Republicans appear ready to move on from cheating and voter suppression to soft coups

In Octo­ber of 2020, Wired Mag­a­zine ran a cov­er sto­ry about the pres­i­den­tial elec­tion that was titled Amer­i­can Hus­tle. The sub­head­line of the piece con­sist­ed of two parts. The first read: US elec­tions are in the mid­dle of a major reboot. Our democ­ra­cy will come out stronger.* The sec­ond part, which was placed at the bot­tom of the page, read: *It just has to sur­vive the next few weeks.

Sev­en months after that arti­cle ran, it is clear that while our democ­ra­cy sur­vived the 2020 elec­tions, we did­n’t come out stronger. To the con­trary: recent events sug­gest that the Repub­lic’s future remains grave­ly endangered.

That is prin­ci­pal­ly because the Repub­li­can Par­ty has com­plet­ed its trans­for­ma­tion from a once hon­or­able polit­i­cal par­ty that stood against slav­ery and saved the Union (the Grand Old Par­ty) to an unpa­tri­ot­ic cult staunch­ly and absurd­ly devot­ed to the ven­er­a­tion of a nar­cis­sis­tic sociopath: Don­ald John Trump.

Despite hav­ing lost the 2020 pres­i­den­tial elec­tion, despite hav­ing lost his social media mega­phones, despite hav­ing been forced to vacate the White House and leave office, and despite the events of Jan­u­ary 6th, in which his fol­low­ers attacked the U.S. Capi­tol at his urg­ing, Trump remains in con­trol of the Repub­li­can Par­ty and all its organs, from the Repub­li­can Nation­al Com­mit­tee on down.

Trump is already con­sid­ered the pre­sump­tive 2024 nom­i­nee by many Repub­li­can oper­a­tives and pun­dits, and con­gres­sion­al Repub­li­cans have decid­ed to stick with him, with only a few excep­tions, like the recent­ly can­celed Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illi­nois. Mean­while, in swing states where they have tri­fec­tas, Repub­li­cans enraged that Trump no longer sits in the White House have gone into over­drive pass­ing laws aimed at pre­vent­ing Democ­rats from hav­ing a chance of win­ning any future elec­tion, whether in 2022, 2024, or beyond.

In a recent blog post, Trump made it abun­dant­ly clear how dis­ap­point­ed he is that his fol­low­ers and loy­al enablers did­n’t put up more of a fight for him in the after­math of the elec­tion. By did­n’t put up more of a fight, I mean that Trump is  clear­ly angry that cer­tain peo­ple did­n’t abuse their author­i­ty to throw out the elec­tion results and sim­ply keep in pow­er through any means necessary.

Here’s Trump in his own words (May 15th, 2021):

The 2020 Pres­i­den­tial Elec­tion was, by far, the great­est Elec­tion Fraud in the his­to­ry of our Coun­try. The good news is, the Amer­i­can peo­ple get it and the truth is rapid­ly com­ing out! Had Mike Pence had the courage to send the Elec­toral Col­lege vote back to states for recer­ti­fi­ca­tion, and had Mitch McConnell fought for us instead of being the weak and pathet­ic leader he is, we would right now have a Repub­li­can Pres­i­dent who would be veto­ing the hor­rif­ic Social­is­tic Bills that are rapid­ly going through Con­gress, includ­ing Open Bor­ders, High Tax­es, Mas­sive Reg­u­la­tions, and so much else!

Had Mike Pence had the courage to send the Elec­toral Col­lege vote back to the states for recer­ti­fi­ca­tion. That’s what Trump want­ed his Num­ber Two to do: dis­re­gard the elec­tion result and get to work on fix­ing things so that he, Don­ald John Trump, would remain in pow­er even though he had lost.

