Perhaps out of fear that Donald Trump is going to ruin their whole "voter fraud" lie with his bombast, Republicans are advising that he shut up about it already.
Republicans have started warning their increasingly ostracized nominee to stop stoking his supporters with claims that the 2016 election will be stolen, daring him to show proof or put a lid on it.
“Somebody claiming in the election, ‘I was defrauded,’ that isn’t going to cut it,” said former Sen. Kit Bond, a Missouri Republican who earlier in the campaign endorsed Jeb Bush and then Marco Rubio. “They’re going to have to say how, where, why, when.”
“I don’t think leading candidates for the presidency should undercut the process unless you have a really good reason,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican who gained little support for his own 2016 White House run, told POLITICO.
Even Ohio's Secretary of State Jon Husted—one of the most devoted voter suppressors in the country—has had to step in to debunk a fake news story that claimed there were "one dozen black, sealed ballot boxes filled with thousands of Franklin County votes for Hillary Clinton and other Democratic candidates." Of course, he had to add "I for a long time have been critical of people in both political parties who have tried to undermine public confidence in our election, rather by saying the election is going to be rigged or suggesting that people are being disenfranchised." As one of the most notorious of disenfranchisers, up there with Kris Kobach, that's pretty fucking rich.
When Husted is complaining about someone complaining about voter fraud, you can bet that he's worried his whole gig is about to be up. Trump has the capability to completely discredit the movement with his bombast, to lay bare the real intent behind all of the voter suppression efforts—the racist intent of keeping people of color from voting. Trump's not even bothering to use a dog whistle anymore. He's using a bullhorn.
Husted and other Republicans need to keep some semblance of reasonableness, of plausibility when they talk "voter fraud" to keep the game going. Trump could ruin that for them. That's why they're trying to make him shut up about it.
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