Trump's Coup Attempt Isn't Over

By Jeannie Suk Gersen, The New Yorker

16 December 20

 

fter the Electoral College cast its votes and affirmed his victory, on Monday, Joe Biden declared that “democracy prevailed” and “faith in our institutions held.” And Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell finally congratulated Biden as President-elect and Kamala Harris as Vice-President-elect. On January 6th, a joint session of Congress will officially count the votes. The result should be more than assured. But last week brought the shock of seeing seventeen Republican state attorneys general and more than half of House Republicans sign amicus briefs supporting Texas’s unsuccessful bid to have the Supreme Court prevent four states’ electoral votes from being cast. That astounding show of loyalty to Trump made it imaginable that Republican lawmakers, having failed to convince the Court to overturn the election result, would use Congress to attempt it. On December 13th, Representative Mo Brooks, Republican of Alabama, announced his intent to dispute Biden’s victory by challenging the votes of five swing states in the January congressional session. The group he will lead in the effort so far includes Representatives-elect Barry Moore, from Alabama, and Marjorie Taylor Greene, from Georgia.

This year’s election and post-election period have felt unprecedented in so many ways, but there are long-standing rules for challenging electoral votes for President on the floor of Congress. The Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution provides that the Vice-President, as President of the Senate, “shall, in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the certificates and the votes shall then be counted.” But, under the Electoral Count Act of 1887, if a member of the Senate and a member of the House sign and submit challenges to a state’s electoral votes, then the two bodies must debate the challenge separately for two hours, and then vote separately on whether to discard those electoral votes as unlawful. The votes are to be tossed only if a majority of both houses agree to do so; that has never happened since the law was passed.

In recent decades, challenges to electoral votes have come from Democrats, after their candidate had conceded, and after they recognized the Republican winner as the President-elect. In 2001, Democratic House members of the Congressional Black Caucus objected to counting Florida’s electoral votes, but Vice-President Al Gore, who’d conceded the election in December, 2000, after losing in Bush v. Gore, rejected the challenge because no senator supported it, and declared his opponent, George W. Bush, the winner. In 2005, Democrats actually succeeded in triggering the mandatory debates and votes, after Representative Stephanie Tubbs Jones, of Ohio, and Senator Barbara Boxer, of California, challenged Ohio’s electoral votes for President Bush on the basis of “numerous, serious election irregularities.” Senator John Kerry, who’d lost to Bush, made clear that he didn’t support the effort, and neither the House nor the Senate agreed to discard those electoral votes. (Tubbs Jones and Boxer said that they were not aiming to change the result of the Presidential election, but rather to make a point about significant voter disenfranchisement.) In 2017, several House Democrats objected to Electoral College votes for Trump, on the grounds of Russian interference and of voter suppression in Alabama, but Vice-President Biden, presiding over the session, rejected their effort because no senator signed the challenge.

A Republican challenge in Congress will not succeed this January, either. Though at least one Republican senator may join Representative Brooks to challenge swing states’ electoral votes for Biden, triggering the two-hour-long debates, there is no possibility that the Democrat-led House will support discarding the votes. And because several Republican senators, including Mitt Romney, John Cornyn, Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins, and Ben Sasse, have indicated that they look askance at such efforts, the Senate is also highly unlikely to do so. But even a guaranteed failure to overturn the election result will still afford Republicans a loud show of doing something to “stop the steal.”

On Sunday, Representative Brooks said, of Congress’s part in Presidential elections, “We have a superior role under the Constitution than the Supreme Court does, than any federal court judge does, than any state court judge does.” Perhaps that is so, in the sense that the Constitution directs Congress to count the electoral votes and declare the winner. But Brooks’s next statement, “What we say, goes. That’s the final verdict,” was of course gross hyperbole. Congress’s role, as spelled out in the Twelfth Amendment and federal law, is limited to the ministerial function of faithfully counting ballots. Any discretionary ability that Congress may have to discard votes must be grounded in evidence of fraud—which, in Trump’s abundant lawsuits, courts have already found wholly lacking. Even after the Electoral College result, Brooks called on fellow-Republicans to object to electoral votes “from states with such flawed election systems that they are not worthy of our trust.”

Testing the waters, Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, has scheduled a hearing of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, this Wednesday, in order to examine “the irregularities in the 2020 election.” Johnson has claimed that his goal is “to restore confidence in the system”—and to determine whether he and other senators should join the challenge to states’ electoral votes. The witnesses will be Republican attorneys including Kenneth Starr, who was Trump’s impeachment defense lawyer. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has urged cancellation of the hearing and said, “To use a Senate committee to spread misinformation about our own elections, it’s beyond the pale.”

