This is the most annoying type of article to write.
Normally, I love writing a contrarian take. My previous post was basically “The so-called ‘Liberal Media’ is actually partially to blame for all that Dr. Seuss nonsense.” Nothing is more fun than saying “Actually, the NYT sucks,” because the NYT sort of does!
This essay is different, because it needs to walk a much finer line than the others. I think that the current wave of Republican-passed election laws are, on the whole, extremely harmful to democracy. Securing the vote is important, of course, and voter fraud should be prevented—but changing all of your voting laws based on rumors of fraud, not even allegations1, is unusual. Doing it right after your party suffered some electoral losses is even more so. Doing it at the behest of a badly-tempered man who is psychologically incapable of accepting that he lost at something, and who holds a lot of power over a decently-sized chunk of the American public, is even worse.
The fundamental issue with these laws is that they signal to bullshit and bluster. Again, nobody has alleged anything improper in the legal sense. Saying nonsense on Newsmax or SuperUSALovingPatriotHeterosexual.com is not a legal allegation, it’s just bullshit. On my platform on this website, I can say “Donald Trump regularly torrents movies illegally” with no consequence. If I were to make that claim in court, I would have to have something legal to back me up, or I’d be in trouble. I think Donald Trump genuinely believes he did indeed win: he’s just not brave enough to put his legal risk where his mouth is.
I, personally, don’t think bullshit and bluster is a good way to decide what to do with our elections. The continued vague handwaving to conspiracies being perpetuated by Republican state legislatures is deeply troubling because it continues the long-running trend of politics being more about feelings and political posturing and the “base” as opposed to facts, policy, and the voting public. These voting restrictions also contain some language clearly designed to gain a partisan advantage, almost always at the expense of Christian voters2.
More troubling is the fact that much of this legislation includes language that give courts or partisan bodies broader powers over elections. These are generally bad: I think that alleging that an election has been done improperly is a serious thing to do, and that it should require a high burden of proof. In general, any crime that is “rare” (as election tampering certainly is) should require a high burden of proof. Hell, any crime at all has a high burden of proof! Giving centralized power in courts or state legislatures to decide specifics of how elections should be ran, as opposed to having them set ground rules, is dangerous because those courts or local officials may try to play that for a partisan advantage.
These laws, specifically, are even more dangerous, because they’re all being done to avoid the wrath of Trump. In our polarized society, winning the base is often winning the election: all you need to do is win the primary, and you’re set, even if your views are generally batshit and unpopular. So, when one person can effectively decide the outcome of primaries, as Trump can, that one person basically gets to decide who gets elected.3 If said person is an older gentleman who is suffering a big loss for the first time in his life and not psychologically dealing with it in a healthy way, well, we’re all going to suffer the consequences.
Democrats, rightfully so, are a bit freaked out about this state of affairs. Many people in Democratic-party-aligned media, notably the hosts of Pod Save America and associated properties, have been pushing hard for a single solution: HR1, a draft bill that passed the house some time ago. The language in which they talk about this bill is almost reverent: this could be our last chance, it could be the only way to save Democracy, and so on.
Well, HR1 is dead, after a single Democratic senator said he wouldn’t vote for it. Worse, that Senator’s modified version of the bill is also dead. So that means Democracy is screwed, right?
Well, uh.
No.
The Nightmare Scenario
First off, let’s describe the scenario that many of the Pod Save hosts have been discussing. It goes something like this:
In 2022, the GOP uses advanced algorithms to Gerrymander the house. With modern computers and statistical estimation techniques, they pick up quite a few seats without actually gaining any more votes. That, combined with targeted voter suppression laws, allows them to win the House easily.
In 2024, Trump runs again. He once again narrowly loses, and once again starts blustering and bullshitting4 about how there was fraud. Republican legislatures decide to send an alternate set of electors, reasoning that their states were won fraudulently, and arguing that they technically have the power to overrule the actual vote counts because of these new laws. The alternate slates of electors causes a constitutional crisis as the house-run GOP votes to accept them, and this goes to the House for a state-based election, where Donald Trump becomes president despite having lost the vote in states that add up to more than 270 electoral votes.
