The Fight for the Presidency May Not End on Election Day

Part of the Series

Voting Wrongs

In the lead-up to today’s pivotal Election Day in the U.S., extremist political rhetoric and actions have taken center stage.

In the Pacific Northwest, several ballot drop boxes were set alight last week, with hundreds of ballots lost to the flames. While anyone who dropped ballots off in those boxes within a specific time period can apply to fill in a new ballot, there’s no guarantee that they will do so; in practice, it’s likely that many burned ballots will simply not be counted.

At a private banquet late last month, Maryland Congressman Andy Harris, chair of the Freedom Caucus, mulled the possibility of North Carolina’s legislators foregoing the niceties of an election and simply pre-allocating the state’s 16 Electoral College votes to former President Donald Trump. North Carolina has a GOP legislative supermajority, which is able to override a veto from the Democratic governor. Bizarrely, the congressman argued this would be done to protect voters, some of whom, he said, might struggle to reach polling stations in the wake of last month’s devastating hurricane.

It isn’t the first time such a strategy has come up. Over the past year and a half, a handful of far right legislators in Arizona have proposed a similar end run around the democratic process. For people who claim to define their politics by a love of “freedom,” such a plot ought to be simply unconscionable. Instead, they lean into such ideas as acceptable strategies in a zero-sum power game.

Upon his release from prison last week, right-wing provocateur and strategist Steve Bannon declared that, as he did in 2020, Trump should preemptively try to declare victory on election night before all the votes have been counted. In other words, “fake it till you make it.”

Meanwhile, U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) and Trump have alluded to a “little secret” that they have hatched to ensure a Trump victory; commentators believe it might well involve a GOP-led House of Representatives refusing to count electors from states where Trump has launched legal challenges, or trying to throw the entire presidential choice to the House of Representatives and the individual state delegations — 26 of which have GOP majorities.

While one would think any sober-minded Supreme Court would intervene to stop such fiercely anti-democratic antics, the hard right majority on that court, three of whom are Trump appointees, has, over the past year, made its political leanings all too clear. In July, the court found that Trump was largely immune from prosecution for otherwise illegal acts committed while he was president; and the most outspoken conservative on the bench, Justice Samuel Alito, was revealed to have flown an upside-down flag outside his home after the 2020 election, a gesture widely interpreted as indicating sympathy with Trump’s “stop the steal” movement.

Meanwhile, associates of retired Gen. Michael Flynn, one of the original far right avatars of the MAGA movement, have been touring the country preparing supporters for what they unabashedly think of as a second January 6, another effort to prevent certification of the Electoral College vote should Trump lose. The general himself has been slightly more circumspect — in a conversation in which questioners touched on whether there should be military tribunals and executions meted out against MAGA’s political enemies, Flynn did not promise an uprising but vowed to open “the gates of hell” against opponents and perceived enemies should Trump win and return him to a position of power.

Associates of retired Gen. Michael Flynn have been touring the country preparing supporters for what they unabashedly think of as a second January 6, another effort to prevent certification of the Electoral College vote should Trump lose.

Trump, from his campaign dais, has repeatedly referred to “the enemy from within,” and has intimated he would use the military against such figures. Among the people he has so labelled as such an enemy are former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Congressman Adam Schiff, who is running to be U.S. senator from California. He has also announced that, if elected, he will immediately fire Special Counsel Jack Smith, and has suggested that Smith ought to be exiled from the United States. It is a crude vision of winning power at all costs, and creates a narrative that only one outcome is possible.

There are those, of course, who say these antics should all be taken in good fun — that it’s just a hyperbolic way of blowing off steam in a high-stress environment. That isn’t the case. In reality, the escalating threats to the country’s democratic processes have profound consequences, with the potential to take the United States down an extremely dark road. When, at political rallies such as the one last month in New York’s Madison Square Garden, entire races and nations are denigrated, there is a spillover effect into the broader culture. When a senior political figure such as Trump invokes bloody images against his opponents, as he did last week when he suggested Liz Cheney ought to have guns trained on her, it comes with consequences.

When fascist messaging — which is how Generals Mark Milley and John Kelly, both of whom served in Trump’s administration, have described the former president’s worldview in recent weeks — becomes normalized, the ricochet effects throughout society are pronounced. It gives a permission slip for everything from online trolling to vigilante preparations.

Around the United States, election workers are facing threats. In the past two years, the Department of Justice has prosecuted roughly 400 cases involving such threats. Even more worryingly, right-wing groups are themselves bragging about their preparedness for violence. This, in a country with roughly 400 million privately owned guns.

People have been voting for weeks now. Election Day is finally here, but that doesn’t mean this election cycle is over. In a healthy democracy, once the votes are in and counted, that would be that. In the United States, in 2024, there’s no evidence that the political fight will end today. Instead, there could be months of legal and political battles over how to count votes and how to certify results. Over all of this looms the very real possibility of force and right-wing violence. It is a threat that would have been familiar to residents of a number of European countries in the early 1930s, as their democracies crumbled before the assembled forces of fascism. It is a threat that, today, we ignore at our peril.