There is a naive reading of Donald Trump’s continuing obsession with the 2020 election that runs something like this: If Republicans pass more so-called election integrity measures, they will more easily resist calls to subvert the results in 2024 on grounds that they were fraudulent.
The former president’s latest machinations in Wisconsin, which are detailed in an extraordinary new report in the New York Times, should seriously weaken the seductive lure of such notions.
Trump fully intends to keep pushing his movement toward the eventuality of a future stolen election, ensuring there will be no pacifying demands for it until the deed is again attempted and, perhaps, accomplished. How far Trump will get remains to be seen. But for now, this requires Democrats to redouble efforts to structurally protect our elections.
Trump is raging at Wisconsin Republicans, the Times reports, for not doing enough to reverse his 2020 loss in the state. This comes after they already went to extraordinary lengths to undercut those results:
They ordered a monthslong government audit of votes in the state. They made a pilgrimage to Arizona to observe the GOP review of votes there. They hired former police officers to investigate Wisconsin’s election and its results.
None of this was enough. Trump is accusing Republicans — particularly the state assembly leader, Robin Vos — for failing to expose the fictional election fraud that led to his loss. This has forced Vos to hire a hard-rightist who says the election was stolen to continue hunting for that fictional fraud.
Meanwhile, a top Republican in the state Senate — who is also in Trump’s crosshairs — has penned an open letter that gently tries to disabuse him of his rage, reassuring him that this hunt for phantom fraud continues. The letter seeks to calm Trump by disclosing that he wears “Trump socks,” while declaring: “The power of your pen to mine is like Thor’s hammer to a Bobby pin.”
Beyond the comical North Korea vibes lies something deadly serious. Notably, in addition to doing everything possible to keep raising doubts about Trump’s loss — ordering audits and investigations — Wisconsin Republicans have also passed numerous new voting restrictions. The Democratic governor will veto them, but Republicans have done everything they possibly can. Now note this:
“The legislative approach they’re taking to fix these problems with our voting systems is good,” said Matt Batzel, the Wisconsin-based national executive director of American Majority, a conservative grass-roots training organization. “But it was good for the base three months ago, and there’s shiny new things happening like the Arizona audit and the grass-roots moves on.”
Once the Arizona audit went national — and was aggressively championed by Trump — that became the new thing, and mere voter suppression to restore “confidence” in elections would no longer suffice.
The core point here is that nothing will ever be enough. These efforts to “audit” and “investigate” the totals are also justified as ways to restore GOP voter confidence in the results. But this treats them as good-faith efforts to empirically reconfirm the truth about the 2020 outcome. In fact, they’re dry runs for creating fake pretexts to question future results, thus fake-justifying maximal efforts to overturn them.
It may be that some Republicans here and there are pursuing these audits and investigations to have one more genuine crack at persuading GOP voters that Trump’s loss was sound. But Trump is determined to never allow that to happen.
Each time Republicans go through these motions, Trump makes it absolutely clear that his real desire is for his movement to be maximally committed to overturning election results that they detest, regardless of what the true results actually were.
This is why he has endorsed a Republican primary challenger to Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger, not just because Raffensperger attested to the integrity of Trump’s loss, but also because his challenger has implicitly committed to using his power to overturn results in a way Raffensperger would not.
Tellingly, Raffensperger is atoning for his sin by supporting new audits of the results, but like Wisconsin Republicans, he’s also discovering it isn’t enough. A willingness to work to overturn legitimate results is what fealty to Trump really requires.
The big question is how far Trump will get in getting his movement to adopt this ethos in future elections. But for now, Democrats must redouble efforts to structurally defend our elections against various scenarios that could result if future pressure persuades a handful of state Republicans to attempt the worst.
One possibility might be for Democrats to champion revisions to the Electoral Count Act, making it harder for a GOP legislature to send rogue electors in defiance of their state’s popular vote, and harder for a GOP-controlled Congress to count the rogue electors rather than the right ones.
Given what Trump will continue demanding, you’d think Republicans would support such a thing, since it would render this scheme even harder to pull off, making it less likely that they’ll face pressure to execute it.
But that’s not going to happen. After all, it would get Trump very, very angry.
