Dem
51
GOP
49
Jonathan V. Last, over at The Bulwark, which is written by a bunch of Trump-hating Republicans, has a very interesting column about the American political system. He says that Donald Trump's great insight was that the system is not about governance, but about getting and using power. Elections are part of it, but not all of it.
What Trump understood is that if he won in 2020, he would say everything was over, the Democrats would agree, and he would take over. However, if he lost, as he did, then that merely initiated the second phase of the process. That consisted of filing dozens of lawsuits (and losing all but one), trying to get state legislatures to appoint their own electors, riling up a mob to attack the Capitol, trying to get the vice president to stop counting the electoral votes, and then getting many members of Congress to try to discard electoral votes from states he lost. Finally, he kept saying he won long enough that a third of Republicans still believe it.
Was this a one-off sequence of events or the new normal? Guess what. In MAGAworld, this is the script for all future elections: If you win, it is over; if you lose, you just keep fighting every way you can. Here is the evidence. Over the weekend, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), a one-time moderate Republican from the hinterlands of upstate New York, but now an embodiment of Trumpism, appeared on Meet the Press. When moderator Kristin Welker asked Stefanik if she would accept the results of the 2024 election, she said: "We will see if this is a legal and valid election." That is not an idle threat. She voted against certifying Pennsylvania's electoral votes in 2021 and has now essentially said that certifying or not certifying states' electoral votes depends on which party takes control of the House on Jan. 3, 2025. It's heads we win, tails we move to the next phase. And note carefully, she is no longer some random backbencher shooting off her mouth. She is the #4 Republican in the House leadership and what she says is party policy. Make no mistake about that.
Trump has been a great teacher. The Republican Party has learned a lot from him. The first lesson is that shattering rules and norms doesn't bring much of a penalty. The second is that while one scandal can be devastating, a hundred of them are just white noise. The third—and most important one—is that elections are not the end points about who achieves power. They are just way stations where the process changes to a different mode.
Republican leaders were shocked by what happened in 2020. They expected that when their candidate lost, he would just gracefully concede, like John McCain did in 2008 and Mitt Romney did in 2012. Now they realize that in 2024, they don't have to accept defeat. They can continue trying to acquire power by any means they can, legal or otherwise. If they are lucky, the Supreme Court might even back them up. And most important, there really isn't any downside to trying, so it is a no-brainer to try.
Stefanik has shown that while Trump was somewhat alone in his quest to overturn the 2020 election, in 2024, the Republican Party will stand behind him, united. Votes in the House on certifying states might end up 220-215 strictly along party lines. Control of the House might determine control of the White House. This is a parliamentary system via the back door. The party that controls the House gets to pick the person who heads the government. Of course, the Senate gets to chime in too, but it might well be 50-50 and completely deadlocked.
This could be the new normal. Get ready for it. With all of this said, if election deniers don't actually gain office (and thus far they haven't) while the people who tried to overthrow the 2020 presidential contest (e.g., Trump) end up in prison, that could put the brakes on things. (V)