pennsylvania to win, but keystone voters don’t trust her – it doesn’t matter.

What matters is perception. Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker claims Harris has energized the party like Barack Obama. Obama created a celebrity following and churned out crowds. Some Democrats literally worshiped him as the messiah, but Harris is no Obama and certainly no messiah. Better than Biden, Harris struggles to get a few hundred to her events, while Trump routinely gathers tens of thousands wherever he shows up. But that doesn’t matter.

Trump was trouncing Biden, not just because Joe was incapable, but because Democrat policies have failed epically by every metric. So how is it the other half of the administration responsible for economic carnage and foreign failures has closed the gap? Every time Harris goes off script, her handlers are vindicated for hiding her, and she reminds Americans that she is clearly incompetent. Without any real effort, did Harris somehow emerge competitive?!

The short answer is she did not. Harris is not rising, and the election is not tight, but the Democrats desperately need Americans to believe she is in this race. Remember the same people that swore the past 3.5 years that Biden was not cognitively impaired, now swear Harris is the best new leader in America! What is really going on?

The Democrat plan is unchanged except that Biden unexpectedly collapsed too early. Democrats have known Biden is and has been incapacitated, but they didn’t need him to campaign to win in 2020. The plan for 2024 was the same, but Biden was slipping so badly that Americans would never believe Biden won again. Understand that Biden would have won in 2024 like 2020, but it would have been entirely too unbelievable. The electorate would have concluded there was something seriously amiss. The results could not be correct.

Therefore, the only objective for Harris is to appear competitive and that her race with Trump is close. The Democrat Media Complex and the deep state will run the same playbook in November with massive voter fraud to flip enough swing states for Harris to win.

Her absurd policies, disingenuous unlikability, inability to speak cogently, and poor record do not matter. Democrats only need Americans to believe it’s a tight election, so her victory will seem plausible and possible. It is crazy, but the only way the party that has caused so much hardship on the middle class can win the White House in 2024 is to cheat.

Democrats will dismiss any suggestion of voter fraud out of hand, because to acknowledge the possibility invites scrutiny they cannot withstand. Many Americans who don’t live and breathe politics will wonder, "Could such a conspiracy be true?" But most Americans already know the 2020 presidential election was stolen. Sadly, they are resigned to it, because no one in authority ever conducted an actual investigation. Elected officials ran from the truth, because when exposed, it would require courageous action – courage is a rare commodity in Congress.

Despite ample evidence of extensive voter fraud (much is still seeping out), it’s still politically incorrect and socially unacceptable to proclaim publicly that the 2020 election was a sham, but again average Americans are not fooled. The details are overwhelming and too time consuming to recount in a single effort, but the vote totals alone tell the tale.

In 2000, 120 million votes were counted for president, and by 2016, there were 129 million votes counted. Over five election cycles, the average increase in each election was about 1.8 million votes for a total of 9 million more votes over 16 years. Yet in 2020, 155 million votes were counted! There is no way 26 million more people voted in one election cycle, or for that matter Biden earned some 15 million more votes than Obama. Democrats’ problem this year is reproducing that many votes. When we see the vote total is less in 2024 due to better election integrity laws, Americans will be confident in the truth about 2020.

Trump is still winning, but average Americans must get out the vote and make his victory so enormous that Democrats cannot cheat enough. The polls are being manipulated to instill doubt, but trust your experience and intuition. Democrats are not giving up and not changing their strategy, but with voter vigilance in every state, we can stem the fraud and prevent another steal.

“Your leaders are rebels, the companions of thieves. All of them love bribes and demand payoffs, but they refuse to defend the cause of orphans or fight for the rights of widows” (Isaiah 1:23).

Pete Riehm is a conservative activist and columnist in south Alabama. Email him at peteriehm@bellsouth.net or read all his columns at http://www.renewamerica.com/.