STOP THE STEAL?

A CNN poll last week reveals that 78 percent of Republicans believe Joe Biden was not legitimately elected, that the election was “stolen” and that they are now forced to live “under occupation” by illegitimate liberals.

You cannot actually debunk these Republican accusations of voter fraud. You can present facts that show they aren’t true - which they aren’t. But doing that has no bearing on the belief itself, and will not change their minds

That 78 percent of Republicans who believe the current government of the country is illegitimate works out to around 60 million of the 74 million who voted for four more years of Trump last fall. Overall, that’s around one-third of all the people who voted in the 2020 election.

Couple that with another recent poll finding: one in ten Americans believe violence is justified to oppose this allegedly-illegitimate government. That’s around one in three of the people who believe the election was stolen. With the current rate of radicalization of the Trump Party (there’s no need to call them Republicans any more, they aren’t republican believers in republican democracy), the remaining 40 million believers in a stolen election could join and magnify that now-fringe minority willing to countenance violence into what can legitimately be called “a critical mass.” If you’re not scared by that, you should be. This is pre-civil war territory.

The Trumpist belief in “Voter fraud” is not a subject to fact-testing and objective analysis; it’s a belief about the way the world works, a statement of ideology. That ideology holds that Democratic voters are not legitimate political actors, that their votes should not count the same as those of “the real people” - i.e., the Trumpist electorate. This comes out as a belief that any Democratic political victory is illegitimate; thus, to accuse Democrats of voter fraud is to say that Democratic office holders, elected with those illegitimate votes, have no legitimate claim to power.

We saw this in practice this past Tuesday in California, where the Trumpists pre-emptively claimed that an election in a state in which registered Republicans are outnumbered by registered Democrats 2:1, guaranteeing a Democratic victory, would be the result of “voter fraud.” Two days before the event, Larry Elder’s website included a page to take reports of voter fraud. Elder himself went on Fox News the week before the election to say, “My fear is they’re going to try that in this election right here.” When questioned by a reporter the day before the election as to whether he would accept the outcome of the election, Elder refused to give a definitive answer. The election proved he was right to act in such an outlandish manner. On Tuesday night, after suffering a 30-point defeat, when he was willing to concede that he had lost (though he was far from direct in so saying), he was met with boo’s from the audience. They were convinced in their belief that a better than 2:1 electoral defeat could only happen by fraud.

In one sense, these accusations of voter fraud should be “taken seriously but not literally,” a position once espoused during 2016 by apologists for Donald Trump. The more florid the accusations of fraud, the better; such near-delusional statements let the audience know that the speaker is a true supporter of Trump and that he or she supported, and continue to support, his treasonous attempt to subvert and overthrow the 2020 presidential election. They also let the audience know the speaker will do anything necessary to “stop the steal,” that they will say and do anything to prevent a Republican osing an election and delegitimize any Democrat who won.

The recall vote gave even greater support to Governor Newsom with its nearly 30-point victory margin than he got when he first ran for the office in 2018 and beat perennial also-ran John Cox by 24 point. But again, the point of the Trumpist voter fraud accusations isn’t to accurately describe reality. It is to express the ideological belief Newsom and his supporters are illegitimate.

This pre-emptive accusation of fraud, which Trump started in 2016 with his declaration that fall that the only way he would lose an election that the polls at the time showed him losing was “if they rig the election”is now Standard Trumpist Procedure. One can absolutely believe that, had Trump lost to Hillary Clinton then, the “stop the steal” campaign we see now would have begun in November 2016, rather than November 2020. Nearly every Republican running for an office to be decided in the 2022 election is already raising the issue of a stolen campaign. Adam Laxalt, the idiot son of a former halfwit Republican governor in Nevada, who is right now the leading candidate for the Republican nomination in Nevada’s U.S. Senate race, has already publicly promised to “file lawsuits early” in order to “tighten up the election.” Laxalt was the co-chair of the Trump 2020 campaign in Nevada and a major supporter of Trump’s effort to overturn the results. He recently stated that “There’s no question that, unfortunately, a lot of the lawsuits and a lot of the attention spent on Election Day operations just came too late.”

