While today’s Electoral College vote is not expected,  by most, to lead to any surprises, and Donald Trump will almost certainly be selected as the next president in a vote that is usually routine but takes place this year amid allegations of Russian hacking to try to influence the election, some states are not taking any chances and following last week’s report that Trump electors have seen a flurry of death threats, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports that electors in Pennsylvania will have police protection as they cast their ballots on Monday.

One Pennsylvania elector, Ash Khare, told the Gazette that he receives thousands of emails a day trying to sway his vote.

“I’m a big boy,” said Khare, an India-born engineer and a longtime Republican from Warren County, who estimates he receives 3,000 to 5,000 emails, letters, and phone calls a day from as far away as France, Germany, and Australia. “But this is stupid. Nobody is standing up and telling these people, ‘Enough, knock it off.’ ”

As a reminder, Pennsylvania allows its electors to vote for someone other than the candidate who won the state.

The messages have escalated to death threats, and so the 20 electors will have state troopers escorting them to cast their votes Monday.

As reported previously, GOP electors have been under pressure over the past month from anti-Trump groups to not vote for President-elect Donald Trump.

“I take my job as an elector very seriously, and in Pennsylvania, Donald Trump won,” said Mary Barket, a Northampton County resident and president of the Pennsylvania Federation of Republican Women. “So any argument thereafter, especially about the nature of him being a president, is not going to have an effect on me.” But she said she generally doesn’t open the messages.

“I don’t have the time, first of all,” she said. “Second of all, there’s really not much to be said that’s going to do anything to change my mind.”

Barket said she has been inundated with phone calls and emails and letters over the last month. Some tell her to read the Federalist Papers or express fear over Trump becoming the country’s commander-in-chief.

In interviews with the Gazette last week, a number of electors said there was no chance anyone will defect. “There is zero chance of that,” said elector Lawrence Tabas, a Philadelphia lawyer and general counsel for the state GOP. “If you want to place a bet on that in Vegas, you can make enough money to retire.”

Tabas said state officials this year gave out contact information for all 20 electors. In his case, that included his work and cell phones, his work email, and his home address. He can’t read every email or letter – and many of them have just been form letters with different signatories.

He said most of the conversations he’s had have been respectful. Others have veered off into what he would only call “nasty” territory. He would not give details. Khare said he received a letter from a 7-year-old describing his fear of Trump. Others have sent him photos of their families, saying they were worried about their future under a Trump presidency.

One woman called to tell him her husband had left the country. Another called him at 1 a.m., while he was in a deep sleep. He was also sent a copy of John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage, which focuses on the careers of eight senators whom Kennedy felt had shown courage under “enormous pressure” from their parties and constituents.

Khare said he understood that the country is deeply divided and that emotions are running high, but said he was clear on where he stands.

“I will not change my mind,” he said.

One GOP elector in Michigan has received death threats as well.

* * *

Trump won 306 electoral votes on Election Day, crossing the 270 electoral vote threshold needed to clinch the presidency and surpassing Hillary Clinton’s 232 electoral votes. Monday’s results are expected to match those figures almost exactly. But thousands are expected to protest across the country as part of a long-shot effort to convince 37 GOP electors to cast their ballots for someone other than Trump.

While the frantic push to exert pressure on the Republican electors isn’t expected to change the outcome of Monday’s vote, it has put the Electoral College under a rare spotlight.

Authored by Davide Battistella,

I read a quote somewhere last week that went something like, “JFK put a man on the moon, Obama put a man in the ladies room”. This got me thinking about President Obama’s oft cited, “war of narratives”.

Who says something like this?  Well, it’s people who believe that as long as they control the narrative, as long as they control the story, then they are winning. The facts don’t matter, the actual events, the situations, the way things unfold, these are also the things that do not matter.

What matters most to a person who believes that the world is based on a “war of narratives” is that their ideas and world view are the only possible alternative. Isn’t this what doomed the Democrats in the Election?  Did they not just believe that they had a superior narrative to the one that was being proposed by Donald Trump? So much so that they practically hid their candidate while waiting for her pronouncement as president.