Trump’s state­ment did not explic­it­ly refer to any­one besides Pence and McConnell, but it’s clear from his behav­ior and his taped calls with Geor­gia’s Brad Raf­fensperg­er that he expects the same loy­al­ty from all Repub­li­cans — espe­cial­ly Repub­li­cans whose job it is to admin­is­ter elec­tions at the state and local level.

Repub­li­can elec­tion offi­cials who did­n’t betray their oaths and fix things for Trump have since come under heavy fire in their own par­ty and with­in their own cir­cles for the sin of hav­ing allowed Amer­i­can democ­ra­cy to sur­vive into 2021.

2020 is now in the rearview mir­ror, and even many of Trump’s enablers in Con­gress claim they’ve moved on (Lind­sey Gra­ham, etc.), but the 2022 midterms are right around the cor­ner, and every­one needs to be pre­pared for them.

And when I say pre­pared, I mean be pre­pared for much more than ger­ry­man­der­ing, cheat­ing, and vot­er sup­pres­sion. See, that’s the old playbook.

There’s a new play­book now and new expec­ta­tions that Trump and his rabid fol­low­ers have set for all Repub­li­cans work­ing in elections.

As David Atkins recent­ly not­ed: “We spend a lot of time talk­ing about bal­lot access. But I don’t think we’ve spent enough time talk­ing about what hap­pens when Repub­li­cans at every lev­el sim­ply refuse to cer­ti­fy Demo­c­ra­t­ic wins at any lev­el, in any process they con­trol. Because that is going to happen.”

“A Demo­c­rat wins a major race, for Gov­er­nor or Sen­ate, in 2022, in a state con­trolled by ‘if a Demo­c­rat wins it must be fraud’ Repub­li­cans, and the state cer­ti­fies that the Repub­li­can won, because, you know, fraud. We all under­stand there’s a good chance this hap­pens, right?” Demo­c­ra­t­ic Sen­a­tor Chris Mur­phy of Con­necti­cut asked rhetor­i­cal­ly this morn­ing in a tweet.

“If you swapped today’s GOP for the one that exist­ed only six months ago and re-ran the 2020 elec­tion, you would have had duel­ing slates from all of the swing states sent to the elec­toral col­lege. That’s how fast it’s moved and it’s not slow­ing down,” Gabriel Rosen­berg wrote in a May 10th tweet.

Just a few months pri­or, in Feb­ru­ary, Rosen­berg had made the same point in a long, out­stand­ing Sub­stack essay, The Apophenic Thrall:

Because of the poor design of the Amer­i­can polit­i­cal sys­tem, the GOP will con­tin­ue to hold numer­ous veto points and it could plau­si­bly win the Pres­i­den­cy in the near future.

What’s also obvi­ous to me is that if we had been faced in 2020 with the GOP as it will be in 2022, none of the state lev­el GOP oper­a­tives who refused Trump’s vote-rig­ging alle­ga­tions would do so.

We’d have GOP elect­ed offi­cials refus­ing to cer­ti­fy elec­tion results and state leg­is­la­tures send­ing com­pet­ing slates of electors.

That much has changed in the last two months alone and it will prob­a­bly get worse in the next twen­ty-four months.

I wor­ry both about the ten­den­cy to write Trump­ism off as “ more of the same” from left crit­ics — the insti­tu­tion­al dif­fer­ences alone are sig­nif­i­cant and like­ly to have impor­tant con­se­quences — and of the ten­den­cy of cen­trist crit­ics to refuse to com­mit to the big changes that might pre­empt the right’s anti-demo­c­ra­t­ic moves.

As I put it on Twit­ter, “anti-Trump” Repub­li­cans who do not back sub­stan­tial polit­i­cal reforms, such as a new Vot­ing Rights Act, are effec­tive­ly pro-Trump at this point.

“Pret­ty clear at this point that if Repub­li­cans con­trol Con­gress in 2024 a Demo­c­rat will not be allowed to win the pres­i­den­tial elec­tion,” The Week’s Nation­al Cor­re­spon­dent Ryan Coop­er agreed in a reply to Rosen­berg on May 10th.

