Carolyn Kaster/AP Photo
State Sen. Doug Mastriano, the Republican candidate for governor of Pennsylvania, gestures to the crowd during his primary night election party in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, May 17, 2022.
In the recent Republican primary election for Pennsylvania governor, state Sen. Doug Mastriano won handily, beating his nearest rival by more than 20 points. Not only is Mastriano a right-wing extremist and die-hard believer in Donald Trump’s Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen, he was a central participant in the January 6 putsch. He spent campaign money (much of it coming from local billionaire Jeff Yass) organizing multiple buses of putschists and attended it himself, though he insists that he did not participate in sacking the Capitol.
If Mastriano wins, there will not be a presidential election in Pennsylvania in 2024. No matter what the votes say, he will exercise the powers of the governor’s office to declare that the Republican candidate won.
It’s a virtual certainty that enough Republicans are going to be nominated for key election administration posts in swing states that if they win, what holds in Pennsylvania will hold for the United States. In sum, if Republicans sweep the midterm elections this year, there will not be a presidential election two years later.
The Pennsylvania governor appoints the secretary of state, who oversees the electoral process, and certifies the results after a presidential election. Up until today, that has been a perfunctory process, but potentially no longer. Not only is Mastriano a deranged maniac who has banned the press from his campaign rallies and regularly appears with QAnon cultists, he has also promised to somehow “decertify” the 2020 results (though there is no legal procedure for doing so).
If Mastriano had been governor in 2020, he would have overridden the election, by hook or by crook, and handed Pennsylvania’s electoral votes to Trump. That would have cut Biden’s total down to 286; Trump would have needed to steal just two more states to be able to claim victory—still the case in 2024, though the electoral vote distribution has changed slightly.
Reuters recently investigated 15 Republican candidates for secretaries of state in all the swing states but Pennsylvania (Wisconsin, Michigan, Nevada, Arizona, and Nevada), and found that ten of them “have either declared that the 2020 election was stolen or called for their state’s results to be invalidated or further investigated.”
Enough Big Lie Trumpers will surely be nominated to account for the rest of the necessary electoral votes, should they win—especially when we remember the threats of violence levied against most every Republican who refused to go along with Trump’s attempt to cling to power in 2020. Republicans are not known for standing up to conservative extremists, and in any case most of those 2020 officials have since been purged from the party (with a few exceptions like Georgia’s Brian Kemp).
It’s worth emphasizing that when Republicans win elections handily, as Mastriano did this week, they don’t raise a peep about voter fraud. This is because they do not have a good-faith belief that the voting system is unreliable. Their true core belief is that Democrats are inherently illegitimate and un-American; convincing themselves of crackpot voter fraud theories is how they give themselves permission to cheat. This process is greatly helped, of course, by a febrile, paranoid mindset and mind-blowing levels of credulous stupidity.
Just witness the numerous Republicans who have been caught voting illegally (apparently including Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows), or illegally casting multiple ballots, or organizing absentee ballot fraud. Indeed, most of the Republican members of Congress who voted to overturn the 2020 election won re-election on the exact same ballots. To conservatives, votes are fraudulent if and only if they are for Democrats.
One of the greatest virtues of democracy is that it channels political conflict into peaceful appeals to the voting population. But should Republicans win enough positions to cheat their way to victory in 2024—that is, if they end American democracy—that will not mean they take power automatically. It will instead mean that they will have legitimized similarly extreme tactics from anyone who opposes them, and political competition will move to other planes: legal pressure, mass protest, and even possibly violent conflict. Whether one thinks it is right or wrong, that extralegal action will become the only way to act politically.
After all, it’s not like future dictator-for-life Donald Trump could point to some American tradition of peacefully submitting to despotism. On the contrary, this country was founded on the idea that governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed,” and that “whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it.” If I were a Republican, I would be a lot more wary about trying to seize permanent national power by fraud.
