I’ve avoided discussing the various nightmare election scenarios that have been suggested by various observers, in which the country enters a state of constitutional crisis or worse due to various vote suppression efforts by the Trump administration before and after November 3 (Thomas Edsall has a good run-down of them in his latest column). Mostly this has been for lack of anything to add to the conversation — but I’ve also had a personal disinclination to do so at a time when opponents of Trump need to maximize their case and turnout against the president; expending energy on such scenarios has felt like bad juju, a way to psych ourselves out (“no matter what we do, Trump will manage to steal the election”). It’s not denial, but an inchoate optimism that I’ve felt — even in a worst case scenario, the American people would simply not let Trump get away with stealing the election; we would find a way.
And as Joe Biden seems to have maintained and even increased his strong lead in the polls, including in crucial swing states like Michigan and Wisconsin, and put into play states like Georgia and even Texas, spending too much energy worrying about such scenarios has seemed even more counter-productive. But in these closing days of the race, it’s become overwhelmingly clear that the Republican strategy to re-elect Trump and maintain a brittle grip on the Senate has everything to do with ensuring that not every vote is counted, and that every preference be given to counting those ballots more likely to belong to Republican voters. With their multiple efforts to limit how long after the election a mail-in ballot may be counted, to limit the number of polling places, and to nullify votes allegedly cast improperly, an effort to steal the election is arguably already well under way.
All of this is sickening, an attempt to twist the mechanisms of voting so as to manipulate the results in favor of the GOP; as this Plum Line post makes clear, there is a real risk that such tactics may intentionally sow confusion and open a path to a power grab in a hotly-contested state like Pennsylvania. Every time a GOP majority court agrees that it has no brief to intervene on behalf of voters who might need more time in the face of covid and mail delays, it’s like a judge has stuck a shiv into our democracy. Every time a Republican governor feigns innocent intent in restricting populous Democratic-leaning counties to the same single ballot drop-off site as tiny rural, GOP-leaning counties, it’s an attack on the principle that every vote should be counted.
But in the face of the greatest assault on our right to vote, and have those votes counted, in our lifetimes, we collectively have the benefit of clarity. The news coverage of these GOP efforts is like nothing I remember from previous elections. And so, despite the very real dangers of these suppression efforts, the Democrats have an unprecedented opportunity to make crystal clear to the public that the GOP sees voting as the enemy of the party. No exaggeration is necessary; simply pointing to the facts on the ground in multiple Republican-governed states, like Texas and Georgia, goes a long way to making the case. We can’t lose sight of what a high-risk strategy voter suppression has become for the GOP, when it’s being done in the plain light of day for all the world to see, or ignore what a cudgel it can be against the Republican Party.
More than anything, the Republican attack on the most fundamental right of American democracy shows the GOP’s glaring weakness, not strength. Even as Democrats need to fight tooth and nail to make sure every citizen can have their vote counted, they can’t overlook the extremely vulnerable position the GOP has put itself in, particularly if, as seems reasonably likely, Joe Biden wins a decisive victory over Donald Trump. At that point, efforts that currently seem threatening to a democratic outcome will look many times more so. Should they continue past Election Day, they will appear as brazenly overt efforts by losers to reverse the judgment of the people. In such a situation there would certainly be danger for the country and the Democrats — but also immense opportunity to publicize to the American people how completely pathetic and off the rails the GOP has become, and to turn a rout into a searing indictment. If events develop in such a direction, the Democrats need to be unsparing in fighting a broader war — not just to win the election, but to discredit the GOP’s last remaining pretensions to belief in American democracy.
The GOP-heavy Supreme Court, with its fresh 6-3 conservative majority, is especially vulnerable to the appearance that it is going all in for the Republican Party. In the wake of the Barrett appointment, which has already pushed even centrist Democratic senators to contemplate expanding the Court, open appearance of partisanship could give the Democrats the public support they need to reform the court in the coming months.