Republicans are taking a three-pronged approach to setting this election up to be stolen, all of which revolve around denying the election results before the ballots are all counted and laying ample groundwork for contesting them after. That means fighting in the courts, sowing a narrative of an inevitable red wave in the traditional media, and finally, brute force.
The GOP is definitely trying to sue their way to victory in battleground states, as Daily Kos’ Lauren Sue documented. In addition to the cases she highlights in Michigan and Pennsylvania, there are dozens and dozens of suits that had been filed as of Nov. 3 by Democracy Dockets’ count; 120 of them. About half are attempting to suppress the vote.
“What we saw in 2020 was this effort to undermine the elections, but, for the most part, it happened after the elections,” Sylvia Albert, director of voting and elections at the organization Common Cause, told CNN. “This time, what we are seeing is the prep beforehand.” Those cases are coming from the same crank legal groups that swarmed the courts after the 2020 election, but about 1 in 5 of them, according to Democracy Docket, are coming from the Republican National Committee or state Republican committees. Election denial is official Republican policy at this point.
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As is the narrative that there will be a red wave this election, and if it doesn’t happen, it’s fraud. GOP House Leader Kevin McCarthy told CNN that there will be “at least enough to win the majority,” and that “anywhere over 20 is a red wave.” If there isn’t? The official GOP line appears to be to deny the result.
That’s what Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel basically said Sunday. Republicans wouldn’t accept a defeat—or the results—without a fight. Republicans “want to make sure” the elections are “run fair and transparently,” McDaniel lied. See the above part about how they’re in the courts now trying to disenfranchise large swathes of eligible voters.
“But I’m also not going to say if there’s problems, that we shouldn’t be able to address that,” she continued. “If there’s real problems, everyone should be able to address that.” If that doesn’t work and secure them the win, “then we’ll let the process play out, and then we’ll accept the results,” she added.
This, by the way, was in response to a question about Sen. Ron Johnson’s (R-WI) refusal to say that he’ll accept the results of the election. “I sure hope I can, but I can’t predict what the Democrats might have planned,” he told a reporter. “It sure seems like there’s an awful lot of, in the past, a lot of attempts on the part of Democrats to make it easier to cheat,” said Johnson.
Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL), who’s heading up the GOP’s Senate efforts this cycle, gave “Meet the Press” anchor Chuck Todd the “free and fair” line this Sunday. “Absolutely. But what we’re also going to do is do everything we can to make sure they’re free and fair, and if there’s any shenanigans, we are ready to make sure,” Scott said. “We support our candidates to make sure that these elections are fair and every ballot is counted the right way.” The “right” way.
Another prominent election denier, and possibly the most dangerous candidate on the ballot this midterm, Keri Lake, said it baldly: If she wins, the election is valid. If she doesn’t, it’s not. “I’m going to win the election, and I will accept that result,” she said last month. She amended that a few days later with “if we have a fair, honest, and transparent election.”
So that “free and fair” and “honest and transparent” bit is how they’re setting us all up, along with the traditional. It’s been a long game by the Republicans, and part of it likely has been what Democratic analyst Simon Rosenberg has been warning about: “a ferocious campaign GOP campaign right now to flood the zone with their polls, game the averages, declare the election is tipping to them.” He’s called it “an active GOP campaign to game/pollute the averages.”
Rosenberg isn’t the only one, of course. Target Smart CEO Tom Bonier, who has been conducting an exhaustive analysis of polling and actual voting this cycle, agrees that there’s a big problem with the polls that continue to show Republican leads.
That avalanche of junk polls gets injected into polling aggregator sites, like FiveThirtyEight, and gets pushed out to the traditional media to set the narrative that there’s a red wave coming. That dynamic has finally kinda, sorta been acknowledged by FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver as a real possibility. He notes that “the composition of polling averages has considerably changed, with fewer ‘gold standard’ polls and more quick-and-dirty ones that tend to show more favorable results for Republicans.”
When that wave doesn’t come, when the inevitable counting delays muddy results, or when Democrats win, what happens? They say that the election was stolen—how could the polls have all been so wrong? That’s when we get to the street fight part of the equation.
That’s the part that many have been really gunning for. Case in point, Tucker Carlson on Fox News. Don’t believe the official election results, he tells his audience. He tells them to believe their own “eyes and ears,” or more precisely, what they “are seeing and hearing” on Fox News.
That’s ginning the GOP crowd up for more of what we’re already seeing: threats and violence against both voters and election workers as well as elected officials; armed “poll watchers” in Arizona; death threats against poll workers; and the assassination attempt against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that landed her husband in intensive care.
All of which is to say, vote as soon as you can and spend the rest of your spare time getting out the vote. Make the Democratic wins as big and unquestionable as possible. The GOP has very much gamed the system this time around, using a compliant traditional media to help them. This might be our last chance to save it all from them.
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