With a president and leader, who holds a belief that the “war of narratives” is all that matters, Democrats have slipped into a very narrow (albeit progressive) world view. Is this starting to make some sense now?

From this perch, you ignore what is going on around you and it is your job and the job of your party to push any given issue through the filter of a given narrative. So take any issue and run it into the ground to convince people your narrative is the only acceptable one. You can blame people for falling down this slippery slope because it usually involves, at some point, the absence of using common sense.

Sure, Republicans push narratives as well, but they don’t seem to do it with such zeal and with the world view that whichever particular narrative du jour is the only plausible, logical story that exists.  One thing that emerges is that being “locked in” to a position can quickly and often turn into a small corner you have painted yourself into.

This tends to result in slinging your final arrows from the last square meter you are standing in. A war of narratives Alamo as it were.  Generally, you then have to fire your narrative in all directions.  But that is not enough, dems tend to push to the point that everyone in the world (outside their square) is “wrong” (more often labeled racists, sexists, or any list of “ists”) and that the logical Democratic conclusion is correct.

When you fight this kind of “war of narratives” you inevitably end up in an extreme position, this usually involves fighting for the survival of your “narrative” or point of view over what, to most people, might seem like common sense.  Issues are made more complex and solutions move further away from the real problems.

This is where Obama now finds himself on the eve of leaving office on Obamacare, Benghazi, Aleppo, the economy and many other issues where he placed the importance on the narrative rather getting to the core of whether the position serves America and American interests.  His legacy is just another narrative that needs to be defended at all costs. How many times have we heard recently that unemployment is at it’s lowest while out of work people are at the highest levels in recent history.

This whole narrative issue and infatuation with it created a situation where democrats have become out of touch with TROA (the rest of America). This does not mean I don’t agree with some of the the narratives I have seen touted, I’m just pointing out that when you are seemingly unwilling to shift from a narrative, or a series of narratives you can end up right where the democrats are now.

Apply this logic to just about any issue and you can quickly figure out that by not being nimble in their narrative, democrats over the last eight years have become everything they always claim to stand against. Take big major issues like abortion, same sex marriage, immigration, jobs, the economy. These are complicated issues with plenty of grey area and plenty of points of view to service. You can’t afford to paint yourself into a corner and the complexity requires an ability to view the problem through more than one lens.

Most reasonable Americans would agree with both the rights and needs of individuals associated with any of these issues, until the point they are tilted a bit to far to the left, a bit to far toward special interest groups and until those people fire back and begin attacking anyone who is not delivering the most extreme version of the message.

Things begin being defined as absolute and in black and white terms leaving for very little grey (or what I like to call the place where actual change can happen).  This is the problem with being glued to one narrative.  This is where TROA fought back.  Not all Americans share the view of the East and West coast Americans and they let that voice be heard. Now the arrows are being fired in all directions from that corner they have painted themselves into and the narrative they are one hundred percent invested in.

An example of this came up between now President elect Trump (then Mr. Trump) and Hillary Clinton in the last debate. It came down to a tough question on abortion where Secretary Clinton could not move off of her previous position/narrative and Mr. Trump could make a statement like, “You can take the baby and rip the baby out of the womb as late as one or two or three days prior to birth,”

That is an image that is very uncomfortable to many people and hard to defend, but it is an extreme example of why things can not be defined in black and white terms. Secretary Clinton had no real response or perhaps did not respond in the moment but my point is to illustrate why you can’t win by sticking to a prescribed narrative. At it’s core it comes off as dishonest as well because folks see you are defending a position instead of taking one. It might legally be ever woman’s right to end a pregnancy with two days remaining but it might not sit well with your average person/voter.

These types of narratives become tough to sell. Even when a given narrative is being touted, pushed, repeated and exploited through what we learned is the vast echo chamber known as the mainstream media. Case in point; election 2016. People were actually so tired, and one might even argue perceptibly fed up, with having a single narrative shoveled down their throats that they naturally sought out other voices.

To understand this one only has to view a video like this one, where talking points are being voiced, verbatim, on show after show.