For all the cries that President Trump’s challenge to November’s election result constitutes an unprecedented attack on political norms, it was only four years ago that influential Democratic politicians and left-leaning pundits were calling for him to be stopped from entering the Oval Office.
In 2017, the late Rep. John Lewis, a Georgia Democrat who died this year, refused to attend the president’s inauguration out of his belief that Trump was an “illegitimate president.”
Then-House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi tweeted in May 2017: “Our election was hijacked. There is no question.” Just over a week following this year’s election, Pelosi sang a different tune in a joint news conference with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat, calling Trump’s legal challenges “an absurd circus.”
“The longer Senate Republicans are playing this sad game is the longer they are denying families much-needed relief from the COVID health and economic crisis,” Schumer added.
Prominent economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman opined earlier this month that presumptive President-elect Joe Biden “[will] be the first modern U.S. president trying to govern in the face of an opposition that refuses to accept his legitimacy.”
Contrary to Krugman’s claims, a number of those on the Left refused to recognize Trump’s victory. In the immediate aftermath, the Atlantic’s Peter Beinart floated the idea of stopping Trump’s ascension to the presidency via the Electoral College and having state electors simply cast their votes for Hillary Clinton due to the existential risk of climate change or nuclear war.
“The prospect of a Trump presidency, however, is terrifying too, terrifying in unprecedented ways. Which is why, for the first time in modern American history, there’s a plausible case for urging the electors to vote their consciences,” he wrote on Nov. 21, 2016. “The case is not overwhelming. But it’s not absurd. It all depends on how dangerous you think President Trump would be.”
Shortly after that column, a coalition of a half-dozen Democratic electors signed a pledge to block Trump from achieving an Electoral College majority, citing his lack of a popular vote win and the supposedly unique threats he posed to the country. A week before that effort, California Sen. Barbara Boxer, a Democrat, quietly proposed a bill to abolish the Electoral College altogether in a not-so-subtle-effort to potentially deny Trump a win months before his inauguration.
Various Electoral College schemes reached the airwaves of MSNBC, with prime-time host Chris Hayes surmising that states Trump won could simply refuse to send GOP electors to Congress in a heroic effort to save the country.
“There are people who have been pushing very hard who think that because of some of the constitutional perils of the emoluments clause, because of the popular vote margin, because of fundamentals they think are a threat to liberal democracy that electors should be persuaded and pressured on Monday and to part to what their pledge is and vote against Donald Trump,” Hayes said in an interview with left-wing filmmaker Michael Moore, who applauded the idea.
Fun fact: states decide how to apportion their electors. They could give them all to, say, whichever candidate won majority of counties!
— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) December 6, 2016
His interview with Moore was followed by a tweet in December, mentioning the technically constitutional but unprecedented scenario where states can simply ignore who voters picked for president.
“Fun fact: states decide how to apportion their electors. They could give them all to, say, whichever candidate won majority of counties!” he tweeted in December.
When the time came to formally certify Trump’s Electoral College victory In January 2017, a number of House Democrats voiced objections. Lawmakers from Michigan, Florida, Mississippi, Alabama, and North and South Carolina all motioned against formalizing the election’s results, citing Russian interference and alleged voter suppression.
“… The confirmed and illegal activities engaged by the government of Russia designed to interfere with our election and the widespread violations of the voting rights act that unlawfully suppressed thousands of votes in the state of Alabama,” Massachusetts Rep. Jim McGovern said on the House floor before being overruled by then-Vice President Biden, who said the Democratic lawmaker’s objections were out of order.
Much of the discussion about denying Trump an Electoral College was fueled by the conspiracy theory Trump was an agent of Russia or that the country interfered with voting totals in key swing states.
A strong majority of Democratic voters agreed. A 2018 poll from YouGov found 66% of Democrats believed Russia tampered with the election results to hand Trump a victory.
Hillary Clinton potentially did as well, who initially waited a night to concede to Trump in November 2016. Three years later, she still referred to her former opponent as an “illegitimate president.”
In an interview with Hardball’s Chris Matthews, Rep. Eric Swalwell, a Democrat, was asked by the host if he believes Trump is an espionage asset of Vladimir Putin, akin to domestic Soviet spies in the 1940s.
“He’s working on behalf of the Russians, yeah,” the lawmaker responded.
For all the complaints about Trump’s legal hijinks, Democrats remain supportive of Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams’s refusal to concede her race against Republican Brian Kemp in 2018. That race was decided by fewer than 55,000 votes, and Abrams remains insistent that voter suppression cost her a win, despite record-high turnout.
In Sunday’s debate between Georgia Sen. Candidate Raphael Warnock and incumbent GOP Sen. Kelly Loeffler, the Democrat alleged Abrams’s complaints differed from the president’s.
“Listen, suppression is something that happens all across our country. It’s happened here in the state of Georgia,” he said.
