Remember when it was bad to describe elections as “rigged?” Such terminology was Exhibit A, proving President Donald Trump’s anti-democratic tendencies.
That’s all gone out the window as Democrats protest both Republican redistricting efforts ahead of the midterm elections and the recent Supreme Court Voting Rights Act decision by using the “r-word.”
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House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) accused the “illegitimate Supreme Court majority” — “It’s the Trump Court,” he said — of hatching a “scheme to suppress the vote and rig the midterm elections.”
“The extremists have completely and totally failed America,” he added. “So they’ve concluded, aided and abetted by the Trump Court, that they have to cheat to win.”
“MAGA has rigged the system,” Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) wrote on social media after the Virginia Supreme Court tossed the 10-1 Democratic map on the grounds that the referendum in which it was approved violated the state Constitution. Newsom, a leading candidate for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination, protested that other, Republican-led states pursued mid-decade redistricting without a statewide vote at all, as if all state redistricting and constitutional amendment processes are identical or that any were designed by “MAGA.”
Former President Barack Obama urged Virginians to erase all but one of the Republican districts in their purplish state using similar terminology.
“Virginia, we are counting on you,” he said in an ad. “Republicans want to steal enough seats in Congress to rig the next election and wield unchecked power for two more years. But you can stop them by voting ‘yes’ on April 21.”
The New Republic warned of Trump’s “plot to rig midterms as polls turn brutal.”
One can plausibly object to mid-decade redistricting as a practice, and neither party has clean hands when it comes to partisan gerrymandering. But the steady drumbeat that the election fix is in, maintained by the same people who are themselves using whatever leverage they have to maximize their partisan advantage ahead of the voting, goes well beyond such reasonable good-government concerns.
Before Trump’s “stop the steal” machinations in 2020, a poll by the Economist and YouGov found that two-thirds of Democrats believed it was probably or definitely true that “Russia tampered with vote tallies in order to get Donald Trump elected president.” That would be quite the steal, if it weren’t for the fact that there was absolutely no evidence this actually happened.
Relatively few elected Democrats went quite this far, but many hinted at it with imprecise claims that Russia “hacked the election” in 2016. Even the more modest claims of Trump-Russia collusion weren’t substantiated by special counsel Robert Mueller’s lengthy investigation.
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Unlike Trump in 2020, Al Gore and Hillary Clinton accepted their election losses. But they also undermined the legitimacy of their Republican opponents’ victories to anyone who would listen. What Trump did was a dramatic and dangerous escalation, as is his wont. But the partisan conviction that the election wasn’t totally on the up and up was not his creation, nor has this kind of talk died down among Democrats since then.
The only way Democrats are likely to heed the Rahm Emanuel types in their party and moderate ahead of the 2028 election is if they underperform in the midterm elections. But if a disappointing outcome can be even semi-plausibly blamed on gerrymandering or the Supreme Court, even that seems far-fetched. “Rigging” will further radicalize Democrats.
