With primary elections swirling all over the country, it’s easy to lose track of what’s happening where. But a recent Washington Post analysis clarifies a troubling pattern: In most of the half-dozen battleground states that will matter most in the 2024 presidential election, the GOP has nominated Trumpian election-deniers to posts that have power over election results. This, more than mayhem in the streets, is how American democracy could fall.
There isn’t and never was any validity to former President Donald Trump’s continuing claim that he won reelection in 2020 but was robbed of that victory by voter fraud. He lost what may well have been the cleanest, most closely monitored and diligently reviewed election in U.S. history, and he lost by a significant margin. But, like the aspiring autocrat he is, Trump attempted to remain in power anyway — an unprecedented violation of oath for an American president.
What prevented Trump’s post-election coup attempt was largely the responsible resistance of state-level Republican election officials to Trump’s demands that they show loyalty to him instead of to democracy. There’s no better encapsulation of Trump’s corrupt quest than his demand to Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, that he “find 11,780 votes” to put Trump over the top there. And there’s no better example of patriotism than Raffensperger’s steadfast refusal.
