As November 3 nears, the strategy of a White House and a Republican Party relying on vote suppression to eke out an Electoral College victory in the face of a likely landslide loss has come into undeniable view. Get GOP-appointed judges to throw out ballots in Democrat-leaning areas on the flimsiest of pretexts; send out Trump supporters on Election Day to intimidate voters at the polls; and declare victory if Trump is ahead by the end of November 3. Throw in the president’s willingness to incite violence if it serves his interests, and the possibility of Election Day assists from hostile foreign powers who want to screw with our election, and there’s no denying the dark scenarios that haunt this election.
But as I argued a couple days ago, there is no point in getting psyched out by anti-democratic and corrupt tactics that signal above all desperation and renunciation of the United States as a country that relies on free and fair elections to determine its collective fate. Americans are voting in unprecedented numbers, and Democrats have deployed legions of lawyers to counter Republican efforts to persuade sympathetic judges to keep people’s votes from being counted. What can be done, is largely being done. Citizens and the opposition are hardly sitting around passively being abused by an unstoppable Republican monolith. And there are hopeful signs that, barring an extremely close election, attempts to secure the election via the power of GOP-majority courts will come to naught. And while articles like this one persuade me that Trump will try to spread confusion and chaos about the results, this will prove persuasive only to those who already support him, not to the majority voting him out of office.
And so I feel safe in re-upping what I said a few days ago: the GOP’s enactment of such an openly anti-democratic and un-American strategy to hold power and secure the re-election of a man seen by a solid majority of Americans as unfit for office can do enormous damage to the Republican Party. For the (increasingly improbable) short-term gain of winning this election, the GOP has greatly increased the odds that it loses its longer-term war on American democracy.
Two specific points from the past few days demonstrate how deep a hole the GOP is digging for itself. As the latest iteration of the push to convince the public that the vote count at midnight on November 3 is the definitive one, we now see Trump advisors taking this line to its absurdist, logical conclusion. On ABC, Trump advisor Jason Miller said this morning that, “President Trump will be ahead on election night, probably getting 280 electoral somewhere in that range, and then they're going to try to steal it back after the election.” As many have already pointed out, by “steal it back,” Miller is referring to. . . counting all the votes. This equation of counting votes with stealing votes has been tacit in all the Trumpist emphasis on shutting down the election once Trump is ahead, but now they are actually saying it out loud. (There is also the minor accompanying point that electoral votes are not awarded until citizens’ votes have been counted and the results certified — another measure of how deep into an alternate fantasy land Trump’s advocates have ventured.)
This sort of absurdity might work in a country that has never had elections before, but continuing to count votes after the day of a national election has been the experience of literally every American who has ever voted in a national election. My point is not that Trump loyalists might buy into this illogic in an act of collective partisan amnesia; my point is that resorting to such anti-democratic performance art provides Democrats with ample ammunition to paint the Republicans as a party that has given up on democracy.
The second example from the last couple days is also one that in the present moment is ominous enough: the apparent willingness of GOP-appointed judges to essentially make up legal justifications to favor Republican efforts to suppress and discount Americans’ votes in order to increase Republican election chances. Again, I’m not saying this isn’t a danger to Democrats in the current election cycle. But looking at the larger picture, Republican judges are making a rock-solid case for Democrats to reform the courts in order to preserve democracy itself. The most-striking recent instance is the attempt by the Texas GOP to have a judge throw out 100,000 ballots in Democratic-leaning Harris County. Josh Marshall summarizes the danger and solution neatly:
Here we have yet another opportunity for a corrupted federal judiciary to rig the election in favor of the Republican party. It’s akin to the kind of things we see in broken democracies like Russian and Turkey, where notional democratic procedures are backstopped by courts which intervene if the elections are going in the wrong direction.
People need to open their eyes to the reality of what has happened. The federal judiciary has been thoroughly corrupted. The issue is not principally one of ideology. It is that a large number of Republican judges see their role as backstopping the electoral fortunes and policy choices of the Republican party. For this they are willing to use states-rights federalism or federal intervention depending on situational convenience. They manufacture new interpretive theories wholesale to achieve these ends. This can sound hyperbolic. But it’s not.
For democracy to survive the federal judiciary must be reformed.
Unable to put together a national majority, and increasingly unlikely to do so in the future, the GOP is now openly defining itself as the party that opposes democracy as Americans commonly understand it. While its strategy of relying on absurdities like “counting votes is stealing votes” may rile up its base, most Americans will not be fooled, and will, in fact, be horrified that this is now the mainstream position of the GOP. Likewise, I am certain that Americans will not tolerate open corruption of the judiciary in the name of nakedly partisan advantage. For the sake of American democracy, after the election Democrats must systematically and relentlessly remind voters of how the GOP tried to subvert the election via the various measures that are in plain view today. Left with no option but to promote absurdities and transparently authoritarian reasoning, the GOP itself is now hastening its imminent immolation at the hands of American voters, and the Democrats are duty-bound to add fuel to the fire.