A friend of mine who considers himself a “former Republican” recently told me that former President Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for president, would rather hire a bunch of lawyers to contest the election than hire a field campaign to knock doors and turn out the vote.
I cannot speak to whether this is really the strategy, but it’s not the first time I’ve heard this concern. Having been on the front lines in Georgia, it fits a pattern. Usually well before the election, Trump starts up the patter that the only way he loses is if Democrats cheat. He did this in 2016 and in 2020 and, of course, is doing it again.
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
Many Republicans don’t seem to realize they are caught in a vicious cycle: Trump sabotages his own campaign, then when he loses, he blames Democrats for rigging the election and savages any Republican who doesn’t get with the plan. Republicans often respond in a way that does further damage to their cause.
If Republicans were simply shooting themselves in the foot, I’d be content to let them learn the lesson on their own. But unfortunately, they seem intent on taking us all down with them by repeatedly undermining faith in the legitimacy of our elections. Remarkably, they can’t see the danger ahead and that we are all going to go down together if they sink this boat of our democracy.
In Georgia, we have experienced the Trump pattern repeatedly. In 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic hit, my congressional campaign immediately assumed we would need to run a strong vote-by-mail campaign. We were worried because we believed Georgia Republicans had more comfort with absentee ballots, and we knew they had run strong vote-by-mail campaigns in the past. In fact, I and other Democrats had litigated around absentee ballots repeatedly in 2018 because of problems with the ballots being held up or thrown out for spurious reasons. In 2020, we had to spend significant resources to try to rebuild trust among Democrats around mail-in ballots.
But Trump latched on to absentee ballots as the way the election would be “rigged” — and this concern was then echoed by Georgia Republicans. As a consequence, in the middle of a pandemic with a deadly disease transmitted by air, Republicans chose to emphasize in-person voting. Democrats dominated vote by mail. Joe Biden won the presidency, narrowly, and Trump lost. Then, in the 2021 Senate runoffs in Georgia, Trump and his supporters sabotaged the Republicans’ campaigns. Though there were many instances of this, the most infamous was the rally right before the election at which Trump suppressed his party’s vote by talking incessantly about how the election was rigged and that his supporters’ votes didn’t count.
In response to these losses, Republicans passed SB 202 to make voting harder, particularly vote by mail, to try to “restore confidence” for their own voters. Despite this, more than half Georgia’s Republican voters still don’t believe the election will be fair. Meanwhile, as the political alignments shift and the Trumpian Republican Party becomes increasingly a blue-collar, working-class coalition, it is becoming more dependent on low-propensity, irregular voters than Democrats, which means Republicans would benefit more from making voting easier rather than harder. Just saying.
Of course, the bigger problem with SB 202 was that it restructured the State Election Board, which has allowed a Trump-aligned majority to take over. These members of the board have demanded hand-counts of millions of ballots on election night — a process likely to introduce all sorts of human error in the election — and then have proceeded to try to give local election boards tools to challenge the election results. This is the part where they are trying to take us all down with them.
The assumption in Democratic circles is that the State Election Board is intentionally trying to undermine the ballot certification process by creating disarray and chaos and, by doing so, force the election into the courts, which favor Republicans, or to the U.S. House of Representatives, where the Republicans would dominate because the vote in this case would be by state delegation rather than by a straight majority vote. Even if this is not the plan, their rules look like an effort to rig the election to favor Trump.
Hopefully, a recent court clarification that the new State Election Board rules cannot be used to delay certification will avoid chaos, but they have put the state and, by extension, the country in an extremely perilous position.
Why? Because I doubt any force on this Earth will convince Trump or his supporters that an election is fair unless he wins it. Meanwhile, they somehow assume Democratic perceptions of the legitimacy of the elections don’t matter.
If Georgia proves to be the decisive state, and it could, a president from either party who is elected under a cloud of chaotic and mismatched Election Day vote counts would be of questionable legitimacy — much less one selected by the courts or elected by the U.S. House because Georgia couldn’t figure out how to count its votes. And there are other types of games that can be played once faith erodes in the legitimacy of elections — some of which will favor Democrats.
When I lost the race for Georgia’s 7th District in 2018 by only 433 votes, it was under the shadow of a lot of election litigation and challenges. One of the options at the time was whether I should appeal to the U.S. House of Representatives to investigate election irregularities, throw out the election results and seat me rather than my Republican opponent. The U.S. House can do this. I fairly quickly rejected this path, because I knew it would not be perceived by many as legitimate.
Similarly, in early 2021, after I had been elected to Congress, there was a race in Iowa that had come down to a six-vote margin favoring Republicans. The Democrats had a four-vote margin in the House, and the question was put to Democratic members whether they would be willing to overturn the results and seat the Democratic candidate instead of the Republican one. Again, I and others declined for the same reasons as above.
These kinds of choices reflect “institutional forbearance,” which is to say a choice not to use all the legal avenues available to seek and retain power because of the damage it might do to the legitimacy of our democracy. This is also the restraint Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger showed in 2020 by upholding the legitimacy of the Georgia presidential election.
Faith in our elections is a common good that we all must reinforce for our democratic institutions to function — to pass laws people respect and to solve problems. Everyone in a leadership position needs to recognize their power rests just as much on whether their opponents see the election as legitimate as whether their supporters see this. One of the great dangers of this moment is that we get into an escalating tit for tat that destroys this confidence. If people lose faith in democracy as a method of policy-setting and conflict resolution, the obvious next step is toward a more violent and authoritarian solution. This might sound unimaginable, but the seeds were there on Jan. 6, 2021, and they have been present in the violence around the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center. In the end, it’s not going to matter if the jackbooted thugs are antifa or right-wing militia, we will all lose.
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