2024: The GOP plan to nullify election results
The GOP’s strategy for 2024 is now clear: challenge all election losses and “cause chaos” in heavily Democratic districts, said Heidi Przybyla in Politico. A top Republican operative in Michigan was recently recorded discussing plans to recruit “an army” of party-trained poll workers, who, unlike poll watchers, have direct influence over vote-counting procedures. Thousands of MAGA followers have volunteered for this task, most of whom believe Donald Trump’s Big Lie of rampant voter fraud in 2020. If installed as poll workers, they would be connected with GOP lawyers and “party-friendly district attorneys who could intervene to block vote counts” in Democratic-leaning districts across the country. Then Republican state legislatures would have an excuse to ignore election results and choose a slate of Republican electors. This sophisticated “precinct strategy” is being led by Steve Bannon, the Machiavellian former Trump strategist, said Eric Lutz in Vanity Fair. Bannon took part in the failed effort to overturn 2020’s results, but this time he plans to “hijack the infrastructure of the election system.”
The GOP’s anti-democratic efforts are based on a simple premise, said Greg Sargent in The Washington Post: “Much of the voting in Democratic areas should be presumed illegitimate.” Most Republicans now insist that “voting is pure and unsullied” in rural areas dominated by Republicans, but “marred by widespread fraud” in cities with lots of nonwhite Democrats. To ensure a Republican victory in 2024, Trumpists have even created an “America First” slate of 2020 election deniers running for various state offices, said Alexandra Berzon in The New York Times. America First candidates have a good shot at winning powerful offices in Nevada, Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Michigan—four swing states “where a relatively small number of ballots have decided presidential victories.”
The 2020 insurrection has become an “institutionalized” movement, said Jonathan Chait in New York magazine. Tellingly, the Bannon operation “has met virtually no intraparty resistance,” with GOP officials widely agreeing that all “Democratic election victories are inherently illegitimate.” In 2020, Trump’s efforts to overturn the election “spectacularly failed,” and culminated in the Jan. 6 violent assault on Congress. The next time, the goal is to “successfully and legally contest and overturn an unfavorable election outcome.” And it just may work.