Three signs that Republicans don’t believe their own hype about a looming red wave

Although nobody knows what is going to hap­pen in tomor­row’s midterm elec­tions, Repub­li­cans con­tin­ue to furi­ous­ly spin the nar­ra­tive that 2022 is a “red wave” year and Democ­rats are pow­er­less to change the fate of the elec­tion. In the words of for­mer Penn­syl­va­nia State Repub­li­can Par­ty Chair Rob Glea­son: “Their peo­ple are depressed… Nothing’s going to be able to save them this year.”

In real­i­ty, data indi­cates that this is a par­tic­u­lar­ly chaot­ic and unusu­al elec­tion in which many dif­fer­ent out­comes are plau­si­ble. That makes pre­dict­ing results — a prob­lem­at­ic exer­cise to begin with — par­tic­u­lar­ly dif­fi­cult and unwise.

Repub­li­cans speak con­fi­dent­ly of vic­to­ry this month, but their own actions belie that con­fi­dence. They’re def­i­nite­ly eager to win, but they’re also very fear­ful that they won’t, and we can see that inse­cu­ri­ty in their behav­ior. Here are three signs that indi­cate Repub­li­cans don’t believe their own hype about a loom­ing red wave.

A big batch of not-credible polls

Repub­li­cans have pub­licly released a whole bunch of sus­pect polls in the final weeks of the cam­paign in an effort to influ­ence polling aggre­ga­tors like FiveThir­tyEight and pro­cure favor­able media cov­er­age about their prospects. That’s not some­thing that a polit­i­cal par­ty con­fi­dent of vic­to­ry would do.

“In six major bat­tle­ground states, more than half the polls con­duct­ed in Octo­ber have been con­duct­ed by Repub­li­can firms,” the NDN’s Simon Rosen­berg explained on a recent episode of Joy Rei­d’s MSNBC show, TheRei­d­Out.

“That means that basi­cal­ly we can’t trust the data on Real­Clear­Pol­i­tics or FiveThir­tyEight any longer because it’s essen­tial­ly Repub­li­can propaganda.”

It’s impor­tant to note that this crop of Repub­li­can polls is sep­a­rate from the inter­nal polling that Repub­li­can firms are doing for cam­paigns and inde­pen­dent expen­di­tures. Both sides are hold­ing their inter­nal polling close to the vest, but Repub­li­cans have addi­tion­al­ly fund­ed a project specif­i­cal­ly intend­ed to gen­er­ate favor­able pub­lic num­bers for their can­di­dates in states and dis­tricts of interest.

“This is an unprece­dent­ed mas­sive cam­paign by the Repub­li­cans to game the polling aver­age. And it’s dis­ap­point­ing to me this wasn’t caught ear­li­er by many of the peo­ple that do this that are on TV and do this for a liv­ing. But it has to be under­stood now that the polling aver­ages have been cor­rupt­ed,” said Rosenberg.

Tom Bonier, the CEO of Tar­getS­mart, a data-ori­ent­ed firm that works on behalf of Democ­rats and pro­gres­sives, observed on Octo­ber 28th: “Last week: polls show GOP leads nation­al­ly. Ear­ly this week: polls show Dem leads nation­al­ly. Late this week: GOP poll­sters release an avalanche of polls show­ing GOP leads.”

Won­kette has also writ­ten about what Repub­li­cans are up to.

Backtracking on opposition to early voting

Owing in large part to Don­ald Trump and oth­er Repub­li­cans’ ridicu­lous attacks on vote-at-home­/vote-by-mail, many Repub­li­can vot­ers are declin­ing to vote ear­ly, choos­ing instead to wait until Elec­tion Day to vote. Mean­while, Democ­rats are “bank­ing” mil­lions upon mil­lions of ear­ly votes, which is mak­ing Repub­li­cans in swing states like Ari­zona extreme­ly ner­vous. So ner­vous that, as The Wash­ing­ton Post report­ed today, they’re back­track­ing on their anti-ear­ly vot­ing stance:

For years, the chair of Arizona’s Repub­li­can Par­ty has led attacks on this swing state’s ear­ly vot­ing sys­tem, warn­ing with­out evi­dence that mail-in vot­ing and bal­lot drop box­es are inse­cure and unreliable.

Kel­li Ward urged her fol­low­ers to instead “wait in line & vote in person.”

Then, last Tues­day, she post­ed a pho­to of her­self smil­ing in front of a steel bal­lot drop box. In her hand appeared to be an enve­lope, slid halfway inside.

