The Coming Electoral Crisis

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Jose F. Moreno/The Philadelphia Inquirer via AP

Trump supporters protest for Congress to decertify election results during a rally on the steps of the Pennsylvania State Capitol in Harrisburg, January 5, 2021.

This week, Donald Trump’s effort to lie, threaten, and finagle his way to a second presidential term he did not win at the ballot box comes to an end, and we can and should be relieved.

But we should also be terrified. Though Trump has lost, Trumpism’s hold on the Republican Party is if anything stronger than ever, particularly the way he has reconfigured their view of elections. And sooner or later—perhaps just four years from now—it will bring us to a crisis of democracy that will make the one we just endured look civil and orderly.

It’s entirely possible that we’ll look back and say that 2020 was a dry run for the collapse of the American electoral system.

Nevertheless, it’s tempting to conclude—and many have—that one of the key lessons of this election is that despite the assault against it, the system held. Local election officials did their jobs. All the states certified their results and anointed Electoral College slates based on the actual vote tallies, not on what Republicans wish those tallies had been. The dozens of lawsuits Trump and his allies filed to get results overturned were tossed out of court, including by some judges Trump himself appointed. The Supreme Court did not simply declare Trump the winner, as he hoped and believed they would. Joe Biden will be inaugurated on January 20.

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But we should not be reassured. The system held this time in an election that was by modern standards an absolute blowout, with a margin of seven million votes for Biden, a comfortable Electoral College majority, and no evidence to back up Trump’s fantastical claims of voter fraud.

Yet much of the Republican Party has decided to challenge the electoral votes on Trump’s behalf. Before the ceremony in which Congress officially receives those votes, 13 GOP senators announced that they would object, refusing to accept the legitimacy of Biden’s victory. They include Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, whose combined ambition to be president burns so hot that it could power a medium-size city. In the House, Republicans organizing the parallel effort said they would be joined by an astonishing 140 members—fully two-thirds of the Republican caucus. You’ve probably already forgotten about the 18 Republican attorneys general who filed suit asking the Supreme Court to throw out the results in four states that Biden won.

I’m reasonably sure that none of the senators who took this position actually believe that Trump won the election, or even that there was anywhere near enough fraud to call the results into question. The same may not be true of every one of the 140 in the House; the closest thing they have to a leader is the far-right conspiracy theorist Rep. Louie Gohmert of Texas, widely regarded as the dumbest person in Congress.

And despite the irrefutable outcome of the election, we shouldn’t forget how close we came to disaster. Biden’s combined margin of victory in Arizona, Wisconsin, and Georgia was less than 43,000 votes, and if Trump had won those states, the Electoral College tally would have been 269-269, throwing the decision to the House of Representatives. With each state delegation given just one vote, Trump would have gotten a second term.

Yes, the system held in the end. But it could easily have gone differently. In Wisconsin, for instance, three out of the seven justices on the state supreme court seemed willing to throw out the state’s results so they could be handed to Trump. The idea of Republican state legislatures simply substituting their own preferences for the will of the voters and handing their electoral votes to their party’s candidate became commonplace. Judges threw out Trump’s lawsuits—but they were so preposterous and amateurishly prepared that not even Republican judges could bring themselves to countenance them.

And that’s just the problem. This extraordinary resistance to the clear outcome is happening in an election where the loser’s claim to have won is not just absurd, not just ludicrous, but positively deranged.

So what will happen when it’s not a blowout? What happens when we have an election where the Democratic candidate wins by a margin as slim as those of 2000 or 1960, and the electoral vote hinges on a state or two?

We were able to resolve those elections because both parties shared a basic commitment to American democracy. They might try to bend the rules to their benefit, and find creative ways to gain an unfair advantage within those rules, but in the end they’d accept the verdict. That is no longer true.

It’s entirely possible that we’ll look back and say that 2020 was a dry run for the collapse of the American electoral system.

Now imagine an election with the Republican Party as we now see it revealed in all its grotesquery, when there’s genuine ambiguity about what the “true” result is. What happens when the legal strategy to steal the election is being designed and executed not by the half-wits who brought you Four Seasons Total Landscaping but by the Republican Party’s most skilled lawyers, the way it was in 2000? Can we really say that they won’t find a friendlier path through the courts, and that the conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court won’t find a way to tip the scales in their favor? What if Republicans had majorities in both houses of Congress and could vote to reject the certified electoral votes of any state whose results they didn’t like?

What we can say with near-certainty is that if the Republican candidate loses in 2024, the party will try to steal the election back.

That’s because its commitment to democracy and the American system, which was questionable before, has now been utterly snuffed out. Drained of nearly all its ideological content, the Republican Party’s only remaining inviolable principles are hatred of liberals and the need to seize and hold power at all costs.

And like Trump, whose spirit will continue to guide them, they convince themselves that democracy is a lie and if you demonstrate any loyalty to it that transcends your short-term political interests, that only makes you a sucker. And if you lose an election and don’t claim that your loss was fraudulent and whatever means necessary must be employed to get yourself declared the winner, you’re a traitor to the party.

Over the next four years and probably beyond, the myth of the stolen election will be the animating force of the Republican Party, the story that organizes their understanding of everything that happens in politics. It will be repeated thousands and thousands of times on Fox News, on Newsmax, on talk radio, on every loony website that the party’s base reads, and reinforced by any Republican politician with an eye on higher office. It will be proof of Joe Biden’s illegitimacy and the limitless treachery of Democrats, the reason why any election Republicans don’t win is fraudulent by definition.

There are steps we could take to reinforce our electoral system and make it less likely that a future Republican effort to subvert the will of the voters will succeed. The problem is that right now Republicans hold the power to stop them from being enacted, at both the federal level and in the battleground states where future elections will be decided.

Which means that we’ll be just as vulnerable as we are now—and next time, we won’t have Donald Trump’s buffoonery to save us.