Americans across the political spectrum can agree that both the Democrats and the Republicans have dumbed down democracy and promoted many glib, hypocritical people to elected office. This is perhaps inevitable with a duopoly, with election laws and norms that protect both the Democrats and Republicans from third-party challenges even when both major nominees are widely disliked (see Clinton versus Trump in 2016). But only the Republican Party is rapidly moving toward the idea of simply refusing to accept election losses.
The Washington Post reported on Oct. 6 that “a majority of Republican nominees on the ballot this November for the House, Senate and key statewide offices—299 in all—have denied or questioned the outcome of the last presidential election.” This is not trivial. When there is no credible evidence of inaccurate vote-counting, or of non-eligible people voting in any significant number, the refusal to accept an election outcome is a refusal of a fellow citizen’s right to pursue different political goals than one’s own.
Americans across the political spectrum can agree that both parties have dumbed down democracy, but only the Republican Party is rapidly moving toward the idea of simply refusing to accept election losses.
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Election denialism by Republicans has been widely reported, but some conservatives object that some Democrats have also questioned the legitimacy of elections, such as the one that put Donald J. Trump in the White House—or at least they have done so at first. In a blog post from this March at the American Enterprise Institute, Kevin R. Kosar charges the Democrats with “hypocrisy” on election denialism and cites a poll in which 52 percent of self-identified Democrats said it was “probably” or “definitely” true that “Russia tampered with vote tallies in order to get Donald Trump elected president.”
But that outlier poll was taken in December 2016, when questions about Russian involvement in the election were in the headlines but before investigators concluded that the involvement was limited to propaganda campaigns. The results were different just before and just after that month. In a Gallup poll taken the day after the 2016 election, 76 percent of those who voted for Hillary Clinton accepted Mr. Trump as the “legitimate” new president, and in a Morning Consult poll taken in January 2017, 65 percent of Democrats said they were “confident” that the votes were counted correctly in the 2016 election. In contrast, most Republican voters told pollsters immediately after the election that Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory in 2020 was due to “fraud,” and they have continued to hold that belief. More significantly, scores of Republican candidates and officeholders have encouraged that belief.
The most common example given of a Democratic candidate refusing to accept an election result is Stacey Abrams, who never formally conceded after losing to Brian Kemp, a Republican, by 1.4 percentage points in the 2018 election for governor of Georgia. The Washington Examiner columnist Timothy P. Carney recently called her “an election denier in a whole party of habitual election deniers,” and The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler has cataloged times when Ms. Abrams has said that the 2018 election was “rigged” and “stolen” and even said, “I won”—in an interview in which she later elaborated, “I believe we won in that we transformed the electorate and achieved a dramatic increase in turnout.”
There is a difference between saying that an election outcome might have been different if more people had voted and saying that official election results cannot be trusted.
Are Ms. Abrams’s statements comparable to the repeated claims by Mr. Trump and his political allies that the 2020 presidential election was rigged? Is she comparable to Kari Lake, the Republican nominee for governor of Arizona, who told The New York Times in August, “Deep down, I think we all know this illegitimate fool in the White House—I feel sorry for him—didn’t win”?
In a recent interview with The 19th, Ms. Abrams rejected the comparison: “My point was that the access to the election was flawed…. That is very different than someone claiming fraudulent outcome.” In particular, Ms. Abrams has criticized the removal of 1.4 million “inactive” voters from registration lists by Brian Kemp in his tenure as secretary of state (before he ran for governor) and the closure of hundreds of voting sites in Georgia during that same period.
Ms. Abrams’s “we won” statements aren’t so unusual in political organizing and in self-empowerment movements, but they were unfortunate and even reckless in an age when more people mean such statements literally. Still, in contrast to Mr. Trump, she did not demand a new election, and she has said, “I have no empirical evidence that I would have achieved a higher number of votes” had more eligible citizens been allowed to cast ballots.
What do ‘election deniers’ propose to do next?
