The lawsuit filed by two Waynesboro Republicans who want to block certification of the Nov. 5 election is a tangible result of the lessons learned by the Donald Trump side over the past eight years.
The Trump campaign didn’t even expect their guy to win in 2016, as you saw with the botched transition that played out for the entirety of Trump’s four years in the White House, with tens of thousands of jobs in the administration left unfilled.
We’re lucky they didn’t know what they were doing, because other than packing our Supreme Court with MAGA loyalists, there wasn’t a lot of other lasting damage done to the foundation of our system of government.
From not expecting to win in 2016, and not knowing what to do with the spoils of their victory, the Trump side went into 2020 not imagining that it could lose, which is why we saw the response in the form of whack-a-mole after-the-fact lawsuits, Trump on recorded phone calls trying to convince state election czars to find him votes, pressure on Mike Pence to just give him the election, and when all of that failed, the attempted coup.
Going into the 2024 cycle, the Trumpers seem to finally know what they’re doing.
Their Project 2025 is a blueprint for what they want to do in office, after wasting the four years from 2017 to 2021, and it also identifies the people that they want to serve in both key roles and middle management.
On the election side of things, they’re clearly not waiting until after the election to challenge the results, as we’re seeing with this frivolous lawsuit in Waynesboro, in which the two Republican members of the electoral board are saying they won’t fulfill their basic ministerial duty under state law to certify the election.
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A former commissioner of the Virginia Department of Elections testified in Waynesboro Circuit Court on Tuesday that their refusal could have “cascading” impacts up the chain, to the point of threatening the ability of the State Board of Elections to certify the statewide vote.
It’s no surprise that Attorney General Jason Miyares, a Republican who is a top candidate to be his party’s nominee for governor in the 2025 cycle, didn’t bother to involve his office in defending the rights of voters in this case.
Miyares was too busy getting the Trump Supreme Court to overturn a lower-court ruling that had frozen the efforts of the Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin, to strip the voting rights of more than 1,600 Virginia citizens, whose only sin was not checking the right box on a confusing form at the DMV.
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Youngkin and the state GOP have also been working with the Republican National Committee on a poll-observer program that seems to be oriented toward providing a flood of questionable paperwork that the governor could try to use to justify not signing off on the certification of the state’s election results, which would pull Virginia’s 13 electoral votes, which are going to go to the Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris, off the table.
Keep in mind, everything I’ve spelled out here is just what we know is going on in Virginia.
Republicans in the North Carolina state legislature have floated a scheme to have the GOP-supermajority legislature vote to just up and give Trump the state’s 16 electoral votes no matter what the popular-vote count there is.
The state is currently viewed as a toss-up between Trump and Harris, but the winds seem to be blowing in the Dems’ direction, with the gubernatorial race between Democrat Josh Stein and Republican Mark Robinson trending toward a Stein landslide.
Throw in New Hampshire, where Harris has a 5.1-point lead in the FiveThirtyEight.com polling average, and a Republican, Chris Sununu, is the governor; Nebraska, where Harris has a double-digit lead in District 2, and a Republican, Jim Pillen, is governor; and Nevada, which is a toss-up leaning toward Harris, and a Republican, Joe Lombardo, is governor; and we could have as many as 40 electoral votes held up.
Harris has a clear path to an electoral majority of 270, but if she needs to get to 310, things get dicier, and if neither candidate gets 270, the election ends up in the House, where the process set forth by the Constitution favors Republicans.
ICYMI
And if somehow all of this ends up not being enough to tilt the scales in the Trumpers’ favor, they’re not going to wait until Jan. 6 to use violence to achieve their aims.
We’re already seeing some of that starting to be an issue at scattered polling places across the country, so just imagine how crazy things will get when the polls close, and election officials start counting votes, and armed mobs start to gather outside the polling places and central offices.
A relative few guys in suits cut short the vote count in a Florida county in 2000 to pave the way for George W. Bush to “win” that election.
What we’re going to see in a few days is going to be nothing like that Brooks Brothers riot.
If you’re thinking with me on this, then, Harris seems on course to win the popular vote by a margin between the 3 million that Hillary Clinton won by in 2016 and the 7 million that Joe Biden won by in 2020, and to get somewhere in the area of the 302 votes that Biden got in the Electoral College, and Trump could still end up president again, despite losing both.
And the reason for that would be systematic chicanery that the Trumpers have meticulously put in place over the past four years.
What’s frustrating to me here is, Democrats don’t seem to have done anything to counter what we all had to know was coming, and we’re now seeing spring into action.
We’re stuck in the mode of, the system has always worked, even when we all know that we were Mike Pence not doing the right thing away from Trump stealing the last election.
We’re going to be the ones scrambling like the Trumpers back in 2020.
The only thing we’ve got going for us is the vice president overseeing the Jan. 6 vote count is a Democrat.
Everything else – from Republican governors in states that look to be a part of the Harris electoral coalition, to the Trump-packed Supreme Court that is primed and ready to do its part – is stacked against us.
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Chris Graham
