A Political Nightmare 2 Years in the Making

As American democracy stands at the edge of the abyss, a piece in Politico reviews how we got to this point and the deliberate efforts each step of the way by Republicans to achieve their goal of permanent one party rule and all the attendant nightmares that would entail for average Americans, including those stupid or immoral enough to vote Republican.  Far too Americans remain oblivious to the peril faced and foolishly think it cannot happen here - thoughts similar to individuals over the milennia likewise believed until their democracy was gone.  Here is a review of what Republicans have been doing in plain sight while too many have ignored the peril or thought they might achieve short term personal gain by closing their eyes:

I have been wary of political predictions ever since I co-authored a book 50 years ago that explained how John Lindsay would be elected president in 1972.

But it took no predictive gifts two years ago to warn that while the 2020 presidential election ended by affirming the legitimate winner, it raised unsettling questions about what might happen the next time. Would American democracy be on firmer ground by 2024 — or in an even more perilous state? After the midterm votes are counted, it’s almost certain to be the latter. The warnings of the growing threat to our very system of government are likely to be validated, with potentially disastrous consequences.

In late November 2020, after the states had certified their electoral votes, but well before the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, I wrote in this space:

“It takes no great leap into speculation to show that Trump has taught his would-be successors very powerful lessons in just how to steal an election. Indeed, he’s shown that there’s already political and judicial structure in place that will make it far easier to pull off in elections to come, at least for Republicans, who hold most of the reins in state legislatures. Like the German military who saw the Spanish Civil War as a testing ground for the Luftwaffe, the GOP may come to see 2020 as the election that illuminated the path to seizing power over the will of American voters.”

That path involved several theoretical steps that have steadily become more real, with anti-democratic forces now poised to gain ground across the country.

First: Convince your voters that the election has been stolen from them.

That’s been the GOP’s approach almost from the moment Donald Trump declared, falsely in 2020, that: “Frankly, we did win.” A significant majority of self-identified Republicans believe Joe Biden is an illegitimate president. Even more significant, large numbers of Republican officials and candidates have amplified this delusion or lie.

Second: Make sure local and state officials are loyal.

This has been a uniquely successful effort on the part of the Trumpists. As soon as key Republican officials in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Arizona rejected efforts to overturn the verdict of the voters in 2020, the strategy for the next campaign was born. The capacity to gum up the machinery of counting and validating votes, maybe even nudge it the other direction, would increase dramatically. If nothing else, Republicans — who control a majority of statehouses in the U.S. — now know precisely where to exert political muscle to ensure that loyalists hold those jobs.

Primary campaigns have already taken out key players who protected the 2020 vote, like half a dozen House Republicans and the Arizona House speaker who was seeking a state Senate seat. In state after state, Republicans have labeled the Jan. 6 insurrection as a “peaceful exercise of First Amendment rights.” More important, some GOP-controlled legislatures have ensured that voting will be more difficult, and that the process of counting of the votes — prohibiting early and mail-in votes from being tallied until late in the process — will only fuel further claims of “another stolen election!”

Third: Open the door to state legislatures deciding the vote.

It caused some heads to turn when Wisconsin GOP gubernatorial candidate Tim Michels told supporters that if he is elected, his party “will never lose another election” in the state. While he claimed later to mean only his policies would be hugely popular, the implication was unmistakable. Ever since taking control of the Legislature in 2010, Wisconsin Republicans have worked to give the Legislature significant power over the counting of votes. . . . . The ability of courts to thwart the power of legislatures, which has proven effective in Pennsylvania and North Carolina, may in turn be severely weakened if the U.S. Supreme Court adopts the radical “Independent State Legislature” theory.

Fourth: Bend the last guardrail — the U.S. Congress.

Should the GOP win control of either the House or Senate, the chances for a voting right bill to curtail the power of state legislatures are non-existent (though Democrats couldn’t even pass one while they had majorities, thanks to Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema’s opposition to gutting the Senate filibuster). And if both houses come under Republican control, the GOP’s ability to contest and reject the certified votes of states in 2024 will be vastly strengthened.

And as for the consequences of allowing election denialism to sink deep into the roots of our politics? I sketched them out nearly two years ago: “Republicans learned in the 2020 election that the ancient machinery of conducting elections is rusted, frail and highly vulnerable. They have seen exactly where the stress points of the system are. … There is every reason to believe they will seek to collapse that system the next chance they get.”

The midterm results look likely to ensure we’ll test that theory out in 2024. I’ll be a lot happier if I’m dead wrong.