Well, it’s the dog days of summer again. Many years at this point in our annual journey around the sun, I post about the melancholy feeling I get as my favorite season winds down and fall approaches—the Sunday scaries writ large. I have been especially on edge in the Augusts of the past two presidential election years.

But over the past four weeks since Joe Biden made the admirable and selfless decision to stand down from the race, that summer feeling hasn’t been quite so bad. As I wrote in my last essay for this blog, the surge of enthusiasm around Kamala Harris pleasantly surprised me, and her deft handling thus far of this strange and unprecedented campaign had only lifted my spirits further. (Are we sure she’s a Democrat?) It’s now clear that America was desperate for a bold, new alternative to Trump, and when presented with one, embraced her with both arms. Team Trump is on its heels, incredibly, having no contingency plan for a change in opponent, while its dear leader continues to rage and flail, his far right flank threatens to mutiny, and talk of firing campaign managers and even replacing his running mate is in the hot August air. And the numbers reflect this dramatic change, with Kamala executing a five point swing in the national polls (when RFK Jr. and his brain worm are included) since assuming her place at the top of the Democratic ticket, giving her a slight lead over Trump nationwide.  

So I am guardedly optimistic.

But as you are no doubt painfully aware, we don’t elect our president in a nationwide popular vote, or even by a conglomeration of statewide ones. The race remains neck-and-neck, including the seven key swing states (Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Arizona, Georgia and Nevada). In many of those states Kamala has erased the advantage Trump had built in July, but the races remain razor close, with leads by either candidate generally within the margin of error. For that matter, that is true of the national numbers as well. We all know that a lot can happen between now and November, including the dreaded October surprise. It also bears remembering that, historically, Trump tends to outperform his polling (in part because some people are reluctant to admit publicly they support him.)

So we can’t let our foot off the gas, even for a millisecond. Team Democracy has to continue to make its case, expand Kamala’s lead where she has one, overtake Trump where he is still ahead, and put this race out of reach for the white nationalist theocrats of Team Weird, the ones who think The Handmaid’s Tale is an instruction manual. We cannot risk getting complacent…..especially against an opponent that is well-known for using every dirty trick in the book.

Which brings me to the subject of this week’s essay.

“DON’T WORRY ABOUT VOTING”

At a rally in Florida near the end of July, Trump infamously told an audience of right wing Christians that if they elect him to the presidency again, “You won’t have to do it anymore. It’ll be fixed; it’ll be fine; you won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians.”

Don’t remember that? Of course not: it was the outrage du jour almost three weeks ago. Since then Trump’s said a dozen new, batshit crazy, blood-boiling things, including insulting Black journalists to their faces and disparaging Medal of Honor winners. Still, it raised some brows.

Here’s Brian Klaas in The Atlantic, breaking down the two basic ways of interpreting that statement.

First, Trump could be implying that there won’t be any future elections if he comes to power. He may imagine himself as an American Xi Jinping, the Chinese dictator he routinely praises, a leader who’s declared himself “president for life.” As he often does, however, Trump left just enough room in what he said for plausible deniability. A second and slightly more charitable interpretation of his remarks is that Trump believes his presidency will entrench so many pro-Christian policies into the United States government that no future election could realistically undo his transformation of the country.

MSNBC’s Zeesham Aleem meticulously teased apart the semantics of a slippery statement like that, and how Trump routinely uses such constructions to befuddle the press and avoid being pinned down, even as his supporters don’t need any handholding to get the message. There is a whole master class to be taught on the subject. But that is not really the point, because the difference between the two interpretations is functionally nonexistent.

As Klaas goes on to note, “Both interpretations lead to the same conclusion: that Trump is telegraphing his authoritarian intentions in plain sight, hoping to sever the link between voters and government policy.” Trump is once again saying the quiet part out loud, telling us that he and his party intend to put an end to free and fair elections in the United States. Oh, we’ll still have Potemkin elections, as more autocracies do. But they will be mere kabuki—or kayfabe, if you prefer the more in vogue term—preceding the inevitable re-coronation.

But it actually gets even more sinister than that.

As Rachel Maddow reported in a recent segment, the day before that Florida rally, Trump told a crowd not only that they’re won’t have to vote again if they re-elect him, but “that they don’t have to vote THIS time.”

To put it mildly, that is an odd thing for a politician running for office to say.

