The Republican Party Against Democracy

A fundamental principle of democracy is that parties must accept that their opponents will sometimes win. Fight the elections fiercely, perhaps fiercely, but in the end, politicians and parties must accept that their opponents can and must sometimes be able to win elections and exercise political power.

Republican Party in 2018, it is that they no longer seem to believe it.

Following a mid-election election in which Republicans lost 40 seats in the House, Republicans were willing to question perfectly legitimate election results simply because they did not did not like the result. President Trump spread violent conspiracy theories about the "19459007" polls in the Florida Senate race and the fact that undocumented immigrants vote en masse for Democrats at California House. We have heard similar sentiments from such personalities as Lindsey Graham Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio.

Some Republican states have even decided to cancel the results of this year's elections. Last Friday, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker signed a bill that gives elected Democratic governor Tony Evers the essential powers that defeated Walker in November. The Michigan Republicans are currently weighing on a similar bill, and both are following in the footsteps of Republicans in North Carolina, who passed a power-down bill after a democratic victory of the governor in the 2016 race. 19659005] These acts go far beyond normal democratic discourse. and take, where the parties are fighting over the rules of the margined elections. They violate basic democratic principles and reveal that modern government is a threat to the American political system itself.

Today's Republicans are not ideologically opposed to democracy, unlike Fascists and Islamists. They are more concerned with power than basic democratic principles and are willing to hit on the latter if it allows them to win first. This republican attitude is more indifferent to democracy than to antidemocracy, reflecting a party so caught up in a partisan fight that it can not recognize the authoritarian way it borrows. instincts. The president's rhetoric about illegitimate elections is the kind of language that in some countries has provoked political crises: the leader who loses an election then refuses to admit defeat. But the institutionalized Republican party does not want to control Trump and supports his game because he is part of their team against the Democrats.

The result is a mutually reinforcing cycle. Republican indifference to democracy allows Trump to behave wildly and dangerously; in turn, Republicans defend Trump and further weaken the foundations of the democratic system.

A recipe for a crisis, and 2018 showed us what would be the most likely critical point: a defeat of Trump in the presidential election of 2020.

The elections of 2018 and the impending crisis in 2020

An astonishing number of Republicans attacked the legitimacy of the November elections in the days and weeks that followed.

Take Florida, where it appeared that the Republicans had won both Senate Races and Governor. As the count went on, it became clear that the overnight electoral consensus was premature, and Democrats Bill Nelson and Andrew Gillum were cutting margins due to late votes in Liberal strongholds like Broward County. The closer the margins were, the more Republicans were ready to cry scandal.

Florida Governor Rick Scott, who ran in the Senate, accused Nelson of "clearly trying to defraud voters to win this election". "Democratic lawyers" tried to try to "change the election results". President Trump claimed that the Democrats were committing an "election flight". Even after the call of the two races in favor of the GOP, some national Republicans – like Senator Graham – continued. to suggest that the Democratic gains in the state were something badly acquired .

In California, where late votes were relying on all the traditional Republican blue seats in Orange County, Republicans continue to insist that something fishy happen. Of course, Trump was the most direct: "Republicans do not win, and that's because of potentially illegal votes," he said without any evidence in an interview with Daily Caller in the middle of the day. November.

But he was not the only one among the leading Republicans. At the end of November, outgoing House Speaker Ryan said that "there would be a lot of races we should have won," blaming GOP defeats on voting and voting procedures. counting of votes allegedly "weird" in the state.

Republican candidate Yvette Herrell, a member of the Congressional District, went to Fox News in mid-November and claimed that there were "more than 100 documented complaints" for Doubtful vote in his race. She did not provide any evidence in support of her claim and the state electoral committee confirmed the Democrat race on 27 November. Nevertheless, Herrell has still not yielded; At the beginning of December, representatives of his campaign went to a warehouse to examine the ballots.

These acts, when they are all together, are not just the sour grapes you hear from a party that has lost an election. They show a willingness to question the very legitimacy of the American electoral process.

"These shenanigans will almost certainly undermine confidence in our electoral institutions, at least among Republicans," Steven Levitsky, Harvard government professor and co-author (with Daniel Ziblatt) of How Democracies Die ] have told me. "When politicians and parties do not want to accept defeat, democracy is clearly at risk."

The threat comes from a fundamental cause identified by Levitsky and Ziblatt in their book: Political Polarization. In the United States today, being a member of a political party is not limited to the policies you would like to see implemented. It's an essential part of people's identity, which influences everything they like to spend time with who they like to spend time, their sense of self and their place in the world. This makes Americans more likely to believe virtually anything that favors their partisan team.

Under these conditions, Republicans who suggest to Democrats to steal elections are deeply dangerous. If Republican elites such as Trump and Ryan say that Democrats won by using illegal votes or dubious election procedures, Republican voters will believe them – and begin to believe that Democrats can never win elections legitimately.

"Elections are among the most fragile in our society. institutions, "says Ziblatt, co-author and colleague of Harvard. "It is precisely here that the system can easily collapse on itself when people do not accept [election results] as legitimate."

