Donald Trump's poll lead in the 2024 presidential election may well be more fragile than it appears.
The most pressing issue for him is the fact that he is on trial in a criminal case. Even if Trump is not convicted, the trial will remove him from all traces.
There's also the issue of the campaign itself, which is smaller and has fewer resources than his 2020 effort. “The situation has alarmed Republican officials in key states such as Arizona, Georgia and Michigan, who have been unable to secure pledged funding, personnel or even new funds since the Trump campaign took control of the Republican National Committee in March. “We have not even received any explanation about the plan,” the newspaper reported. The Washington Post reported.
There's a good chance Trump will maintain his lead through the summer and fall, but he still won't be able to translate his stated preferences into actual votes. What looks solid in the numbers may prove to be temporary in the final tally.
It's too early to tell whether the polls are right or wrong. But what we can say is that if voters do not return Trump to the White House, the former president and his allies are already attempting to contest or overturn the results of November's election. This means that we are laying the foundation for our efforts.
For Mr. Trump, who seems to live in the eternal present, “stopping the steal” is actually not over. He claims to have won the presidential election that sent Joe Biden to the White House, just as he did on November 3, 2020. “We won this state by a landslide,” he told a Wisconsin audience last month. (He lost by 20,682 votes.) He told Time magazine in a recent interview that it “doesn't feel good” to hire someone who believes Biden is the rightful winner of the last presidential election. Told. Asked if he would accept the results of the 2024 election, Trump said he would “if everything is honest.”
Of course, for Trump, it wouldn't be honest if he didn't win.
But it's not just Trump urging Republican voters to reject the results of November's election if Biden wins. His allies are doing the same.
Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio told CNN on Sunday that it was a “free and fair election” and that he and all other Republicans “enthusiastically accept the results.” In other words, if Trump doesn't win, the election won't be free and fair. Mr. Vance is so keen to serve as President Trump's running mate that on Monday he made a pilgrimage to the Manhattan courthouse where the former president is on trial for hush money payments to cover up an affair with a porn star. However, it was also revealed that Mr. Trump is on trial for paying hush money to cover up his relationship with President Donald Trump. Had he been vice president in 2020, he would have directed each state to submit an alternate slate of electors.
Rep. Elise Stefanik (RN.Y.) said she would accept the results if they were “constitutional,” and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R.C.) said the results “absent massive fraud.” He said he would accept it. ”
Now, to this crowd, what is an unfair, unfree, and unconstitutional election whose results were shaped by “massive fraud”?
Recall that after the 2016 presidential election, President Trump blamed his loss in the popular vote on a wave of illegal voting. “In addition to a landslide victory in the Electoral College, we also won the popular vote, minus the millions of people who voted illegally,” he said on Twitter.
Illegal voting was a convenient tool for the president-elect, who relied on the illusion that the United States was under siege by illegal immigrants. The policy remains a useful boogeyman as the former president infuriates his supporters with spitting attacks on immigrants who he says “taint the blood of our country.” While some groups of Trump supporters are promoting the notion of an unfair election, others are centering their rhetoric on fears of illegal voting by immigrants and immigrants living in the country without legal permission. , is building what that means.
“We know intuitively that many illegal aliens vote in federal elections, but that “It's not something that can be easily proven.” Voting in a federal election within the country without legal permission. This is already illegal under current federal law, but Johnson touted the measure as a necessary precaution in the face of uncertain information.
Johnson, who voted in 2021 to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, was initially joined at a press conference by Republican Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) and Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah). I was present at the event. He called on the White House to challenge and seek to overturn the 2020 results in the weeks leading up to January 6. “We have a duty to ourselves, to each other, and most importantly to the American people to ensure that the people making decisions on our behalf are able to make decisions.” “The people and those who elect them to government are certainly empowered to make those decisions,” Lee said, adding that the fiction that recent U.S. elections were shaped by, and even stolen from, rampant illegal voting is “undeniable.” justified.
Stephen Miller, head of the MAGA organization behind some of the former president's most egregious anti-immigrant statements, was also in attendance, slamming the non-citizen vote in characteristically apocalyptic fashion. “American democracy is under attack,” he said, “with wide open borders and thwarting all efforts to verify the citizenship of those who vote in elections.”
All of this gives us a first look of sorts for our next “stop the steal.” Indeed, Mr. Trump could win the November election outright, in which case no elaborate conspiracies would be needed to explain the result. As Vance said, the election will be “free and fair.”
But let's say Biden regains lost ground. Let's say they win the Electoral College with narrow wins in key battleground states, as they did in 2020. Suppose some of those differences were very close. A few thousand votes here, a few thousand votes there. We know what happens next. President Trump has called out “illegal voting,” and most Republicans are likely to follow suit. They will demand that states overturn their results, arguing that Democrats encouraged it with “open borders.” And President Trump in particular has not ruled out using violence to get what he wants.
If the Republican Party can somehow break free from Trump's influence, it will find that there is a simpler explanation here. The point is that Trump, despite his hyperbolic rhetoric, is not really an electoral juggernaut, and the solution to this problem is: Just to put them out to graze.
Most of the time, American political parties move forward when standard bearers are unable to strike a deal with voters. Not so with this Republican Party. We cannot move on from President Trump or accept that he is an unpopular and unpopular figure with most Americans.
It is true that some of this comes from the fact that many in the party have fallen into the trap of the former president's personality cult. But some of it goes even deeper. The Republican Party never moved on from Richard Nixon's “silent majority,” the idea that only the Republican Party represented America's supposedly authentic people. From this perspective, the Democratic Party, no matter how many votes it receives or how many elections it wins, cannot legitimately claim to represent the nation.
From the Tea Party to Mitt Romney's “47%,” to Trump's whitewashing stories about fraud and illegal voting, Republicans are trying to convince Democratic voters and the Democratic majority that they are completely wrong, that is, completely unrealistic and completely unrealistic. are treated as un-American. From this perspective, no matter how many votes the Democratic Party receives or how many elections it wins, it cannot legitimately claim to represent the nation.
Even if Biden wins, we should not expect the threat to American democracy to end. With or without Trump, the Republican Party that cannot share this country with its political opponents is a Republican Party that will always find some way to stop the theft.
This article was originally published in The New York Times.
