The Republican Plan to Steal the Presidency
Republicans plan to steal the presidency in 2024 by electing extremists in swing states, who if elected will place the state's electors in the hands of their Republican legislatures.
The Republican plan for ending American democracy is now clear, and all of its pieces could fall into place this election if we don’t turn out to vote in droves. The plan involves electing extremists in swing states, who would place their state’s electoral votes in the hands of their legislatures, thereby allowing them to steal the vote for Trump.
Consider the Republican Party’s Pennsylvanian candidate for Governor, Doug Mastriano. Mastriano denies the results of the 2020 presidential election. He paid thousands of dollars to help extremists attend the attack on the Capitol. He was present when they were tearing down the police barricades. He is so fascist that he paid an openly white nationalist social media site to make all of its new members his followers. And he was chosen by the Trump administration to create an alternate slate of fake electors to be submitted to Mike Pence in place of the actual electors the day he helped attack the Capitol.
Trump backed Mastriano because Mastriano can be counted on to steal his state for Trump, and it is much the same with the rest of his slate of candidates. Since Pennsylvania often votes Democratic in presidential elections, and since its legislature is typically Republican, it is particularly worrisome. Placing its electors in the hands of the legislature would effectively make it go red for presidential elections in perpetuity.
Republicans are running a similar slate of extremists in Arizona, whose gubernatorial candidate ran on the election being stolen. Arizona’s Kari Lake is so extreme that, shortly after winning the Republican primary for Governor, she suggested seceding from the union. Meanwhile, the Republican candidate for Senate is so extreme that he ranks the Unabomber an “underrated thinker” and counsels his supporters to read his edifying works. Needless to say, like most Republicans these days, neither recognizes the results of the 2020 election.
Since there are only a handful of swing states, and presidential contests tend to be tight, Republicans would only need to place the electors of perhaps a couple of states in the hands of their legislatures for the party to attain a near permanent lock on the presidency. If you find that hard to imagine, consider how Republicans have already entrenched themselves in power in spite of being a minority.
The Senate is split evenly between the two major parties, but Democratic Senators have received over 40 million more votes than Republicans. That’s only possible because with each state having equal representation in the Senate, and several states having less than a fiftieth the population of California, Republicans in sparsely populated rural states have over fifty times the voting power of Californians. Similarly, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, Republicans enjoy a 17 seat advantage in the House due to gerrymandering. But their gerrymandering would have never happened if they did not possess an unfair advantage on the Supreme Court, which made the gerrymandering possible.
Republican presidents have enjoyed four terms in office over the last three decades, but they have only won the popular vote once. So, while one-person one-vote would have given them only a single Supreme Court seat, America’s outmoded electoral system has led them to dominate it six to three. And since Republican appointees to the court struck down most major campaign finance reform laws with their Citizen’s United decision of 2011, their unfair advantage on the court has helped bring wealthier corporate candidates to power in both parties. Meanwhile, Republican appointees to the court helped their party gain seats at every level of government by striking down the Voting Rights Act in 2013.
Insofar as the state is a master lever that can be used to transform incentives in every dimension of our lives, the unfair advantages built into our system of governance have allowed Republicans to dramatically alter the way we live. In short, much of the extremism that separates life in the United States from that in Europe is the result of unfair advantages built into our system of government, which have long favored conservatives and racists in Deep South states—and if we let them, they will continue to shape the system to their advantage.
If each American possessed only a single, equally weighted vote for each branch of government, Republicans may not have controlled a single branch of government in quite some time. But rural racists shaped the American political landscape to their advantage from the start. And in order to protect their power, they generated a cultish devotion to an outmoded and frankly undemocratic constitution. So, if you think that Republicans would not be able to permanently destroy the presidential vote, think again. It has already happened—in every branch of government, and it has dramatically altered the course of our lives.
Republicans are literally a dying party, with those closest to death favoring their party the most. Yet, they also represent the remnant of an increasingly beleaguered white majority with which ever fewer citizens have come to identify, and their ham handed attempts at bringing diversity to their party have proven simply bizarre.
For instance, Georgia’s Republican candidate for the Senate is an African American football star, who pulled a gun on his ex-wife and hunted a delivery man down with intent to kill. Clearly suffering from a traumatic brain injury, he struggles to string together sentences while concocting stories about having been a cop and running businesses that no longer exist. Republicans apparently think this is normal for African Americans, and that this is what they have to tolerate if they are going to run a token candidate.
Republicans came close to electing a candidate for Arizona’s Secretary of State who is simply ghoulish. Abraham Hamadeh is a Saudi-American, who ran internal security for the dictator of Saudi Arabia while the dictator was busy having Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi assassinated and chopped to pieces. Hamadeh also negotiated arms sales to the regime when they were busy bombing Yemeni ports and bridges and food warehouses, ultimately taking 18 million people to the brink of starvation. It is as if Republicans think participation in an extremist regime and mass murder are normal for Muslims and that this is just what they will have to tolerate to cobble together a majority.
Republicans can no longer win elections without suppressing votes and gerrymandering districts, and they are even failing at that. So, they have pulled together a new slate of candidates so extreme that the only people openly resistant to calling them fascist anymore are either ignorant of their extremism or in denial. Republicans are making a final push to steal our democracy, but if we crush them at the polls, we just might break the spell.
Don’t let them steal our democracy without a fight; don’t throw away your life by sitting out this election.
Theo Horesh, author of The Holocausts We All Deny
Incredibly important post! Democracy in the US is dangling from a cliff. It’s now or never to save it.