Like the statement to the “beautiful Christians” in the Sunshine State, there are at least two interpretations of that cryptic assertion. It could easily be passed off as bog standard, nonsensical Trumpian egotism. It might also be some clumsy attempt at reverse psychology. (Read The Gamepeople!) But there is a much more worrying interpretation that is probably more likely. Because it wasn’t just a one-off. Trump has made a curious practice lately of telling crowds at his rallies that he doesn’t need their votes; Maddow even played a montage of him saying that in speech after speech after speech. “What that means,” she observed, “is that he doesn’t think he needs to win the vote to win the election. He doesn’t think he needs to win the election in order to take power. He thinks something other than votes is going to determine whether or not he gets back in the White House.”

For all the surface level weird behavior and language and strange choices and incoherence and odd donors in the Republican campaign, the serious core at the heart of it is that they’re not planning on the vote being counted as normal.

And in fact Trump is now repeatedly saying the vote will not matter. He doesn’t even want your vote. The Republicans are counting on the election results not being certified, thereby creating chaos in Washington around the results. Just like 2020, right? Just like January 6th, 2021. Except this time with no Mike Pence in the way and with Republican officials already in place in multiple states saying, “Yeah, you may not get any sort of official vote.”

The dislocation from actually asking people for their votes, that means something. It means they are not trying win this thing in a normal way.

That Maddow segment the most alarming thing I have seen since Biden gingerly walked out onto the debate stage at the end of June.

PLANS “A” AND “B”

The Republican Party would certainly like to win the presidency in 2024, and retake the Senate, and increase its majority in the House. That is its easiest path to absolute power, and despite recent setbacks, it still hopes it can pull it off. But just in case, it is also preparing to prevent the certification of a Democratic victory.

It is no secret that the GOP has tried—and had appreciable success in—seeding local election boards with pro-Trump ultra-MAGA loyalists who will do Trump’s bidding during and after Election Day, including challenging vote counts, refusing to certify wins by Democratic candidates, conducting spurious recounts, and generally throwing the election into total chaos. I say “it’s no secret,” and yet it’s not widely reported on anywhere near the scale and scope that those alarming efforts call for. (Though still not widely discussed in the mainstream media, this threat is now being reported at least more prominently than in previous months. It was called to my attention by my friend Tom Hall, my go-to source—or should I say, or “come-from”—for all things political, cinematic, musical, and soccer-related.)

Longstanding Republican attempts to suppress the vote—through gerrymandering, voter caging, attacks on early, online, and absentee voting, and other skullduggery—are one thing, and terrifying enough. But the idea of Trump partisans controlling the tabulation of votes after the fact, or being in a position to challenge that tabulation, is a whole different order of pants-shitting magnitude.

As the saying goes, it’s not who votes that counts, it’s who counts the votes.

Fears that the right wing would try to subvert the 2024 presidential election emerged almost as soon as Joe Biden was sworn in on January 20, 2021. After all, just two weeks before we had seen the outgoing Republican president summon a mob for a self-coup in a violent attempt to remain in power, the capstone to a far longer, multi-pronged attempt to overturn a free and fair election. There was every reason to believe they would try it again, and there still is. I have written at length about Republican efforts to do so, in fairly hyperventilating terms.

But in the first half of 2024, as Biden’s approval ratings continued to decline, and Trumpnesia took hold, not to mention the series of assists his presidential prospects got from the likes of Aileen Cannon and the Supreme Court, fears that Republicans would cheat their way back into power gave way to a new fear: that they wouldn’t have to, because—incredibly—the American people would return Trump to the White House willingly. As recently as a month ago, before Kamala replaced Joe as the presumptive Democratic nominee, that grim fear had for many of us become nearly a self-fulfilling prophecy, a fait accompli that we simultaneously could not fucking believe, and dreaded to our bones, and yet seemed a near certainty. Republicans were giddy.

What a difference a month makes.

But Republican plans to ratfuck the 2024 presidential election have never gone away. And now that their chances of a clean (or even semi-clean) electoral victory have dimmed considerably, those plans have resumed a place of prominence. Even if Trump is soundly defeated and Kamala wins the White House, the groundwork is inarguably being laid to challenge her victory and sow the seeds for confusion, chaos, and further undermining of public belief in the integrity of our elections, including incitement to political violence and perhaps even worse.

A VISIT TO THE HARDWARE STORE

So what are the nuts and bolts of how the Trumpified GOP intends to pull off this robbery?

The first step is to destroy public confidence in objective metrics like polls.

In a piece for the Washington Post titled “Trump Prepares to Reject Another Loss,” Philip Bump  writes:

A loss this November looks more possible than it did a month ago, certainly. Over the weekend, the New York Times released new swing-state polling showing Harris with leads across the Upper Midwest. So, naturally, Trump’s campaign released a memo suggesting that the polling was fake or misleading.