“Hub­by & I vot­ed ear­ly in per­son today,” her Twit­ter post said.

The new mes­sag­ing from the par­ty leader came amid anx­i­eties among Ari­zona Repub­li­cans that their assaults on ear­ly vot­ing could ulti­mate­ly sup­press GOP turnout in a cycle that will help decide con­trol of the U.S. Sen­ate, the governor’s office and dozens of oth­er contests.

If Ward and oth­er Repub­li­cans were real­ly supreme­ly con­fi­dent about a loom­ing red wave, they would have stuck to their guns and urged Repub­li­can vot­ers to vote at polling places only, not through the post or by return­ing to a drop box.

Repub­li­can poll­ster Paul Bentz told The Post that he thinks Trump’s attacks on Amer­i­can elec­tions are boomerang­ing. “He sup­pressed his own vote and trans­formed a por­tion of his own elec­torate from ear­ly votes that were bank­able and that were reli­able, to Elec­tion Day vot­ers,” Bentz remarked.

Mean­while, Repub­li­can con­sul­tant Con­stan­tin Quer­ard admit­ted to The Post that there’s a huge risk to putting all of your eggs into one bis­cuit. “The dan­ger is, any time you just say, ‘Okay, well, I’ll turn all my votes out on just one day,’ is if some­thing hap­pens that day, like unex­pect­ed sick­ness or weath­er problems.”

Lawsuits to disqualify legitimately cast ballots

In key swing states like Penn­syl­va­nia, Michi­gan, and Wis­con­sin, Repub­li­cans have filed law­suits aimed at ensur­ing that legit­i­mate­ly cast bal­lots they think will favor Democ­rats get thrown out and not count­ed due to technicalities.

Here’s a Wash­ing­ton Post sto­ry on these efforts:

Repub­li­can offi­cials and can­di­dates in at least three bat­tle­ground states are push­ing to dis­qual­i­fy thou­sands of mail bal­lots after urg­ing their own sup­port­ers to vote on Elec­tion Day, in what crit­ics are call­ing a con­cert­ed attempt at par­ti­san vot­er suppression.

In Penn­syl­va­nia, the state Supreme Court has agreed with the Repub­li­can Nation­al Com­mit­tee that elec­tion offi­cials should not count bal­lots on which the vot­er neglect­ed to put a date on the out­er enve­lope — even in cas­es when the bal­lots arrive before Elec­tion Day. Thou­sands of bal­lots have been set aside as a result, enough to swing a close race.

In Michi­gan, Kristi­na Karamo, the Repub­li­can nom­i­nee for sec­re­tary of state, sued the top elec­tion offi­cial in Detroit last month, seek­ing to toss absen­tee bal­lots not cast in per­son with an ID, even though that runs con­trary to state require­ments. When asked in a recent court hear­ing, Karamo’s lawyer declined to say why the suit tar­gets Detroit, a heav­i­ly Demo­c­ra­t­ic, major­i­ty-Black city, and not the entire state.

And in Wis­con­sin, Repub­li­cans won a court rul­ing that will pre­vent some mail bal­lots from being count­ed when the required wit­ness address is not complete.

As of press time, this report­ing is cur­rent­ly the top sto­ry on washingtonpost.com:

Here in Wash­ing­ton State, vote at home is the default and the law clear­ly says that vot­ers have until 8 PM on Elec­tion Day to return their bal­lots. Bal­lots that get an Elec­tion Day post­mark get count­ed. A bal­lot does­n’t need to be received by elec­tion offi­cials by the dead­line to be valid­ly cast. The return enve­lope must be signed and dat­ed and vot­ers are accus­tomed to pro­vid­ing this authentication.

A polit­i­cal par­ty tru­ly con­fi­dent of vic­to­ry would­n’t try to sup­press the vote because it would not be nec­es­sary. If Repub­li­cans are des­tined to win and there’s noth­ing Democ­rats can do about it, then all of these law­suits aimed at stop­ping vot­ers’ votes from being count­ed would­n’t have been filed. They would have been unjus­ti­fi­able: a total and inex­cus­able waste of par­ty resources.

But Repub­li­cans know per­fect­ly well the midterms are not in the bag for them. As in 2020, the prospect of los­ing to Democ­rats is sim­ply unbearable.

That’s why Repub­li­cans are pulling out all the stops to rig the out­come in their favor, whether that’s pump­ing out bad polls, back­track­ing on vot­ing instruc­tions to their own fol­low­ers, or launch­ing vot­er sup­pres­sion lawsuits.