American Democracy is now effectively dead. Civil war or some kind of brutal dictatorship ensues. The only way to stop this horrible calamity from happening is to pass HR1.
Let’s be clear here: Trump himself would love for this situation to happen. The guy cares about #1, and that’s it. It’s obvious from his entire life story. The fact that there is a core group of supporters who would most certainly go along with this nightmare is legitimately terrifying.
But is the story itself terrifying? Is it plausible? Well… Let’s break this down, shall we?
HR1 does a lot, and it’s not the only bill around
One important thing to note here is that HR1 is being misframed by many of the people promoting it. HR1 is not designed narrowly to stop some future steal by Trump. It’s more of a broad electoral reform bill, which includes other components.
It requires PACs and other groups to disclose donors
It requires social media companies to disclose political advertising prices
It adds an ethics code for members of the Supreme Court
It prevents Congresspeople from using taxpayer money to settle sexual harassment cases
It requires presidential candidates to release their tax returns
Now, I think that all of these are pretty reasonable, worthwhile things to do. The fifth one is sort of obviously pointing a finger at Trump, of course, but I think wanting to know the financial decisions of a presidential candidate is a worthwhile goal.5
None of these provisions, however, are narrowly designed to prevent the Pod Save America nightmare. That nightmare relies on three things: massive Gerrymandering, targeted voter suppression laws, and legislatures straight-up ignoring the effects of an actual election. HR1 does a lot more than that, and does nothing to prevent Gerrymandering.
The Manchin Bill, strangely enough, is actually better on these fronts than HR1. It sets universal and broad standards for voter ID (so individual states cannot target their ID requirements to advantage or disadvantage certain demographics), makes election day a national holiday, and eliminates Gerrymandering. On basically all measures it’s actually better at preventing the Pod Save America nightmare scenario.
The way Pod Save America promoted HR1 is already suspect by the very presence of a bill that is, in my opinion, objectively better for the stated goal of preventing the nightmare scenario. If somebody is trying to sell you a train ticket, and telling you that it’s the only way that you’ll be home in time for Christmas, this salesman instantly becomes less credible when somebody offers you a flight to the same destination. The Manchin Bill’s mere existence hurts the credibility of the entire message.
Donald Trump Might Screw the GOP
I don’t think Donald Trump gives a shit about the conservative project.
The guy was talking about how we should take away guns with no due process after a mass shooting, or about how we maybe need to do some populist stuff, or whatever. He cut taxes, sure. But a lot of his general behavior seems to be mostly based on his own personal preferences and whatever he sees on Tucker Carlson’s show.
One of these preferences is a preference not to be a loser. The issue is that he lost.
Now, a lot of the GOP’s base is also not accepting that. But that’s just the GOP’s base. When it comes to Americans in general, about one in three may believe him. Trump’s approval, too, is roughly 30%. This number is scarily high, but notably catastrophically low if the goal is to win elections.
But, it’s probably high enough to win a primary, especially when the percentage among Republican primary voters is substantially higher.
So, let’s try a new scenario. Trump decides to only endorse candidates who vocally and actively say not only that he was cheated, but that he should be reinstated ahead of time. These candidates proceed to easily primary many existing Republican representatives and Senators, and run a general election campaign on some harebrained scheme to elect Trump speaker of the house, and then impeach both Biden and Harris.
Then, in the national popular vote, only that 30% goes along with this insanity.
That’s Democrats winning 70-30. Dems +70.
Even if you give the GOP an additional 10% of people who go along with it anyway, for 40% total. 40%-60%. That’s still Dems +20.
It would be an absolute bloodbath for the GOP. It wouldn’t be a blue wave. It wouldn’t even be a blue tsunami. It would be like a blue supermassive asteroid impact.
Now, obviously, a win that big is unlikely. But Trump could cause some serious problems for the GOP if he doesn’t let his loss go, and I really don’t think that he’s going to let it go.6 So assuming that the Democrats are screwed is a bad mistake to make.