Jamelle Bouie piled on lat­er that same day: “Yep. ‘A Demo­c­ra­t­ic elec­tion vic­to­ry is inher­ent­ly ille­git­i­mate’ is already Repub­li­can Par­ty dog­ma and should Biden/Harris win by a sim­i­lar­ly slim mar­gins in 2024, Repub­li­cans will sim­ply refuse to cer­ti­fy the results. Hell, we’ll prob­a­bly see this even if they aren’t slim.”

The kind of thug­gery that we most need to be pre­pared for in the next two elec­tions is like­ly that of the soft coup variety.

A soft coup, also known as a silent coup, is “a coup d’é­tat with­out the use of vio­lence, but based on a con­spir­a­cy or plot that has as its objec­tive the tak­ing of state pow­er by par­tial­ly or whol­ly legal means, in order to facil­i­tate an exchange of polit­i­cal lead­er­ship and in some cas­es also of the cur­rent insti­tu­tion­al order.”

Stag­ing a soft coup is what Trump want­ed to do back in the win­ter, and it’s what he and his rabid fol­low­ers will want Repub­li­can elec­tions offi­cials to do next time the results show Demo­c­ra­t­ic can­di­dates ahead in a swing state or red state.

Here in Wash­ing­ton State, it’s unlike­ly we would see this kind of behav­ior either in 2022 or 2024, and that’s not just because of the state’s Demo­c­ra­t­ic tilt.

It’s because Repub­li­cans involved in elec­tion admin­is­tra­tion in Wash­ing­ton State, like Sec­re­tary of State Kim Wyman, have no inter­est in being lack­eys for Don­ald Trump, no mat­ter what kind of pres­sure they’re sub­ject­ed to by Repub­li­can PCOs. Notice that Wyman has spo­ken out force­ful­ly, ear­ly, and often against the Ari­zona Repub­li­cans’ fake audit oper­a­tion of Mari­co­pa Coun­ty’s ballots.

Those coun­ty audi­tors who are Repub­li­cans in Wash­ing­ton have sim­i­lar pos­tures, by all rep­utable accounts. That’s good news for the Ever­green State.

But what about the states that will decide the com­po­si­tion of the House major­i­ty for the next Con­gress? Texas, Flori­da, Geor­gia, and Ari­zona have Repub­li­can tri­fec­tas run­ning their state­hous­es. Penn­syl­va­nia, Michi­gan, Wis­con­sin, and North Car­oli­na, mean­while, have Repub­li­can-con­trolled Legislatures.

The local elec­tions offi­cials in those states sad­ly don’t all appear to be peo­ple who are pre­pared to put coun­try ahead of par­ty when under mas­sive pressure.

If safe­guards can­not be put into place to pro­tect ahead of the 2022 midterms, whether through fed­er­al leg­is­la­tion like H.R. 1, or court action, or fierce local resis­tance to bad state laws and dic­tates, we could be in huge trouble.

As Jamelle Bouie said, it’s hard to fath­om a Repub­li­can Con­gress cer­ti­fy­ing a Biden/Harris vic­to­ry in 2024, or a Harris/? vic­to­ry if Biden does­n’t run again.

It’s trag­ic that Repub­li­cans in our coun­try have sunk this low. But we should­n’t think for a sec­ond that it can’t get worse, because it absolute­ly can get worse.

The best way to ensure that the cri­sis we’re in does­n’t get worse is to make the most of the time we have to get ready for the midterms.

And by “we,” I mean every­one who cares about the future of our coun­try, not just the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty and Demo­c­ra­t­ic aligned orga­ni­za­tions. Every patri­ot­ic Amer­i­can, regard­less of par­ty and regard­less of ide­ol­o­gy, should be com­mit­ted to ensur­ing that the midterms are con­duct­ed fair­ly and the true win­ners seated.