Joe Biden’s belated decision not to seek reelection has turned the Democratic prospect of almost certain defeat in November into one where victory seems at least possible. Not probable — given the abruptness of the anointment of Kamala Harris as the party’s standard bearer, the policy baggage she carries, and American voters’ proven reluctance to elect a woman as head of state — but at least possible.
Many wayward ducks still have to fall into line, including her picking a running mate who can secure desperately needed electoral votes — which argues forcefully for Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro — and Team Trump continuing to whale away with the racist, misogynistic attacks that tend to alienate suburban women and independent voters. But in the end, assuming Harris can project an even-keeled persona and not overdo the progressive policy schtick that might be her gut inclination, the Trump-Harris matchup will be a much closer call this November than Trump-Biden would have been.
And that’s a problem.
Until Biden stepped aside, it seemed as though the Democratic Party had cynically decided to throw in the towel and concede the presidency to Trump, let him have his last four years, let the country get sick of him all over again, clear the decks of all the octogenarians, and reset for 2028 with a fresh set of faces and a careful, competitive primary season that would result in a near-sure winner. And after the attempted assassination, where Trump cannily seized the opportunity to play martyr as well as cult leader, I for one was preparing to accept this dismally pragmatic outcome, even though some of us literally don’t have the time for four more years in Trumpland.
But there was another, less mentionable consolation to the prospect of a Trump landslide: it would mean we wouldn’t have to endure, again, the attempted usurpation of the will of the people that followed the 2020 election. We could have foregone the authoritarian tantrums and endless guerrilla lawfare that led up to and followed January 6, 2021. We wouldn’t have had to witness for a second time the sickening spectacle of a supreme narcissist and his lackeys working hard to subvert the federal, state, and local mechanisms through which we act out our form of democracy.
Was this wish to avoid a repeat of the political thuggery of the last presidential transition just a capitulation to it? In a way it was. But one could also rationalize that maybe Hamilton was right and we really do get the government we deserve, that we need to live through the consequences of our worst political instincts before we can once again rise above them.
As it is, though, we’re unlikely to get off that easy. Of course it will be better to have a closely-contested presidential election than the one we were facing, in which an energized demagogue would have run roughshod over a doddering bureaucrat. But close contests, made more likely by our asinine system of winner-take-all allocations of electoral votes, incentivize the claims of fraud and other vote count disputes that Trump’s minions have had four more years to plan for.
The electoral denialism that followed the 2020 election was just a rehearsal for what we will face if it’s close this time around. Ardent Trump supporters are so outraged that he lost last time, and so appalled at what they see as our country’s accelerating transformation into a woke socialist hellhole, that they believe almost any means to change that end are justified. A return to the boring agenda of adult governance is like withdrawing an addictive drug that they’ll fight to continue to receive. Most of our state legislatures and executive branches are dominated by Republicans, many of whom have either endorsed Trump’s fiction of a stolen election or have concluded that old fashioned democracy doesn’t bode well for them politically, and have enacted laws that make voting more difficult and partisan interference in future elections more likely.
Trump’s lawyers are in hair-trigger litigation mode already, as evidenced by their challenge to the transfer of campaign funds from Biden-Harris to Harris and their complaint to the FEC that Biden’s Oval Office speech regarding his resignation violated the Equal Time Rule. If the electoral vote margin is razor-thin, count on at least one swing-state legislature to try to change their slate of electors in favor of Trump between Election Day and when the electors convene on December 17. Expect lawsuits over rejected ballots, mail-in ballots, and any ballots at all that aren’t for Trump.
And in a country where there are more guns in circulation than people, and we’re encouraged by open-carry and stand-your-ground laws to use them, the prospect for threats and armed violence to achieve political ends is far less preposterous than it should be.
We should be preparing for the worst so that if this election is as close as the last two, we’re not shocked into immobility as we were on that January 6th. Learn, by name and office, who runs elections in your state and locality. Demand that local media begin to monitor those officials’ plans for running the November election, and how they intend to keep voting easy, private, protected, and accurate. Demand that the leaders of your state legislature pledge that there will be no changing of the statutorily prescribed method for appointing presidential electors.
It seems absurd to have to say these things, to prepare for what should be unimaginable. But if we’re to prevent the past from becoming a prelude, we must.