Trump and his allies are already eagerly raising questions about the reliability of measures of Harris’s support—and by extension, the reliability of the results in November. Harris is a CHEATER, Trump asserts. It is not subtle.

Once Trump Nation accepts that the polls can’t be trusted, it’s but a short hop to destroying its confidence in another objective metric like the vote count. This, Bump notes, is a key part of Trump’s strategy: to relentlessly condition his supporters to distrust the media, the government, and any other credible authority. “That way, when they accurately report the results in November, Trump can remind his supporters to reject them if necessary.”

It’s all part of a broader conditioning program that has been going on ever since he left office, to set the stage for his return to the White House.

Recall that his efforts to reject the 2020 results did not emerge out of the blue in November of that year. Trump began raising questions about the purported insecurity of mail-in ballots soon after it became obvious that the coronavirus pandemic would spur more remote voting. He and his staff amplified all sorts of claims about ballot security, including a bizarre claim that July that a mail truck that caught fire was somehow suspicious. His base was more than prepared when he subsequently challenged the actual election results.

That’s the pattern that is again underway….

That scheme also includes portraying the legitimate criminal prosecutions of Trump as a liberal plot to rig the election against him. Donald has even begun to claim that the election is somehow “unfair” (one of his favorite complaints, the big baby) on the absurd grounds that the Democrats had no right to change their nominee. In his usual projecting, every-accusation-is-a-confession mode, he has repeatedly described it as a “coup” within the DNC.

(Pause to take in the irony.)

But it’s not just Trump and his clown car of second-rate Batman villains like Giuliani and Stone and the currently imprisoned Steve Bannon who are working on this. Elections expert Marc Elias recently wrote that “Republicans are building an election subversion war machine.”

Just about a month before Bump published that piece, Jim Rutenberg and Nick Corasanti of The New York Times reported on what they described as “an unprecedented legal campaign targeting the American voting system” by Republicans, calling it “wide-ranging and methodical,” and “laying the groundwork to contest an election that they argue, falsely, is already being rigged against former President Donald J. Trump.” The Times reports that this effort “involves a powerful network of Republican lawyers and activist groups, working loosely in concert with the Republican National Committee,” many of whom were key players in the attempt to overturn the 2020 election. The difference is that this effort is far more organized than four years ago, and far more focused on “a systematic search for any vulnerability in the nation’s patchwork election system.”

Mr. Trump’s allies have followed a two-pronged approach: restricting voting for partisan advantage ahead of Election Day and short-circuiting the process of ratifying the winner afterward, if Mr. Trump loses. The latter strategy involves an ambitious—and legally dubious—attempt to reimagine decades of settled law dictating how results are officially certified in the weeks before the transfer of power.At the heart of the strategy is a drive to convince voters that the election is about to be stolen, even without evidence.

“As things stand right now, there’s zero chance of a free and fair election,” Mike Howell, a project director at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, said at an event this week. “I’m formally accusing the Biden administration of creating the conditions that most reasonable policymakers and officials cannot in good conscience certify an election.”

That same Heritage Foundation has engaged in exercises war-gaming scenarios to dispute the 2024 results—one of many such measures going on in plain sight. Under the farcical umbrella of “electoral integrity,” Republicans in Nevada and several other states “have sued to tighten rules for voting by mail—currently a method preferred by Democrats. In Georgia and Arizona, they have filed lawsuits that, if successful, would effectively give local election board members the right to hold up certification and even conduct their own personal investigation into the vote.” The Times reports that already “election board members in several states have moved to block certification of primary election tallies, including in a major swing county in Nevada last week.”

The effort is strategic in its focus on local election officials, largely in swing states. Key to that task is seeding those election boards with fanatic Trump loyalists who are willing to block certification, typically by making outrageous requests, like demanding reams of voter information in order to personally examine it for cases of potential fraud. At the national level, it includes the RNC itself, now co-led by Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Oftrump (nee Yunaska), and a new position called “senior counsel for election integrity” held by Christina Bobb, a lawyer currently under indictment in Arizona abetting Trump’s effort to overturn his defeat in  that state four years ago. (Reportedly, a litmus test for potential RNC employees under the new regime is to assert that the 2020 election was stolen.) In Georgia, Cleta Mitchell, a Republican lawyer who was part of Trump’s effort to do the same in that state, “now runs the Election Integrity Network, a group that is advising activists on how to challenge voters’ eligibility.”

