This is not a plot to steal the 2020 election. It is a decades-long campaign to undermine American democracy, which treats Democratic governance as inherently illegitimate. —Jonathan Chait
Republicans are at it again, alleging that the only way the acting president could have lost reelection was because he was cheated.
The modern manifestation of the campaign Chait cites dates at the very least from the 1981 voter suppression lawsuit brought by the New Jersey Democratic Party and the Democratic National Committee in 1981. But we might trace its roots to the conservative backlash to the New Deal or even to the notion that governance of the new republic ought to fall to its “owners.” A disquisition on that will wait for another day.
Suffice to say that Republicans have long considered themselves the country’s owners and all others interlopers. When Republicans win, Real Americans™ have spoken. When they lose, Democrats cheated.
So it must be with Donald Trump’s loss in 2020. Despite “Democrats'” losing seats in the U.S. House and failing (to date) to wrest control of the U.S. Senate. Republicans who retained their seats believe their races were fairly decided. But they will go along with Trump’s wild claims that his was not.
Chait writes:
The Republican strategy has several sources of motivation, but the most important is a widely shared belief that Democrats in large cities — i.e., racial minorities — engage in systematic vote fraud, election after election. “We win because of our ideas, we lose elections because they cheat us,” insisted Senator Lindsey Graham on Fox News last night. The Bush administration pursued phantasmal vote-fraud allegations, firing prosecutors for failing to uncover evidence of the schemes Republicans insisted were happening under their noses. In 2008, even a Republican as civic-minded as John McCain accused ACORN, a voter-registration group, of “maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy.”
The persistent failure to produce evidence of mass-scale vote fraud has not discouraged Republicans from believing in its existence. The failure to expose it merely proves how well hidden the conspiracy is. Republicans may despair of their chances of proving Trump’s vote-fraud charges in open court, but many of them believe his wild lies reflect a deeper truth.
Belief in the voter fraud bogeyman by these supposed hard-nosed realists is something akin to believing in orgone energy. The belief is unfalsifiable, as Chait observes.
They will have as much luck finding those illegal voters as finding space aliens. (If aliens can take human form, falsifying a photo ID is child’s play.) I mentioned a study on this in 2017:
As those paying attention recall, a clever study published in 2013 looked at how many people in America report having committed voter fraud. Researchers found that roughly the same percentages of the population admit to perpetrating voter fraud as admit to being abducted by aliens:
The implication here is that if one accepts that 2.5% is a valid lower bound for the prevalence of voter impersonation in the 2012 election then one must also accept that about 2.5% of the adult U.S. population — about 6 million people — believe that they were abducted by extra-terrestrials in the last year. If this were true then voter impersonation would be the least of our worries.
Republicans similarly believe Democrats never accepted George W. Bush’s win in 2000 or Donald trump’s in 2016, despite Hillary Clinton’s conceding the morning after.
Republicans blame the four-year stream of misconduct and outright criminality not on Trump but on the reporters and investigators who uncovered it. Trump faced “a political insurgency that refused in practice, if not in formal fact, to accept the outcome of an election its candidate had lost,” Wall Street Journal columnist and recent editor Gerard Baker rants in his column today. “The members of this resistance spent four years using every lever at their disposal — bureaucracy, law enforcement, Congress, news media — to thwart, disrupt and try to bring down the duly elected president.”
Clinton may have technically accepted the election result very quickly, and the Obama administration may have technically offered full cooperation with the transition. But in reality, Trump’s opponents proceeded to expose massive corruption and wrongdoing — and the blame for this rests not on Trump but on them.
So it goes. The party of personal responsibility blames Trump’s bottomless corruption on Democrats and the press. Claims of fraud are “the process” now when Republicans lose.
Meanwhile, Trump is on track to make this the most chaotic transition in history.