With a Democratic wipe-out projected in next week’s midterms, the Trump administration is already gearing up to interfere with the results. Trump himself ordered his Justice Department to file a lawsuit that would block the certification of the results of Alaska’s Senate race should the Republican candidate lose. He has spent years fomenting distrust in America’s electoral system — if he wins its legit, if he loses it’s rigged. Conservative harassment of election workers has driven many out of their jobs, and some from their homes. Given ICE’s aggressive tactics against immigrants and US citizens alike, election-watchers are concerned that ICE agents could be at polling places, intimidating non-white US citizens (multiple American citizens have been detained and even killed by ICE agents); the Trump administration has refused to rule out the possibility of ICE presence. The administration is deploying more than 1,000 election observers, ostensibly pro-Trump ideologues tasked with raising doubts about Democratic wins. Then there’s the Insurrection Act, which Trump could use to deploy the military on or after Election Day; that, too, is a possibility he has refused to rule out.
Trump is not doing this alone. He has a team of enablers and fixers who are figuring out how to illegally prevent, cast doubt upon, or overturn Democratic wins. And he has a party behind him that is happy to play dirty. It seems notable, for example, that among the most obviously and egregiously gerrymandered states in the nation, most are Republican.
Which is not to say that Democrats are angels — many Democratic states are ridiculously gerrymandered, too, and Democrats also know how to play dirty. But both parties are not actually the same. Democrats have not refused to accept the results of free and fair elections, and have not sown doubts about the integrity of the American electoral system. Trump has — and his Republican Party has backed him, even as many Republican legislators no doubt know that this claims are flatly false.
(Democrats, notably, have also never done anything like the disgrace of Jan. 6).
The best-case scenario, of course, is that next week’s elections go off smoothly, and that Trump and his GOP accept the results with grace. I suspect, though, that a handful of races will be extremely close, and if they tip toward the Democrat, Trump and his team will do what they can to invalidate the results. I suspect, too, that there may be attempts at influencing the elections the day of.
This interference may be inevitable. But tolerating it is not.