There is a difference between saying that an election outcome might have been different if more people had voted and saying that official election results cannot be trusted because of cheating or tampering. The most important difference is what comes next. Ms. Abrams’s complaints can lead to election reform, which could be a bipartisan project (balancing Republican demands for “ballot security” with Democratic demands for easier voter registration). But the grievances of Mr. Trump and his allies enforce the belief that elections can never be fairly administered, which can eventually lead to the logical conclusion that they should be eliminated altogether (or turned into instruments for suppressing political opponents, as has happened in Hungary).
In the meantime, many Republican office holders and candidates are flirting with methods to counteract election results (thus, the suggestion that Vice President Mike Pence could have simply rejected Electoral College votes he didn’t like on Jan. 6) or to keep voters from getting to the polls in the first place.
For example, before next summer, the Supreme Court will rule on the “independent state legislature” theory, advocated by Mr. Trump’s legal team. This theory takes the narrowest possible view of a provision in the U.S. Constitution that says “the times, places and manner of holding elections for senators and representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof.” The interpretation being proposed is that legislatures have unlimited power—unchecked by the executive and judicial branches—to make election rules and, possibly, to choose Electoral College delegates without regard to the popular vote in their states.
Here I must risk charges of “both-sidesism” and point out that the Democratic Party has repeatedly blundered in its response to Mr. Trump’s demagoguery.
Even if the independent state legislature theory does not win at the Supreme Court, there are other moves to give state legislatures unilateral power over the election process. A new law in Georgia removed the secretary of state, who is elected statewide, as the chair of the state election board (the current Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, famously refused Mr. Trump’s request to “find” him more votes in 2020) and replaced him with a chair appointed by the legislature. The same law allows the state election board to temporarily suspend a county’s election officials for “negligence” and take over the administration of elections there.
More alarming than such proposals, at least in the short term, is Mr. Trump’s inartful (or artful?) use of violent and often racist language against political opponents and his repeated “opinion” that violent protests will follow if he suffers any political or legal loss—the same kind of rhetoric that led to the Jan. 6 riot. (Seven months after that riot, Madison Cawthorn, a Republican congressman who has since lost his seat in a primary election, was more explicit than Mr. Trump, saying, “If our election systems continue to be rigged and continue to be stolen, then it’s gonna lead to one place and that’s bloodshed.”)
Living in New York, I witnessed almost-weekly street protests against Mr. Trump between his election and his inauguration in 2017. They were big and noisy, and people carried signs saying “Not my president” (and a lot of “Love trumps hate” signs), but I can remember no suggestion of storming the U.S. Capitol and no threat against election officials or poll workers. Some protesters suggested blocking Mr. Trump’s win in the Electoral College, but in the end only a half-dozen Democrats in the House and none in the Senate formally objected to the vote—compared with the 121 House Republicans and six Senate Republicans who tried to reject Electoral College votes for Mr. Biden in 2021. Election denialism was and is a fringe view within the Democratic Party; it is now almost a litmus test for membership in the Republican Party.
But here I must risk charges of “both-sidesism” and point out that the Democratic Party has repeatedly blundered in its response to Mr. Trump’s demagoguery. In 2016, Ms. Clinton seemed to think the threats to civility and democracy posed by Mr. Trump absolved the Democrats of any responsibility to address voter concerns about a new economy that left much of the country behind. As Trumpism endures, the Democrats continue to wave away popular concerns about the economy, crime, border security and the excesses of “wokeism,” and as a result is viewed by U.S. voters just as unfavorably as the party that actually threatens to make elections meaningless.
In a U.S. Senate debate on Oct. 10, Democratic nominee Tim Ryan accused his Republican opponent, J. D. Vance, of “running around with the election deniers, the extremists.” Mr. Vance shrugged this off and responded, “I find it interesting how preoccupied you are with this at a time when people can’t afford groceries.” I could hear political scientists all over the United States crying, “No, inflation is a temporary concern, but the future of our system of government is at stake!” We will soon find out who the voters are listening to.
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