After Election Day 2024 was over, a consortium of political scientists commissioned a national survey from YouGov, which offered some encouraging results. The New York Times, summarizing the data, noted that Americans “are more confident in the country’s election system than they have been at any time since the 2020 election.”
The shift, alas, was predictable. After Joe Biden’s victory in 2020, Donald Trump, Republicans and allied conspiracy theorists convinced much of the GOP base that the results of the race must be rejected. Indeed, for the better part of four years, ample polling evidence suggested that millions of Republican voters lost confidence in the nation’s electoral system — because the leaders they trusted effectively told them to.
After Trump won a second term, however, those same voters decided that the United States’ system wasn’t so bad after all.
Dartmouth College professor Brendan Nyhan — the director of Bright Line Watch, which commissioned the survey — told the Times, “The increase is heartening. But there’s also bad news, which is we now have to wonder if Republicans will only trust the system if they win.”
It is, to be sure, a critically important dimension to the larger conversation, and it’s painfully easy to believe that in the coming years, much of the GOP will only accept election results when they tell the party what it wants to hear.
But making matters worse is the message the Republican Party’s most influential voice continues to peddle to the public.
Trump made some news earlier this week, issuing a statement in support of incumbent House Speaker Mike Johnson, but in the same message, the president-elect asserted that he won a second term “despite large scale voter fraud taking place in numerous states.”
For now, let’s not dwell on the simple fact that there was no large-scale voter fraud taking place. If Trump and his political operation had any evidence to support such a claim, they would’ve presented it by now.
They haven’t, because the president-elect simply made this up.
But just as extraordinary, if not more so, is Trump’s willingness to undermine public confidence in election results — even when he wins.
When the Republican leader attacks election results after a defeat, it’s transgressive and dangerous, but there’s at least a twisted logic to the rhetorical tactic. When Trump tries to undermine public confidence in elections following a victory, however, that’s evidence of something far more pernicious. If this sounds at all familiar, it’s because it has happened before. After he won in 2016, the Republican spent a fair amount of time insisting that “millions of people … voted illegally.” Four years later, after he lost, Trump pushed the same line. Now, following a second victory, he’s at it again, pointing to fraud that only occurred in his overactive imagination. Why in the world would the president-elect question the integrity of an election in which he prevailed? One can only speculate, but the possible answers aren’t exactly encouraging. It’s possible, for example, that he’s laying the groundwork for the imposition of new voting restrictions to address a problem that doesn’t exist. It’s also possible that Trump, win or lose, just doesn’t like elections very much, and he hopes to convince Americans to share his undemocratic attitudes.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
Latest Post
Recommended