As Election Day approached, many worried about the possibility of significant violence at polling places or in the streets. Thankfully, that did not come to pass. But, in the weeks since, we had new and developing reasons for alarm stemming from the harmful notion, promoted by Trump and key Republican leaders, that exerting pressure on officials could change the result of the election. Election officials in Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, Vermont, Pennsylvania, and Michigan have become targets of harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence. Last month, the Trump campaign attorney Joe diGenova declared on Newsmax that Christopher Krebs, the former director of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, whom Trump fired because he was working to debunk election disinformation, “should be drawn and quartered, taken out at dawn and shot.” Last week, Krebs filed a defamation lawsuit against diGenova, Trump, and Newsmax, describing the threatening tweets and messages that Krebs has received, which, according to the lawsuit, prompted one of his children to ask whether “Daddy’s going to get executed.” The Arizona Republican Party recently sent a tweet asking supporters if they are willing to die to overturn the election results. And, this past weekend, after the Supreme Court declined to hear Republicans’ case, four people were stabbed in clashes between pro-Trump protesters and counterprotesters in Washington, D.C., and one person was shot in a similar clash in Washington State. On Monday, the Electoral College voted without incident, but, after threats to many electors’ safety, electors in Arizona had to vote in a secret location, and electors in Wisconsin were directed to enter their meeting place through an unmarked side door.

Violent unrest around elections is unfortunately common in emerging democracies. This year, more than fifty people were killed in post-election violence in Côte d’Ivoire, and state police killed civilians and assaulted and arrested political rivals in Tanzania. In the United States, the longer our representatives contest the result of the election, the more possible violent escalation seems. The threats against U.S. election officials are particularly chilling in light of examples such as that of Kenya, where, three years ago, a top election official was murdered, and Belarus, where, last year, a former police officer revealed that he was involved in the 1999 abduction and murder of the former head of the central election commission.

House Minority Whip Steve Scalise said on Sunday that “if you want to restore trust by millions of people who are still very frustrated and angry about what happened, that’s why you’ve got to have the whole system play out.” But it remains unclear how pursuing the goal of overturning election results, simply because one’s own side lost, bodes at all well for what happens when the legal process finally runs out. Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national-security adviser, who received a pardon from his former boss, insisted at a rally over the weekend, “We decide the election,” after having tweeted out, two weeks ago, a petition warning that “the threat of a shooting civil war is imminent,” and urging Trump to declare martial law, suspend the Constitution, and order a new Presidential election under military supervision. Those calls were swiftly condemned as dangerous by military leaders. That puts into relief the overarching question about what the Trump Presidency has meant for our laws and legal institutions. Are they weathering a particularly bad storm while doing what they’re supposed to do—namely, to channel the potential for violent conflict into peaceful if begrudging resolution and coexistence? Or are they truly beginning to crumble around us in Trump’s final weeks in office? We likely won’t know for years whether the emerging norms of today are merely testing democracy or destroying it.

Democrats Can't Keep Clinging to the Center

By Jeff Weaver, Jacobin

16 December 20

Democrats focused more on courting GOP voters than younger voters in the last election, former Bernie Sanders senior staffer Jeff Weaver argues. The strategy was a disaster, damaging downballot Democrats across the country — and it could backfire even more when Trump is gone.

hile the curtain falls on Donald Trump’s desperate and frivolous post-election lawsuits, Democrats are rightly asking how they were able to beat Trump but could not regain control of the Senate and maintain or increase their margin in the House. At a time when Democrats should be dispassionately examining the lessons learned from 2020, some in the conservative wing of the party are instead using this opportunity to attack the party’s growing progressive wing.

Soon after the election, centrists began arguing that Democrats lost House seats and most key Senate races because terms like “defund the police” and “socialism” turned off too many moderate voters — despite Joe Biden getting far more votes for president than any presidential candidate in history. In their telling, Biden was Teflon while promising to raise taxes on the wealthy and make major investments in fighting climate change, but centrists who lost House seats and failed in Senate bids were dragged down by Republican name-calling and red-baiting.

On its face, the story is incongruous. In fact, it is so nonsensical that one of the standard-bearers of the “the Left dragged us all down” crowd, former CIA officer and Blue Dog Coalition representative Abigail Spanberger, actually won a higher percentage of the vote in 2020 than she did in 2018.

So, what’s really going on?

Much of the answer lies in the very strategy chosen to elect Biden and oust Trump.

In 2020, Democrats did not focus on winning back working-class voters in the two-hundred-plus counties that shifted from Barack Obama to Trump four years ago — and they won back only a tiny fraction of those locales. Instead, Democrats adopted a strategy aimed at replacing the blue-collar segment of the Obama coalition with suburban voters and anti-Trump Republicans — which succeeded at the top of the ticket but created the weakest Democratic coattails in six decades.

Democrats’ Strategy Boosted GOP Turnout, Which Hurt Downballot

Tens of millions of dollars were spent by Democratic groups to turn out Republicans who could no longer stomach Trump. Coupled with a surprisingly effective turnout operation by the GOP machine, 15 million more Republicans voted in 2020 than in 2016, while Democratic turnout only increased by 6 million votes.

