Barton Gellman, in a review of the events leading up to, and following, the January 6 insurrection ("Trump’s Next Coup Has Already Begun"), describes the dire threat to our democracy as we approach the next presidential election:
For more than a year now, with tacit and explicit support from their party’s national leaders, state Republican operatives have been building an apparatus of election theft. Elected officials in Arizona, Texas, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and other states have studied Donald Trump’s crusade to overturn the 2020 election. They have noted the points of failure and have taken concrete steps to avoid failure next time. Some of them have rewritten statutes to seize partisan control of decisions about which ballots to count and which to discard, which results to certify and which to reject. They are driving out or stripping power from election officials who refused to go along with the plot last November, aiming to replace them with exponents of the Big Lie. They are fine-tuning a legal argument that purports to allow state legislators to override the choice of the voters.
. . .
As we near the anniversary of January 6, investigators are still unearthing the roots of the insurrection that sacked the Capitol and sent members of Congress fleeing for their lives. What we know already, and could not have known then, is that the chaos wrought on that day was integral to a coherent plan. In retrospect, the insurrection takes on the aspect of rehearsal.
. . .
To understand the threat today, you have to see with clear eyes what happened, what is still happening, after the 2020 election. The charlatans and cranks who filed lawsuits and led public spectacles on Trump’s behalf were sideshows. They distracted from the main event: a systematic effort to nullify the election results and then reverse them. As milestones passed—individual certification by states, the meeting of the Electoral College on December 14—Trump’s hand grew weaker. But he played it strategically throughout. The more we learn about January 6, the clearer the conclusion becomes that it was the last gambit in a soundly conceived campaign—one that provides a blueprint for 2024.
The strategic objective of nearly every move by the Trump team after the networks called the election for Joe Biden on November 7 was to induce Republican legislatures in states that Biden won to seize control of the results and appoint Trump electors instead. Every other objective—in courtrooms, on state election panels, in the Justice Department, and in the office of the vice president—was instrumental to that end.
The essay underscores (as does a story from yesterday's New York Times, which also notes there has been virtually no push back against the Republican campaign to purge election officials who didn't embrace the Big Lie and to "assert more control over election systems and results by partisan offices that Republicans already decisively control") the urgency of the imminent threat posed by Trump's Republican Party with a couple of concise quotations from election maven Richard Hasen:
"The democratic emergency is already here," and "We face a serious risk that American democracy as we know it will come to an end in 2024 . . .”
In an equally compelling narrative, Gellman describes "the bitter grievance of Republican voters that they lost the White House, and are losing the country, to alien forces with no legitimate claim to power" and their acceptance of "revisionist narratives spread by fabulists and trolls" that Trump won the election. While Gellman cites research suggesting that perhaps 21 million Americans (8 percent) are "committed insurrectionists" who believe Biden is an illegitimate president and regard violence as justified to restore Trump to office (while a more recent poll suggests that 12 percent of Americans are in this camp), the number of Republicans who regard Biden's election as stolen is far higher:
"More than two-thirds of Republicans (68%), compared to 26% of independents and 6% of Democrats, believe that the election was stolen from Trump. These shares are even greater among Republicans who most trust Fox News (82%) and essentially universal among those who most trust far-right news (97%). Less than half of Republicans who most trust mainstream news agree (44%)." -- Survey results from the Public Religion Research Institute.
How did we get here? Yesterday Kevin Drum reminded us ("Republicans believe they are fighting for democracy") that we've been headed this way for years. He links to a piece he wrote a decade ago -- "The Dog That Voted and Other Election Fraud Yarns." Subtitle: The GOP’s 10-year campaign to gin up voter fraud hysteria—and bring back Jim Crow at the ballot box. Republicans have been telling themselves lies about voter fraud for an awfully long while.
Drum -- a persistent critic of Fox News Channel's crusade to amplify rage toward liberals, stoke white grievance, and undermine trust in democratic institutions -- concludes his post with a Morning Consult poll -- A majority of Republicans believe there was widespread fraud. Those voters were most likely to cite information from Trump and Fox News as the basis for that view:
