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LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN
August 26, 2024
Heather Cox Richardson
Aug 27, 2024
The point that is currently holding up plans for ABC’s September 10 presidential debate is whether the candidates’ microphones will be muted when it is the other’s turn to speak. Vice President Kamala Harris’s team wants the mics “hot”; Trump’s team wants them turned off. Officials on the Harris campaign say they are quite willing for viewers to hear Trump’s outbursts and, in a statement, appeared to bait Trump by saying: “Our understanding is that Trump’s handlers prefer the muted microphone because they don’t think their candidate can act presidential for 90 minutes on his own.”
Over the past few years, observers who have been paying attention to Trump have noted that he appeared to be sliding mentally and warned that when voters saw him again outside his Mar-a-Lago cocoon and his rallies they would be shocked. That prediction appears to have come true. Trump seems to have little interest in doing the actual work of campaigning, instead swinging between grievance-filled rants and flat recitations of his apocalyptic worldview, trying to stay in the center of public consciousness with outrageous lies and, as he did in his suggestion that he would not debate Harris, telling people to “stay tuned!”
But as Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo pointed out today, “nobody cares.” Instead of making him look dominant, his old performance makes him look weak, especially as he appears unable to grapple with Harris’s rise and is still fixated on how “unfair” it was of the Democrats to choose Harris as their presidential candidate. In 2016 and 2020, Trump had the help of talk radio host Rush Limbaugh and the Fox News Channel to push his narrative, but Limbaugh died in 2021 and the Fox News Channel is somewhat chastened after a $787 million settlement over its lies about the 2020 election. Harris and Walz are now setting the terms of debate surrounding the 2024 presidential election, and their dominance illustrates his weakness.
A key element of Trump’s political power was always his insistence that he is by far the nation’s popular choice. In 2016 he insisted that he won the popular vote against Democratic candidate former secretary of state Hillary Clinton—in fact, he lost by almost 3 million votes—and even now, he keeps saying he has all the votes he needs and that he is doing well in the polls, when demonstrably he is not. His constant focus on crowd sizes and enthusiasm is designed to establish the illusion that a majority of people prefer his election to that of his opponents.
By insisting he is the popular choice, Trump has tried to make his election seem inevitable, convincing his loyalists that a loss must be an assault on our democracy and that good Americans will fight to defend both it and him. The Big Lie that he won the 2020 presidential election was intended to cement the idea that the Democrats could win only by cheating. In fact, President Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election by about 7 million votes and won the Electoral College by 306 to 232, the same split that in 2016, when it was in his favor, Trump called a landslide. Trump and his allies lost more than 60 lawsuits challenging the results of the election.
And yet, pushing the idea that Trump cannot lose in a fair election seems to have been a key part of his strategy for 2024. The lie that there was widespread voter fraud in 2020 led to a wave of new state laws to suppress the vote. MAGA lawmakers defended these laws on the grounds that they must respond to voter fraud. The nonprofit law and public policy Brennan Center for Justice recorded that in 2021 alone, from January 1 through December 7, at least 19 states passed 34 laws that restricted access to voting.
In May 2024 the Brennan Center reported that in at least 28 states, voters this year will face new restrictions that were not in place in the 2020 presidential election. Varying by state, these laws do things like shorten the time for requesting an absentee ballot, make it a crime to deliver another voter’s mail-in ballot, require proof of citizenship from voters who share the same name as noncitizens, and so on.
As MAGA Republicans and their plans—especially their assault on reproductive healthcare and the policies outlined in Project 2025—become increasingly unpopular, Republican-dominated states are ramping up their effort to keep the people they assume will oppose them from voting.
In Nebraska, Alex Burness reported in Bolts today, two Republican officials—Attorney General Mike Hilgers and Secretary of State Bob Evnen— last month stopped the implementation of a new state law, passed overwhelmingly by a Republican-dominated legislature earlier this year, that granted immediate voting rights to about 7,000 people with past felony convictions. In the process, Hilgers also declared unconstitutional a 2005 law that had allowed those convicted of a felony to vote two years after they completed their sentence. Evnen then told county-level elections offices that they could not register former felons.
The confusion has made people nervous about even trying to register. “People are scared they’re going to get charged with something if they try to vote and can’t vote, so a lot of people will just wash their hands of it,” Pamala Pettes told Burness. “They don’t want to go and vote unless they have a clear idea of what’s going on. They don’t have that.” More than 100,000 people are caught in this confusion. As Burness notes, the election could come down to the city of Omaha, where thousands of potential voters—overwhelmingly Black, Latino, and Native—have been blocked from registering.
Voter intimidation is underway in Texas, too. On August 18, Fox News Channel personality Maria Bartiromo, who was a key figure in promoting the Big Lie, posted a rumor that migrants were illegally registering to vote at a government facility west of Fort Worth. The Republican chair and election administrator there said there was no evidence for her accusation and that it was false, but Texas attorney general Ken Paxton nonetheless launched an investigation.
In addition to feeding the narrative that there is voter fraud at work in Texas, the investigation led Paxton’s team to raid the homes of at least seven Latino Democrats. No one has been charged in the aftermath of the raids. Latino rights advocates call them a “disgraceful and outrageous” attempt to intimidate Latino voters and have filed a formal complaint with the Department of Justice.
Today, Texas governor Greg Abbott announced that since 2021, Texas has removed more than one million people from the state’s voter rolls, and said the process will be ongoing. Abbott’s office said those removed are ineligible to vote because they have moved, are dead, or are not citizens. But more than 463,000 of those on the list have been removed because their county of residence is unaware of their current address.
Even when voters do make their wishes known, in Republican-dominated states, those wishes are not always honored. David Kurtz of Talking Points Memo today pointed out an article in which Adam Unikowsky, who clerked for the right-wing U.S. Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia, eviscerated a recent decision by the Arkansas Supreme Court that will prevent an abortion rights initiative from appearing on the ballot in November.
Why is the state supreme court keeping an initiative supported by far more than the 10% of voters required by law off the ballot? Because, Unikowsky writes in Adam’s Legal Newsletter, “when the ballot initiative sponsor submitted its petition on the due date, it failed to staple a photocopy of a document it had already submitted a week earlier. The court reached this conclusion even though (a) nothing in Arkansas law requires this photocopy to be stapled; and (b) even if this requirement existed, Arkansas law is clear that the failure to staple this photocopy is [fixable], and the sponsor immediately [fixed] the asserted defect.”
Unikowsky accuses the court of guaranteeing that a measure the people wanted could not win by making sure it was not on the ballot. Further, although Unikowsky doesn’t mention it, keeping abortion off the ballot will generally help Republicans in the Arkansas elections by keeping those eager to protect reproductive rights feel less urgency to make it to the polls.
Another way to suppress the vote is showing up these days in Georgia, where MAGA Republicans in the state legislature have handed control of the state election board to a three-member MAGA majority whose members Trump has personally praised.
The three have been passing a series of last-minute rule changes that will sow confusion over how to conduct an election and then will give Republican-dominated election boards the power to refuse to certify election results. Such a scenario would put into effect the plan Trump and his allies hatched in 2020 to nullify the will of the voters. Tonight the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Party of Georgia sued to stop Trump’s allies from blocking the certification of the 2024 election.
The momentum of the Harris-Walz campaign undermines the Big Lie that Trump is the popular choice, but the voter suppression the Big Lie justified remains. That voter suppression recalls the years of Reconstruction in the American South, when southern Democrats determined to keep Black men from voting found all sorts of ways to do so on grounds other than race, which the Fifteenth Amendment prohibited. Modern media allows us to see today’s machinations in real time, making it easier for civil rights lawyers—who were few and far between in the late nineteenth century—to fight back, and for voters to recognize that they are not alone in their struggle to claim their right to a say in their government.
In her acceptance speech at last week’s Democratic National Convention, Vice President Harris called for the passage of two measures killed by Republicans after 2020: the John Lewis Voting Rights Act and the Freedom to Vote Act. These measures would stop the flow of big money into politics, end partisan gerrymandering, and protect the right to vote.
LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN
HEATHER COX RICHARDSON