Democrats have State-Level Tools to Fight Back
One of the banes of Democracy at the moment is partisan gerrymandering. It essentially allows political parties to design for themselves “safe” seats, which inadvertently result in the primary process being the actual election, which leads to unqualified and extreme candidates7 gaining those seats. In some states, like New York and my home state of Colorado, this problem is avoided by having independent commissions do the redistricting.
This, however, doesn’t have to be the case.
Republicans are open about using map-drawing for partisan advantage. There’s no federal law against this. Their argument is that this is perfectly legal.
If that’s the case, fine! Democratic states can also go along with this. In New York, they could eliminate five Republican seats. In other states, they could also make gains. Congressional Gerrymandering makes a mockery of our Democracy and may eventually lead to its downfall, of course, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a potentially useful tool. A single ad from AOC saying that “This Gerrymandering stuff is great, it lets me stay in power forever so I can enact socialism!” would probably have the entire GOP base absolutely screaming for an immediate end to federal Gerrymandering right the hell now.
Furthermore, if the rules of the game are such that Gerrymandering is ok, I think a message of “We don’t want to have to do this, but it’s the only way we can make things fair, please encourage your representatives and senators to vote for this bill abolishing the practice if you don’t like it as much as we do” is probably one that could be communicated to the general public.
I’m not a messaging expert, of course, but it’s important to note that these are entirely state-level tools. Even if New York doing a Gerrymander doesn’t cause a federal law to get passed to ban the practice, it does mean that the Democratic Party gets to pick up more seats, and there isn’t anything the GOP can do about it.
Joe Biden will be President in 2024
A key component of the Pod Save America nightmare is state legislatures tossing out the results of a legitimate election because of technicalities and laws on their books. The basic idea is that several states have given stronger powers to partisan elected officials to manage elections, and that these officials might say “look, we think that Jewish Space Magic messed up our ballots, so we’re gonna just send Electors for Trump lmao.8”
The problem with this idea is that it relies on state legislatures basically explicitly saying “no no, we trust Trump over Democracy.” Passing a voting rights bill is going to do nothing against it, especially passing it on a partisan basis. State Legislatures, even if explicitly prohibited from doing something as dumb as throwing out their election by federal law, will just say “That’s a Democrat Communist Law and we’re going to ignore it.” If the premise is that these people will use technicalities and legalese to do something that’s obviously against the very spirit of the Republic, I don’t think a federal law is going to stop them.
The important thing to note here, though, is that Joe Biden is going to be commander in chief of the military, leader of the free world, and the most powerful man on the face of the planet in 2024. If Republican state legislatures are trying to say “we don’t care about Democracy actually,” the most powerful man in the world is a good ally to have. If this leads to outright civil war, the implication of the Pod Save America nightmare that they aren’t willing to say outright, having the guy in charge of the US military be the guy who isn’t a fascist is an incredibly valuable tool.
Again, I think that all of this is pretty speculative and frankly outlandish. Even among GOP voters, who you would expect to virtue signal as hard as possible in polls, the idea that Biden is some sort of election-stealing mastermind only has like 65% support. Taking the extreme step of explicitly ignoring the will of the people and handing the election over based on bullshit puts us in territory that’s so grim no federal law could stop it. The inevitable result would be some kind of violence.
In a circumstance like that, it is extremely good that the person in charge of the military is not the person who people are breaking democracy for. In fact, the idea that an elections bill could prevent this sort of outright, in-your-face steal is farcical. If State Legislatures say “eh screw the voting thing actually,” there will be some kind of conflict, and the people who care about Democracy will be in a very good position to win it.
Not that I think this has any real chance of happening, of course.
There’s a Massive Amount of Institutional Inertia Against Stuff like this
Here’s a fun fact: Donald Trump was President in 2020.
You might have forgotten that fact, because the media and basically everybody treated him as if he was just some internet troll for his whole presidency, but he legitimately had massive power. He controlled the executive branch with essentially sole authority. All of his cabinet members literally served at his pleasure.
