Increasingly, MAGA Republicans associated with Trump are convinced he is going to lose the election. But they have a backup plan to put him in the White House no matter what. And that plan even has a second backup plan of its own.
The three states most likely to swing the election in the Electoral College this year are Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. And, just by coincidence of course, Republicans in those states recently passed laws guaranteeing Election Day chaos around their vote counting this November 5.
Trump and the GOP know there’s little chance he’s going to win the national popular vote; the last Republican initially elected to the White House with a majority of America’s voters was George H.W. Bush in 1988. Republicans just aren’t that popular with the American people.
Poppy Bush’s son George lost in 2000 by a half-million votes but got five Republicans on the Supreme Court (including two appointed by Daddy) to block the recount in Florida that would have shown that Al Gore won the state and thus that year’s election.
Like Bush, Trump lost the election in 2016 by three million votes. But in five swing states—focused on by Vladimir Putin and Jill Stein—he was able to eke out a tiny Electoral College win. And then everybody forgot he had lost by three million votes. Tip your hat to our media.
This year, Republicans are again counting on the Electoral College (and Jill Stein, Putin, and Elon Musk) as their first line of defense, focusing billions of dollars on a handful of swing states with ads that range from deceptive to outright lies. It’s all backed up by a massive Russian effort on social media.
If it looks like that’s going to fail, however, their primary Plan B is to replicate their 2000 strategy of messing with the vote at the local level and using the chaos from that to get the election in front of their Republican friends in the Supreme Court. To that end, they’re preparing a variety of lawsuits (check out Marc Elias’s site, Democracy Docket) in swing states.
As Joyce Vance noted Friday at her excellent Civil Discourse Substack newsletter: “This cycle, Republicans are filing so many meritless cases that it’s fair to wonder if their goal isn’t to win legitimate cases at all. Those cases are useful as a way to try and convince voters, in advance of the election, that the system is rigged against Trump.”
Their biggest weapon in this fight for both public perception and legal standing, however, won’t initially appear in a courtroom. Instead, it’ll be played out in the media immediately after Election Day, as the result of farsighted 2020 efforts by Republicans in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.
Anticipating just this scenario, Republicans in those three states—when they controlled them in 2020—passed sweeping election laws preventing any mail-in ballots from being counted until Election Day, guaranteeing that election workers would be overwhelmed and the results would be delayed.
Democrats took over Michigan and in 2023 amended the law so ballots can be processed before Election Day, thwarting their plans there. But Democrats don’t and haven’t taken back the legislatures of Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, so the GOP’s laws stand: Mail-in ballots can’t be counted until Election Day in those states.
Republicans did this for a very simple reason.
Ever since Operation Eagle Eye and the election of 1964, Republicans have used the canard of “voter fraud” to throw people off the voting rolls, challenge signatures on mail-in ballots from Democratic areas, and generally make it harder to vote. Over the last 30 years, it’s become the main way they’ve stayed in power in about a third of the United States (particularly Florida, Georgia, and Texas).
Their strategy is based on a simple foundation: They’ve spent the past decade convincing their voters to cast their ballots in person on Election Day rather than in advance by mail, so when Election Day rolls around, they know the initial results will favor the Republican candidate.
Then the mail-in Democratic votes come in hours, sometimes days, later.
This period—when it could appear that Trump has won because the Harris mail-in votes haven’t yet been counted—is the sweet spot Trump is already signaling he’ll take advantage of. As NBC News reported this week, after asking a former Trump adviser if such a scenario—Trump claiming victory the evening of the election before the final count is known—was probable this November 5:
“‘100 percent,’ a former Trump adviser said when asked what the person thought the odds were that the former president would prematurely say he won. ‘Duh! Is the pope Catholic? There are few things in politics I would ever say you could make a firm bet on. That is one of those.’
“An early declaration of victory could be facilitated by what’s known as a ‘red mirage.’ That happens when Republicans appear to have a lead on election night because in-person votes are generally counted quickly—but that lead could disappear in the days after November 5 as absentee and early voting ballots are counted.
“In 2020, Trump quickly proclaimed victory on election night, even though he ultimately ended up losing to Joe Biden.”
Between the “red mirage” scenario and the multiple challenges local Republican election volunteers will launch against voters themselves, GOP strategists hope to create enough confusion that it’ll provide a smokescreen for their six Republican allies on the Supreme Court to rule that—because of “election irregularities”—the election should be handed to Trump or thrown to the House of Representatives, per the Twelfth Amendment.
Under that scenario, each state’s House delegation has one single vote for president (the Senate is not involved under the Twelfth Amendment), and right now there are 26 state delegations controlled by Republicans. That vote will be taken by the next Congress, not this one, but Democrats have little hope of flipping any House delegations, so chances are that Trump would win the presidency by a 26–24 vote of House delegations.
As Jim Rutenberg and Nick Corasaniti recently wrote for The New York Times: “The Republican Party and its conservative allies are engaged in an unprecedented legal campaign targeting the American voting system. Their wide-ranging and methodical effort is laying the groundwork to contest an election that they argue, falsely, is already being rigged against former President Donald J. Trump.”
Justin Rosario notes, over at The Banter Newsletter, that this is explicitly at the core of the challenges the GOP has planned to inflict on our media and legal systems for the days and possibly weeks after November 5: “All Republicans who actually pay attention to how ballots are counted are aware of this. Every single one of them will still say it’s a sign of fraud that we will not have results on election night. This is an integral part of the coming coup and we all need to be aware of it.”
Many in the GOP see this election as a life-or-death moment for the party. That’s why they’re willing to lie, cheat, and offer favors to billionaires and foreign dictators just to get Trump into the White House.
The GOP hasn’t won the White House by majority vote, as mentioned, since 1988. And the two Republican presidents prior to Bush Sr., Nixon and Reagan, both chose to engage in naked treason—Nixon blowing up LBJ’s Vietnam peace deal, and Reagan getting the Iranians to hold the U.S. hostages, respectively—to gain the White House.
Republican leaders and the billionaires who own them know that if they lose this election in a blowout, it might be years before they can again climb to power, particularly if the Harris administration is successful in rebuilding the American middle class that’s been gutted so badly by Reaganomics.
They’re desperate, and, as anybody who’s ever cornered a rat knows, desperate also means dangerous: Anything goes. The days immediately following November 5 will probably be insane.
The Harris campaign says they’re aware of this, as is Marc Elias. The rest of America needs to know the scheme too. Forewarned, after all, is forearmed, and one key to the GOP pulling this scam off will be public opinion.
We can’t let them have that advantage.
