IT’S TRUMP’S PARTY, AND HE’LL LIE IF HE WANTS TO
To win a Republican primary in 2022, you’ll probably need to support a coup attempt.
The Republican nominee for governor in Pennsylvania, Doug Mastriano, won his race on the strength of his enthusiastic support for Donald Trump’s effort to subvert and overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
The Republican nominee for the Senate in North Carolina, Ted Budd, was similarly committed to Trump’s effort to keep himself in office. He was among the 139 House members who objected to certifying the presidential election in Biden’s favor.
Overall, there are hundreds of Republican candidates in races across the country who have embraced Trump’s false claims about his defeat. Many, like Budd, voted against Biden’s Electoral College victory. Some, like Mastriano, attended the “stop the steal” protest in Washington on Jan. 6. And others signed legal briefs or resolutions challenging Biden’s victory.
The extent to which election denialism and pro-insurrectionism are now litmus tests for Republican politicians is clearly attributable to Trump’s huge influence over the Republican Party. Despite his defeat, he is still the leader. But if, instead of the boss, Trump was only one influential figure among many, there would still be reason for Republicans to embrace this view.
That’s because Republican election denialism is simply the strongest form of a belief that has defined the Republican Party since at least the Newt Gingrich era in the 1990s. For many Republicans, theirs is the only legitimate political party and their voters, irrespective of their actual numbers, are the only legitimate voters — and the only legitimate majority. Democrats, from this vantage point, are presumptively illegitimate, their victories suspect.
You see this in the years of voter fraud hysteria that preceded Trump’s claim, after the 2016 election, that he had been cheated of millions of votes.
In 2001, for example, Attorney General John Ashcroft announced a crackdown on voter fraud, accusing unnamed actors (presumably Democrats) of manipulating elections. “Votes have been bought, voters intimidated and ballot boxes stuffed,” he said at a news conference that year. “The polling process has been disrupted or not completed. Voters have been duped into signing absentee ballots believing they were applications for public relief. And the residents of cemeteries have infamously shown up at the polls on Election Day.”
After the 2008 election, Republicans went into a frenzy over the group ACORN, accusing it of perpetrating fraud on a national scale. How else, after all, could you explain Barack Obama’s unexpected victories in traditionally Republican states like Virginia, Indiana and North Carolina?
There were other ways that Republicans expressed their belief that they were the only legitimate members of the political community.
Sarah Palin’s rhetoric about the “real America,” very much in evidence during the 2008 presidential campaign — “We believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America” — was one of these ways. So was the tea party movement, whose members understood themselves as a disenfranchised majority, under siege by a Democratic Party of burdensome immigrants in the country illegally, ungrateful minorities and entitled young people.
Yes, the Republican Party’s present-day election denialism is much more extreme than the rhetoric surrounding voter fraud or the idea that there is a “real America.” But the difference is ultimately one of degree, not kind: Republicans have been trying to write Democrats out of the political community in one way or another for decades. It was only a matter of time before this escalated to denying that Democrats and Democratic voters can win elections at all.