Trump, unable to cope with his loss, tried everything to reverse the election. The guy told an angry mob to march on the capitol with barely a “but do it peacefully ok” disclaimer, and after they violently broke into the building, told them how much he loved them in his video where he said to go home. He also had Mark Meadows pressure the justice department to investigate the (outlandish, to say the least) theory that Italian Spy Satellites were used to change votes.9 He even called up the Georgia secretary of state and basically begged him to find some extra Trump votes so he could win.10
Why did none of this work?
Because the United States has many complex institutions, all of which are directly opposed to this sort of thing.
Now, that doesn’t mean that such things aren’t bad. There’s a reason why attempted murder is a crime, even if the attempt is done with comical ineptitude. However, it does mean that stealing an election is a pretty difficult thing to do.
This isn’t even entirely due to some commitment to democracy or other ideals. A lot of it is just inertia. It’s hard to steal an election for the same reason it’s been hard for General Electric to reinvent itself for the modern age: when that many people have “always done it that way,” it’s a herculean task to get them to do something different.
This doesn’t mean that it is no virtue to make our elections harder to steal. I think it’s pretty difficult to break into my house, but I still have security cams and I own a firearm. However, even if I didn’t, I wouldn’t be panicking that somebody was going to break in. Even if crime rates raised slightly in the area, or even raised by a lot, I wouldn’t be freaking out. I wouldn’t be saying “If I don’t buy a security system right now, I am going to be burglarized and lose all my stuff.”
Caution is good, of course. But panic is generally not.
In Conclusion: Calm Down
The Trump Era was a horrible time in American politics. It was not an ideological fight, conservative vs liberal, bimetallic vs gold standard, or even slave state vs free state. It instead focused entirely on the whims of a single person who was popular in all the right places for our electoral system to give him a disproportionate advantage.
I can understand the frustration as we leave this era. I felt like I was losing my mind throughout most of it, as people would say “Oh, you know, he’s just trolling” about somebody with a position that demanded solemnity and respect. What’s worse, most of the media took the same view: ironically, they didn’t give Trump the respect he deserved as President. He was just some guy who tweeted a lot. For four years, I saw conservative relatives do a complete 180 on positions from the importance of the deficit, to the need to replace Obamacare, to the importance of trade deals. Much like watching good friends get into dumb communist podcasts and suddenly become more cynical, less driven people, watching Conservatism die to Trumpism hurt. It hurt even more that everybody seemed to just accept it: the media was “brave” in the sense that they would ask a few zingers at press conferences, but none of them had the courage to discuss the actual spiritual decay that was happening in front of our eyes.
That being said.
One of the sins of Trumpism was exaggeration. We had the best wall, but if we didn’t build it, America would become a third world country. We had the best new trade deals, but if Congress didn’t act, nobody would have a job ever again. These statements where rhetorically effective in that they gained lots of shares on Facebook, likes on Twitter, and coverage (faux outraged or faux enthralled) on the evening news.
But they weren’t true.
Even if you believe that America would be more secure with a border wall, it’s patently obvious that it isn’t something we need to do right now or we’re all gonna die. We’ve gone a long time without a border wall, and change in geopolitics is pretty slow. If you’re an immigration control advocate, being honest about your position11 and about the situation on the ground is more effective in the long run than using wild hyperbole. After all, if we need to build a wall in four years or America is screwed, and four years pass without a wall, you’ve just lost all credibility. All hope is lost, after all—it’s been four years, and that was the cut-off!
On the far left, this same situation often presents itself. If we don’t pass the Green New Deal in two years, all human life on Earth is going to end. If we don’t forgive student debt now, nobody under the age of 30 will ever buy a house.
And, according to Pod Save America and other outlets, if we don’t pass HR1, Trump is going to do a fascist coup.
Now, I think HR1 is a pretty okay bill. I think Manchin’s compromise bill is actually pretty fucking fantastic, all things considered—I’m a fan of bills with a narrower scope, and I think Gerrymandering is actually a much bigger issue than the monetary aspects of elections. I also think either bill would go a long way to making our politics match the actual opinions of our people better.
