Wrapping up a week that was *much* better than anticipated on this side of the aisle, despite the now almost certain loss of the House.
I’ll start with the defeat of the election deniers.
We’re still awaiting the outcome of the AZ gubernatorial race, where Democrat Katie Hobbs looks increasingly likely to eke out a victory over conspiracy theorist Kari Lake, the GOP nominee. However, the election results have already delivered very good news for 2024.
I tweeted this Saturday night1:
In each of the above states in which an election denier/truther/skeptic ran for Secretary of State (SoS) or governor, that candidate lost. The only one of these states whose election administration will be run by the GOP in 2024 is Georgia, where Republican SoS Brad Raffensperger swept to reelection. Raffensperger was perhaps the GOP official who stood up most publicly, forcefully and angrily to Trump’s election lies in 2020. And Georgia’s Republican governor Brian Kemp, who defeated Stacey Abrams last week to win reelection, also refused to go along with Trump’s attempts to overturn the election in 2020.
In Arizona, Michigan and Nevada, Democratic SoS candidates defeated election deniers. In Pennsylvania, where the governor appoints the SoS, Democrat Josh Shapiro beat election truther and all-around extremistDoug Mastriano in a landslide. Wisconsin election administration follows a somewhat complicated structure, but the reelection of Democratic governor Tony Evers and likely reelection of Democratic SoS Doug LaFollette augurs well.
The possibility that election deniers in battleground states might be in a position to overturn results in 2024 they dislike - including for the presidency - has been a looming threat since January of 2021. The outcomes last week make that much less likely.2
As many observers have noted, a related and very welcome development has been that many Trump-backed candidates, including some who dabbled in election conspiracism before Tuesday, quickly conceded defeat when they lost (even graciously in lots of cases!). The significance of these concessions isn’t as a test of the character of those making them. The looming threat denialism poses is its potential to delegitimize the most basic and immediate tool available to ordinary people to influence our political system - voting. It has also already helped foment political violence and there has been every reason to worry that there would be more. Chaos agents like Trump and his political mentor, Steve Bannon and its shock troops like the Proud Boys and Oathkeepers, would use the tools of delegitimization and violence to pave the way for authoritarian rule.3
These concessions are, therefore, consequential in denying oxygen to the extremists, by choking off a larger pool of would-be recruits.
A final comment for now. We’re in an era of both intense division and insanely closely contested politics. So many of the races to decide control of the Senate and the House are being decided by razor thin margins. Commentators are already offering sweeping explanations for these results, but the reality is that it’s a muddled, jumbled picture across the country. As I said last time, there were great results for Democrats in places like Pennsylvania and Michigan, and disastrous ones in Florida (and, to a lesser degree, New York). Different kinds of candidates pursuing very different strategies won election in competitive battlegrounds. One thing voters rejected in many places - at least, enough of them - were chaos agents. We’ve experienced a series of unnerving disruptions in recent years, including Covid, Trump, January 6, the overturning of Roe, increases in crime and inflation. A sense that things are just out of whack has been a pervasive reality of ordinary people’s lives the past couple of years. The political conventional wisdom was that the party-in-power would pay the price for that sense of disruption. But those Trumpian candidates who essentially promised to double down on the chaos, including by openly toying with the idea that they might not accept election results, appeared to fare poorly.
As Peter Beinart says in a video he released this morning, none of this means we are saved. The slow, grinding political slog will continue. But I’ll wait a couple of days to return to more depressing fare (I know I’ve said that before.:))
That was a tad premature, but Lake’s likely loss in Arizona will make it official.
The Supreme Court will hear a case this year, Moore v. Harper, that will test the once fringe independent legislature theory. That case could significantly alter the nature of election law, though there is debate about whether an adverse ruling by the Court’s right-wing majority could enable state legislatures to overturn the popular vote in future elections. The mere fact that such a prospect has become a significant focus of discussion is unnerving enough. And avowedly anti-democracy beliefs continue to gain traction in rightwing circles, including among GOP party elites. So, don’t relax *too* much.
Bannon’s goals in this regard are explicit and self-conscious. Trump’s just being Trump.
You, I hope, can admit that the Democrats have done their share of election denying: Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, former Pres. Carter, Jerry Nadler, and many others are on the record claiming that Trump's presidency was illegitimate.
When over 50 former and acting members of the intelligence community, in their open letter, without offering any proof, claimed that the Hunter Biden laptop showed all the signs of being Russian disinformation and those same intelligence agencies "suggest" to Facebook, Twitter, etc. that they should be on the lookout and stop this Russian disinformation we see how elections can be compromised.