Desperation and even panic in Trumplandia

This election is by no means over, but Joe Biden leads in the polls. The two best forecasts (The Economist and 538) give him a better than 85% chance of winning in the Electoral College. The popular vote has long been a foregone conclusion. Biden will beat Trump by more than the 2.8 million votes that Hillary Clinton beat him by. If Trump wins, it would be the third Republican victory since 2000 with a minority of the popular vote, due mainly to the overweighting in the Electoral College of relatively unpopulated states. Both Trump and Biden are campaigning in states like Iowa, North Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, all of which Trump won easily in 2016. The states that put him over the top last time–Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin–all seem to be Biden’s this time around, if people vote they way they poll.

Americans are ready to vote overwhelmingly against Trump because of his failure to respond appropriately to Covid19 and the damage this failure has wrought on the economy. His racism, misogyny, egotism, coarse lack of empathy, defiance of laws and tradition, blatant nepotism, mistreatment of asylum seekers, corrupt exploitation of public office for private gain, and encouragement of right-wing violence are factors as well. But it is mainly incompetence that has made him the underdog against an even older establishment Democrat who once seemed out of the running in a crowded primary field. Biden exudes precisely what Trump lacks: competence, fairness, empathy, and commitment to orderly and legal governance. Nebraska Republican Senator Sasse put it well:

Republicans are beginning to perceive the dismal election outcome that awaits them. They are determined to blunt its impact. First and foremost they want to make sure the Supreme Court is heavily loaded in their direction with the Senate confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett. While lauding her “originalist” judicial philosophy, what they are really looking for is her loyalty to Trump in election-related cases, her willingness to strike down the Supreme Court’s decision to allow abortion, her antipathy to President Obama’s health care law, and her religious fervor. She never explained in her hearing last week how she squares originalism with her charismatic Catholicism, which definitely was not to be found among America’s founders. I’d bet originalism will play second fiddle to her political and religious commitments.

Next in the Republican playbook is to prevent as many people from voting as possible, knowing that the surge of interest in this election is vastly stronger among those who will vote for Biden. Republicans are in state and Federal courts all over the country trying to tighten restrictions on voting, on the demonstrably false premise that there is a lot of voting fraud. Next will come an inundation of court challenges to the polling, counting and tabulation of votes, focused in part on ballots mailed in since the Republicans are convinced most of them come from Democrats who take Covid 19 seriously and therefore hesitate to come to polls on election day.

If they are successful in casting doubt on the results in some battleground states, Trump’s minions will then try to get state legislatures to intervene and decide for whom the state’s electoral votes should be cast. This is something that hasn’t really happened in a century or so, but in at least some states it is still legally possible. If that fails, I won’t be surprised to see right-wing “militias”–armed groups with political purposes–show up to interfere with the casting of electoral votes on December 14, so that no one gets a majority in the Electoral College. That would force the decision on who gets to be the next president into the House of Representatives, where each state would have a single vote. In the current House, most states have majority-Republican delegations, but it is not the current House that decides. It would be the one elected on November 3, which will sit in early January.

Trump himself said Friday:

“Could you imagine if I lose? I’m not going to feel so good. Maybe I’ll have to leave the country, I don’t know.”

He and his supporters know they cannot win this election by getting more votes. But if the margins are close in a relatively few battleground states, they can hope to steer the outcome through the courts and state legislatures to their desired outcome in the Electoral College or to no outcome at all. I hope this anti-electoral putsch will turn even more Americans, Republican and Democratic, in Biden’s direction. It’s a strategy reflecting desperation and even panic more than confidence.