“I think we are going to see mass refusals to certify the election” in November, Marc Elias told Rolling Stone. “Everything we are seeing about this election is that the other side is more organized, more ruthless, and more prepared.”

As if to prove his point, Democrats have largely responded with our usual featherduster-to-a-flamethrower mentality of naïve belief that “the system” will protect us. Shortly before Biden stepped aside, his campaign advisers told the Times that right wing skullduggery of that magnitude was unlikely, because “the law and the courts would intervene to keep the process on course before any worst-case scenarios could come to pass.”

Yeah, right. Let’s hope Harris’s campaign advisors are a little more street savvy and gimlet eyed.

START THE STEAL

Way back in April, A.B. Stoddard had a piece in The Bulwark outlining Trump’s plan, predicting that he “will declare victory on election night before all the votes are counted, as he did in 2020—and as we know he had planned before election night.” If the results contradict his claim, he will insist that the results are wrong, tainted “by mail-in voting, machine voting, machine counting, ballot harvesting, corrupt election officials, liberal cities, and illegal immigrants.” But because Trump won’t be in office this time, and won’t have the levers of power at this disposal, “his best path to stealing an election is through the states, before the question comes to Congress on January 6, 2025.

“What Trump has planned for November and December, if he doesn’t win, is not a ‘pressure campaign’,” she wrote. “It’s another coup.”

Recently Stoddard had another piece in The Bulwark even more bluntly titled, “Get Ready Now: Republicans Will Refuse to Certify a Harris Win.”

An investigation by Rolling Stone identified “in the swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania….at least 70 pro-Trump election conspiracists currently working as county election officials who have questioned the validity of elections or delayed or refused to certify results.” Of those seventy, 22 of them already have “refused or delayed certification” in recent past elections. Nationwide, Republicans have refused to certify results at least 25 times since 2020, in eight states—the most in Georgia.

The article describes social media posts from the zealots who have infiltrated election administration as showing “unapologetic belief in Trump’s election lies, support for political violence, themes of Christian nationalism, and controversial race-based views.”

There are more than enough such individuals in these key posts to bring us to a constitutional crisis.

Although the courts have turned back some GOP attempts to get a chokehold on the electoral process, Stoddard notes that it’s foolish to count on that.

In retrospect, those efforts look like initial probes—like a bank robber casing the joint, figuring out where the guards stand and the cameras are while planning the real heist.

It sure doesn’t appear that the law is going to deter them from launching an unprecedented attack on our elections. And the ways that the potential scale of the assault will test the legal system is, in and of itself, daunting. The Brennan Center for Justice wrote, “little academic attention has been paid to the mechanics of state certification processes, leaving many in the legal community bewildered by the recent string of attacks.”

Two weeks ago, in the same Atlanta rally where Trump again attacked Georgia’s popular Republican governor Brian Kemp for not sufficiently backing the Big Lie in 2020, he also singled out three obscure state election officials—Janice Johnston, Rick Jeffares, and Janelle King—praising them as “pitbulls fighting for honesty, transparency, and victory.” Johnston, Jeffares, and King are three of the five members of Georgia’s State Election Board who, three days later, approved a new rule that could allow them to delay statewide certification of the presidential election ahead of the November 22 deadline. Stoddard reports that “Election experts say the new rule could disrupt the entire process across the state by allowing local partisans to reject results.” By casting doubt on the vote in Fulton County—where Atlanta is, and where most of the state’s Democratic votes are—Trump can claim he won the whole state, which is largely red everywhere else.

But Marc Elias believes that Republicans “are counting on not just that they can disrupt the election in big counties, they’re counting on the fact that if they don’t certify in several small counties, you can’t certify statewide results.

There are lots of unpleasant scenarios. A deadlocked election could get kicked to the House, where a one-state-one-vote show of hands would ensue, which would undoubtedly result in a Republican victory (as it currently stands). If the decision winds up in the Supreme Court, we know what ruling will come down from the 6-3 right wing supermajority that recently declared Trump is a king who is above the law. On that front, our only hope is that the far right has so overplayed its hand in blatantly capturing the Supreme Court and turning it into a wholly owned subsidiary of the RNC that no one has any faith in it as an honest broker, and if the justices try to pull a Bush v Gore 2.0, there will be riots.

What does it say that we are in such a state where that’s where we have to put our hopes?