Every Republican candidate running for office next year knows that the road to becoming the official Republican nominee is to receive the endorsement of Trump; when he endorsed one candidate to oppose Liz Cheney in next year’s Wyoming congressional election, the other would-be candidates dropped out. Trump endorsed Laxalt this summer, going out of his way to praise Laxalt’s commitment to the voter fraud narrative in the statement: “He fought valiantly against the Election Fraud, which took place in Nevada. He is strong on Secure Borders and defending America against the Radical Left. Adam has my Complete and Total Endorsement!”

This isn’t just a rhetorical tactic. The ideological belief in voter fraud - that only Trumpist victories are legitimate - is driving the actual efforts in Trumpist-controlled state legislatures to delegitimize Democratic Party victories and tilt the electoral playing field in favor of Trumpist candidates.

In Florida, a member of the state House of Representatives introduced a draft bill that would require an Arizona-style election “fraudit” in the state’s largest and most heavily Democratic counties. In Georgia, Jody Hice, a Trump-endorsed candidate for secretary of state, is running against incumbent Brad Raffensperger on a stated promise to do what Raffensperger wouldn’t do in 2020: subvert the election for Trump’s benefit should he run again in 2024, stating: “If elected, I will instill confidence in our election process by upholding the Georgia Constitution, enforcing meaningful reform and aggressively pursuing those who commit voter fraud.” In his current position as a congressman, Hice voted against certifying the 2020 election on January 6 after the insurrection and in February told a group of conservative activists, “What happened this past election was solely because of a horrible secretary of state and horrible decisions that he made.”

In Pennsylvania, the Trumpist-controlled state legislature has sent subpeonas to state election officials demanding the names, addresses, date of birth, and Social Security number of everyone who voted in the 2020 election, to be handed over to a contractor who has yet to be chosen by the legislators running the “audit.” Democratic Attorney General Shapiro, and the Philadelphia Inquirer, have called the event a “fraudit” and Shapiro is fighting the subpeonas.

This is not a case of the leaders of a movement pressing an ideology on the followers. If Trumpist Party politicians keep pushing the narrative of voter fraud and a stolen election, it is likely because their voters in “the base” want to hear it as it is because those politicians are themselves true believers; that this is true, that these candidates and office-holders are willing to act with such cold hypocrisy, is an even-greater indictment of the party than that the voters have been propagandized for 30 years by Faux Snooze and the rest of the Conservative Entertainment Complex into believing that the sky is green and the grass is blue.

If this belief was merely a matter of bad information, that would be straightforward - even if not easy - to fix. But the problem is that this falsification of reality in support of narrow political goals is more akin to McCarthyism, the last great fantasy to consume the American Right. It is not something that can be reasoned with; it can only be defeated.

Unfortunately, there is no present Margaret Chase Smith among Republican office holders to oppose the hold of this fantasy on Republican voters; Liz Cheney has been all but expelled from the party; other Republican office holders who recognize actual reality are announcing their retirement from politics in the certain knowledge that they cannot maintain their position in the face of this insanity. So long as Trump controls the party base, so long as he can maintain himself as the center of a cult of personality, there will be no calls coming from inside the house to return to reality.

The California recall election demonstrated that when the opposition is tied to Trumpism, when Trumpism is on the ballot even if the Orange Traitor isn’t, there is a good chance of defeating them. Democrats are going to have to look at what is really important in what they believe and campaign on if they are to defeat this, because an essential element of such a victory is attracting the Republicans who have been repulsed by all this. They made up a significant percentage of the winning vote last year, particularly in the states where the margin of victory was narrow.

This weekend will see the last posts at That’s Another Fine Mess that will be available for free in their entirety. As of Monday, the free posts will be highlights of the main post - they’ll be the appetizer, but the main course and the dessert will be for paid subscribers. The main topic this week will be, how do we successfully oppose the situation described in this post? I’ll present what I think we should consider, and I very much hope that all you smart paid subscribers (that’s all of you) - and the folks I hope will decide to come along and join - will take your time to leave a reply and continue the conversation.

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