The problem with the coverage of HR1 is that it didn’t frame these as good bills that would help. It framed it as “maybe our only chance.” It was framed as the best way to prevent a violent fascist coup. And, much like claims that a border wall was the only way to stop MS13 from personally turning your daughter into strips of chili-flavored human flesh jerky, this framing was a lie. It was just wrong.
Joe Biden’s statement on the matter, meanwhile, is yet another example of why he is a more honorable man and a better politician than the young media types who continually doubted him for the last two years.12 He didn’t say that Democracy was dead. He didn’t say that Fascism was inevitable. He acknowledged that the fight for more fair elections and greater voting rights has been going on a long time, admitted that the failure of the Manchin Compromise to pass was a setback along this long road, and pointed towards the future. The guys from Pod Save America tried a similar trick, but it didn’t work out as well: when the end of the world comes to pass, it becomes a lot harder to convince people to keep fighting afterwards.
Politics is a funny business in that it’s very hard to lose. You can lose elections. You can lose the respect or opinion of the public. But none of these conditions are permanent. Politics is not a boxing match or a football game. Politics is a slog. It’s a never-ending death march. Using hyperbole to temporarily motivate people, at the cost of the long-term fight, is foolish. Worse, it’s lying. Democracy is not screwed because the Manchin compromise isn’t going to pass. It’s a setback, much like other things are setbacks.
In a triathlon, if you lose the swimming event, you’re not screwed. You have an awful lot of biking and running to do. You can catch up. You can push harder.
A triathlon coach who screams at you about how you’re falling behind and you need to swim faster or you’re going to lose might shave a few extra seconds off the first portion of the event. But he also puts himself in a horrible position if you lose swimming anyway. He forfeits the credibility to push you through the remaining two events. Worse, he’s lied to you, his athlete.
Politics isn’t three events. It’s a never-ending series of uphill battles. A coach who says that you need to win any single one or you could be screwed is a bad coach.
And everybody who said that HR1 could be our “only chance” is bad at politics.
Almost all of the supposed “voter fraud” or “stop the steal” lawsuits did not allege fraud. They instead alleged procedural flaws, arguing that the PA Governor didn’t have power to change how the election was run, or that observers were not allowed in the room during a count. These would have been bad if they were true (they were not, the courts found insufficient evidence in all cases,) but they’re not allegations of fraud. Nobody argued in court that Biden didn’t actually get that many votes, they tried to argue that some technical part of the process was misplaced. To use a sports analogy, it’s like arguing that a football hadn’t been properly inflated before a game: that would be wrong and something that should be corrected, and probably punished with a fine, but you still lost.
In this case, the Christians happen to be almost entirely black baptists who organize rides to polling places and snacks while people wait in line, so it’s discriminatory along two axes.
Look for a future article titled “I think primaries are actually the devil” for me to expand on this.
Lying. The dude loves to lie.
This will allow me to never vote for any presidential candidate who owns too much crypto.
Look for another future blog post that expands on this topic more after Trump starts his rallies up again.
Such as Ihan Omar, who retweets videos by antisemitic organizations, Lauren Boebert, who ignores her district to get twitter likes, and Marjorie Taylor Green, who thinks that the Rothschilds used a space laser to ignite a wildfire (a doubly stupid conspiracy since paying a guy to pour some gasoline over some leaves is infinitely less expensive and much more difficult to track down).
Once again, this is different than doing any kind of legitimate election audit in the face of actual potential fraud. I’ve said this like eight times in this article, but nobody actually alleged any fraud, they just bullshit about it. I can only assume that this will be the case once again in 2024, if this scenario were to take place.
Which I’m going to guess originally came from somebody who thinks the Pope is the Antichrist.
A verbatim quote: “I just wanna find 11,780 votes.” That is stating explicitly that he wants to find the exact number that would let him win.
Which, to be clear, I vehemently disagree with, and I have studies to tell you why. But that’s another post.
While I don’t hate Pod Save America or the rest of the Crooked Media crew, I will say that their coverage of Biden’s dominance on Super Tuesday after months of completely discounting him was one of the funniest things I have ever listened to.