But it could get even worse. Imagine a contested election that winds up in a standoff in the US Senate over the certification of electoral votes—not unlike January 6^th, 2021. Except that this time, the vote count might really be illegitimate, due to Republican ratfucking at the state level, to include illegitimate slates of electors submitted by GOP-controlled elections boards. And who, as the sitting Vice President of the United States, and therefore president of the Senate, would be presiding over that process, and would have to be the one to stand up and stop the certification of fake electors prepared to award the presidency—again—to Donald J.  Trump?

I’ll give you one guess, in case you failed 7^th grade civics (do they still teach that?). I’ll even give you a hint: She’s got a Howard University sticker on her car.

You can imagine what the GOP would say, let alone Fox News, OANN, and the shitkickers down at the gun shop.

UP ON A ROOF

Sigh. It’s hard to believe that four years on from the 2021 attack on the Capitol we still have to worry about the authoritarian Republican Party trying to steal an election. But we do. Stoddard again:

With all that has transpired since November 3, 2020, why are we here again?

Four years later we must ask this question. Our entire country has been held hostage by Trump’s mental and emotional deficits. He doesn’t “lose.” He is unwell and cannot publicly acknowledge defeat. Democracy was vulnerable before Trump, but its fragility could be fatal because of him.

The Big Lie, born from his pathological insecurity, led to a failed coup and a deadly insurrection. We had hoped those two things would undo or, at least, diminish the power of the Big Lie. Yet it has only grown more potent and widespread. It is an article of faith in the GOP base, with polls estimating that roughly two-thirds of Republicans are bought in.

There is nothing he won’t try.

The willingness of the once Grand Old Party to blatantly cheat is another measure of its descent into neo-fascism. Electoral mischief is nothing new, in America as elsewhere. But the sheer brazenness of the Republican effort, and the meticulousness and determination with which they have gone about it, is appalling—and telling. (Hey, what about the idea of winning elections by having policies people actually like? But that’s no good when your whole raison d’être is to enrich plutocrats and force a minoritarian religious agenda on the public against its will.)

Even as we raise the alarm about this threat to a free and fair electoral result in November, make no mistake: We first have to win before we should worry about the win being taken away. Job #1 is winning in November—ideally in such overwhelming numbers that no challenge to that victory is plausible by serious, thoughtful people. (But of course, we are not dealing with serious, thoughtful people.) No doubt the GOP’s Plan B is to sow chaos and doubt and file lawsuits in order to fuel Big Lie 2.0., along with more violent flagpole-and-bear-spray-oriented solutions. But their Plan A is to win in the first place. So we will be fortunate if we are in a position where our victory has to be doubted.

But even if we win, we’d be fools to imagine a polite concession speech from the Donald. We must be prepared for an assault on a Harris victory that will make the Big Lie of 2020—including the attack of January 6—look tame.

So what can be done?

One prophylactic solution that Stoddard recommends is for voters—and the media—to aggressively ask every last Republican politician, official, and candidate to state their position on “local certification of elections, electors honoring the popular vote of their state, preventing political violence—all of it. Repeatedly.”

Another is for high profile Democrats to sound the alarm now, and not wait for the crime to occur, when it may already be too late. There are small signs of that happening. Less than two weeks ago Joe Biden himself told CBS News that he is “not confident at all” there will be a peaceful transfer of power if Trump loses. That’s a jawdropper, but exactly what we need.

Harris isn’t likely to talk about this in her campaign, so it’s critical that other high-profile surrogates do. President Obama, President Clinton, Hillary Clinton, and others must educate voters about the plot underway to force more public pressure and accountability on the process.

It’s crucial that these plans are widely publicized. And they can be. Just like Project 2025, which was virtually unheard of and is now in the forefront of the political debate. Putting a media spotlight on this issue will force Republican officials to address what they are well aware of and are refusing to call out.

She goes on to quote the much-respected retired federal judge Michael Luttigremarkingon Trump’s attacks on the daughter of Judge Juan Merchan last March even as he presided over the Stormy Daniels case. “Never in history has any person leveled such attacks and been met with such passivity, acquiescence, and submissiveness by the nation,” Luttig tweeted. “The same can be said for the nation’s collective reaction to Trump’s plans to steal the 2024 election,” Stoddard writes.

So let’s shout it from the rooftops and keep it from happening. Like Biden’s remark, another good sign is that it is in fact beginning to get more airtime, including a front page piece in The Washington Post just today. As Stoddard wrote way back in April:

Trump’s plan to potentially steal a free and fair election should itself be a central issue of the 2024 campaign. It’s far more consequential than polls, fundraising tallies, or the electoral salience of student loan payments or a TikTok ban.

Trump intends to light the country on fire with his lies—again. We can’t stop it if we don’t talk about it.