If you think 2020 has been a tumultuous year so far, just wait until November.
A massive effort is underway to delegitimize the result of the presidential election. It’s not the Russians or the Chinese doing it, but U.S. politicians, and even the candidates themselves.
It would once have seemed edgy or over-the-top for the Nation magazine to ask on its cover whether President Trump is planning a military coup d’etat if he loses. Now, this is just par for the course. Old hat, in fact. Democratic officeholders are campaigning to make people think that the vote will not be fair, that the count will be corrupted, and that the other side will not accept defeat. This is a recipe for disaster, even civil unrest.
The highest-ranking Democrat in Washington, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, has been peddling a conspiracy theory about Trump attempting to sabotage mail voting by hobbling the Postal Service. Hillary Clinton, the Democrats’ 2016 nominee, has said Joe Biden should not concede on election night, no matter how large his margin of apparent defeat. From this sort of rhetoric, one gets the idea that Democrats fear Trump has a much better chance of winning than any poll indicates.
But don’t just blame Democrats. Trump is an active participant in this recklessness as well. He has ill-served the nation and perhaps his own campaign by disparaging mail balloting in a way that could discourage his supporters from using it. Mail balloting has its flaws, to be sure, and mailed ballots are statistically less likely to be counted. But Republicans used to be adept (in some states they still are) at getting their voters to request absentee ballots and return them early. For older voters, a natural Trump constituency, the mail-in vote is the easiest way to participate in an election.
Trump is also known to have said that millions of illegal votes are cast in each U.S. election, a baseless assertion that is more likely to discourage his supporters from bothering to vote.
In 2016, Trump hinted that he might not accept the election result if he lost, making explicit the implication of probable cheating that Democrats have suggested about every election they’ve lost since 1968. Clinton was eager to point out Trump’s transgression before Election Day. But then she returned the favor in an even more grievous and absurdly hypocritical manner. She lost and has refused to admit it or accept the legitimacy of Trump’s presidency ever since. Her behavior has been disgraceful.
Democrats spent years promoting the discredited idea that Russia got Trump elected. And 2016 isn’t the only recent election about which Democrats remain in denial after having clearly lost.
As the Washington Examiner’s Kristen Soltis Anderson points out, polling now shows that less than half of the public believes that the election tally will accurately reflect how people vote this year. With political leaders of the sort we have, is it any wonder?
Such talk could lead to some serious upheaval this fall, and all in a year when the nation already seems to have suffered decades worth of serious upheaval.
Every time there is a vote, democracy requires goodwill and buy-in from the losers. They cannot like the outcome, but if they refuse at least to accept it, the system begins to fall apart.
How will Trump’s supporters react if he leads on election night and his lead is eaten away in subsequent days and weeks by the slow counting of mail ballots? How will Democratic voters react if Trump once again ekes out a win, perhaps again only in the Electoral College rather than in the popular vote?
This is why rhetoric encouraging the delegitimization of the coming election is so dangerous and irresponsible. It is leading the nation toward a crisis in which people abandon lawful processes for the sort of street violence that leftists have been inflicting upon most big cities for the past several months. If our political leaders are interested in putting their country first, they will drop it.