It is difficult to know how effective Democrats’ focus on swinging GOP voters was, given that Trump consolidated the Republican vote percentage-wise from 2016 to 2020 — going from 90 percent support to 94 percent support among GOP voters. That said, an analysis of 2016 and 2020 exit polls shows Biden did get almost a hundred thousand more Republican votes than Hillary Clinton did in 2016, because the overall size of the electoral pie was much bigger.

It is an open question whether those Republican votes would have come to Biden without the enormous cost of Republican outreach by pro-Biden groups — Trump may have made himself so toxic that those voters would have gone to Biden anyway, and there is evidence that some of the strategies to court GOP voters were ineffective.

What can be said, however, is that the substantial increase in Republican turnout overall — again driven by both pro-Trump and pro-Biden aligned groups — had what should have been the expected effect down the ballot: a big GOP swing in races beneath the presidential contest.

Some House Democrats who had won by small margins in the 2018 “Blue Wave” did not survive, and Senate candidates went down to defeat in states that Trump won.

In Iowa, according to exit polls, the percentage of the electorate that identified as Democrat fell from 31 percent in 2016 to 26 percent in 2020, while the percentage identifying as Republican rose from 34 percent to 36 percent.

In North Carolina, the percentage of the electorate identifying as Democrat fell from 35 percent to 34 percent, while the Republican share rose from 31 percent to 37 percent. There’s an obvious lesson here: turning out Republicans — even if they hate Trump — benefits Republicans downballot.

Contrast that with the biggest surprise of the night, in Georgia, where Biden was the first Democrat to win the state since 1992 and Democrat Jon Ossoff outperformed Senate candidates in Iowa and North Carolina. In Georgia, the percentage of the electorate who identified as Democrat was stable from 2016 to 2020, at 34 percent, while the Republican total only rose from 36 percent to 38 percent. That is a much smaller shift in the electoral composition to Republicans when compared to Iowa or North Carolina.

Focus on Young Voters, Not Republicans

So why were Democrats successful in Georgia and not in Iowa or North Carolina, even in face of a shift, albeit marginal, in the Republicans’ favor in the Peach State? The numbers are clear: Georgia went blue due to the overwhelming turnout among young voters.

Nationally, young voters were 17 percent of the electorate, and they voted overwhelmingly for Biden. In Georgia, young voters were 20 percent of the electorate, and they supported Biden by 13 points over Trump.

Put another way, Biden won the under-thirty vote in Georgia by more than 129,000 votes. That is more than ten times his winning margin of 12,640 votes across the entire state. If young voters in Georgia were the same percentage of the electorate as they were nationally, Biden would have received 19,500 fewer votes — and lost.

In Iowa and North Carolina, young voters were only 16 percent and 15 percent of the electorate, respectively. One can only imagine the impact if the king’s ransom spent to woo Republicans had instead been focused on progressive youth.

Young voters are not the future of the Democratic Party. They are our present.

A Lesson That Should Have Been Learned After 2008

The critical importance of young voters in turning red states to blue should have already been learned.

In 2008, youth turnout was the highest since 1972, and in that year, President Obama won both Indiana (the first Democrat to do so since 1964) and North Carolina, but he only carried the eighteen-to-twenty-nine age demographic in each. For the record, the only age cohort Biden carried in his Arizona win was also voters under thirty. But it’s a lesson that keeps being forgotten, as party leaders and electeds overreact to Republican name-calling.

Republicans are always going to attack. That’s the nature of politics. The panic over “defund the police” and “socialism” among centrists is really no different than when so many Democrats retreated from a fair estate tax because Republicans yelled “death tax.” Political contests are called campaigns for a reason. Like a military campaign, your enemy gets to shoot back. That’s not cause to cower in your foxhole. It’s cause to deliver more intense and overwhelming fire in response.

In politics, effective return fire is not touting résumés and projecting competence. It’s bold and broadly popular substantive policies that address the systemic inequities of all kinds in our society.

Democrats should be mindful that the referendum to raise the minimum wage got 61 percent of the vote in Florida, while Democrats were going down in defeat.

If turning out anti-Trump Republicans as a short-term strategy was effective in winning the White House — and that is a big if — it was certainly worth it. After all, one would be hard-pressed to find a Democrat who would trade control of the Senate for a Trump-controlled White House.

The point moving forward, however, is simple: as attention focuses on Georgia and inevitably turns to the 2022 midterms, attempting to rely on anti-Trump Republicans with Trump out of office is a loser, especially in downballot races.

Anti-Trump Republicans without Trump are, well, just Republicans. But young voters will still be there, waiting to be inspired with bold policies that will ensure broad-based prosperity, opportunity, and inclusion. So will blue-collar voters, including the black and Latino men that Democrats lost ground with this cycle.

If hand-wringing centrists win the day, Democrats can expect losses in Georgia and a tough cycle in 2022. If Democrats learn the real lessons of 2020, we can build the type of electoral coalition that has shown its unique power in turning red states blue.

In case the point is lost on anyone, if Democrats want to win in Georgia and the midterms, they must appeal to the most progressive part of our party: young people, not Republicans.