The GOP ignored the post-2012 autopsy it commissioned. And the party may not have performed a formal, post-election autopsy on its failed 2020 presidential efforts. But the executive editor of The Bulwark thinks an informal one has emerged nonetheless. Jonathan V. Last writes that Republicans now see three ways forward:
(1) Win a lot more votes than the opposing candidate.
(2) Get fewer votes, but win pluralities in enough states to get 270 certified and counted Electoral Votes.
(3) Get fewer votes and fewer Electoral Votes, but prevent the official counting and certification of the Electoral Votes—and then win a majority of state delegations when the contest is shifted to Congress.
Republicans have decided winning democratically is either too hard, too wussy, or involves the risk of losing. And they cannot have that.
Instead, the GOP figures if it controls the House and Senate, controls a majority of state legislatures, and has enough raw political will, it can “win the presidency even while getting blown out in both the popular vote and the Electoral College.” It’s all there buried in the rules. What’s consent of the governed got to do with it? asks Conservatism Inc.
The real cutting edge of Republicanism is Option 3, Last explains. The GOP has a good shot at winning back the House in 2022 and maintaining control of 26 state legislatures. What they need (and what Trump’s state-level allies lacked in 2020) is the raw political will to circumvent the will of voters regardless of how the “world’s oldest democracy” looks to the rest of the world.
First they came for the truth….
The GOP has already targeted for elimination state Republicans who defied Trump’s effort to steal the 2020 election for himself. The Big Lie can take care of the rest:
The Big Lie is actually the biggest insight to come from the Republican autopsy. Republicans and their enablers discovered that if they make false, evidence-free claims often and loudly enough, then the vast majority of their voters will believe them.
And then, once Republican voters were onboard, they found that the rest of the party elites would either join them or stay silent. Only a handful of Republicans dared to object. And those figures are in the process of being either defeated or coopted.
By insisting that Trump was the real winner of 2020, Republicans have created a trifecta of preconditions within their base going into 2024:
- There is a pent-up demand for retribution.
- These voters will not believe that election results unfavorable to them are legitimate.
- These voters will be primed ahead of time to demand that elected Republicans satisfy their desired outcome, by any means necessary.
Which is to say: Republicans are already well on their way to marshaling the political will to do whatever the law even theoretically might allow in pursuit of power.
The Republican Party for years has been on a trajectory toward rejecting democracy and whatever the law theoretically might allow. REDMAP might have been cunning but was not illegal. Rigging the census as the Trump administration attempted was ruled illegal (or at least out of order). Conservatives’s extralegal means of securing a presidential win were on public display during the Jan. 6 insurrection. Republican officials even now are trying to disappear that down the memory hole. The assault on the U.S Capitol resulted in multiple deaths. Can you say slippery slope?
Analyst Zerlina Maxwell noted in late January that Republicans are “not engaged in this project of democracy that the rest of us are participating in, because they don’t actually want voters to make decisions and elect people.”
Jonathan Last concurs:
This is how authoritarianism starts. A society goes from the rule of law, to rule by law—where the minority gets just enough power to change the laws so that they can amass more power.
************************
While the Roberts Court will never explicitly endorse a white man’s government in the way the Redemption Court did, in pursuit of other cherished ideological goals it will be asked to pave the road for a white man’s government by another name. – Adam Serwer, The Atlantic, September 4, 2018