We first noticed the impact that Trump's rhetoric could have in 2016, when the Republican candidate was commonly heard. claiming that the election would be "rigged" by "millions" of illegal votes cast in Hillary Clinton's favor. A study published in Political Research Quarterly found that Trump voters were much less likely to believe that elections would be fair before elections – a gap that they believe is attributable to Trump's speech on electoral fraud. It was feared that this would lead Trump to refuse to concede Hillary Clinton in case of defeat and to gain the support of a considerable number of Republicans.

Trump's victory averted these fears. The study revealed that after the elections, Republicans had regained their confidence in the fairness of the US elections. This is consistent with what political scientists call a "winner effect": voters whose preferred candidate still wins the election are more legitimate than those whose candidate is defeated.

But imagine if Trump loses against, say, Senator Kamala Harris or Sen. Bernie Sanders. Republican voters would be willing to accept Trump's claim that the elections are illegitimate. This would precipitate a situation in which Republicans would falsely evade fraud and refuse to accept a democratic victory as legitimate.

Such a possibility represents, for political scientists, a crisis on the horizon.

In 2016, while it was feared that Trump would not accept Clinton's victory, political scientist Cornell Tom Pepinsky looked at two recent examples of countries where parties and their supporters had concluded that elections were illegitimate: Thailand and Madagascar. In both cases, the failure of democratic political institutions to resolve a power conflict has led the military to intervene to resolve the crisis. In the case of Thailand, this meant that the army seized power

There were great differences between these two younger and poorer democracies and the United States. But when I recently spoke to Pepinsky about the GOP's response to 2018, he seemed to fear that Trump and the Republicans would act so as to look like a political party in a weak democracy drifting into authoritarianism.

Political party leaders criticize election procedures based on what they anticipate, "he said." It's an example of something very dangerous, that we can find in authoritarian contexts. "

The United States has already gone through an election event threatening legitimacy: the 2000 Florida narrative, which many Democrats still believe the Supreme Court has Al Gore and George W. Bush both stressed the importance of respecting the results (at least publicly), of working to repair the damage done to the system's reputation, and of protecting its reputation. legitimacy.

Trump, it seems, would not – no more, as we learned in 2018, the rest of the Republican Party.It is now conceivable that if a Democrat wins a close election in 2020 , the Republicans as a party ref will simply accept the vote count.

"If [Trump] loses the race, he will promote false allegations of electoral fraud and he will still be commander-in-chief for ten weeks," writes Seth Masket US policy specialist at the 39, University of Denver.

after this kind of rhetoric is not at all comforting.

The assault of the GOP against democratic procedures

This flirtation with the crisis does not come out of nowhere. It has emerged from a number of Republican actions in recent years in an attempt to tilt the electoral system unfairly in their favor.

Over the last fifteen years, Republicans have shown disdain for procedural fairness and the will to pursue power. more democratic principle. They have implemented measures that make it more difficult for racial minorities to vote, make constituency votes irrelevant, and even nullify the results of block elections. There was no systematic Republican plan to undermine democracy, but rather a series of decision points that Republicans made the wrong choice without any real reaction from the party.

"It's not just President Trump," says Ziblatt. "There is really a breach of electoral fairness, I would say, in Republican-ruled states. And it's really only in Republican-ruled states where this has happened.

Take the laws on voter identity. In 2008, four states had strong voter identification laws; by 2018, 10 states had implemented such laws. All had a Republican legislative majority at the time of passage. Although the impact of voter identity laws on voter turnout is unclear, it is clear that black and Hispanic voters are the most affected.

Partisan intent is fairly obvious and sometimes openly stated. In 2012, when the Pennsylvania GOP legislature passed its Voter Identity Act, State House GOP leader Mike Turzai spoke openly about the impact on this year's presidential elections. "The electoral identity … will allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania," he boasted.

The proliferation of laws relating to voter identification shows how much Republicans have become so comfortable with anti-democratic practices at the national level: what begins with legislation in a few states controlled by the GOP, they spread quickly across the country and become in fact an element of the party's national political agenda.

Take the purges of voters, a tactic in which state governments review voters' registration lists and expel people who have not recently voted ballot boxes. Republicans have devised strict methods to carry out these purges, which tend to keep voters away from Democratic-minded groups (like young voters and Hispanics) who do not show up every year.

In 2015, Ohio passed a law that put in place an automated system to carry out purges, usually expected to remove Democratic voters routinely and disproportionately from the lists. The Supreme Court upheld the law by a vote of five or four supporters earlier this year; then, 12 Republican states began considering a bill implementing similar systems

In addition to making voting more difficult, Republicans are now willing to restructure the rules of the game so that the vote of democrats is no longer important. Extreme gerrymandering is the most obvious tactic.

In 2010, Republican strategist Karl Rove wrote an editorial in the Wall Street Journal in which he pleaded for a significant Republican incentive to vote legislative constituencies after this year's midterm elections. Rove's idea was manifested by the REDMAP project, a black money campaign designed to support Republican candidates in the state legislature and then redraw them after the 2010 census.

first saw the results of this process of several years in 2012, while Republicans held the House despite the victory of President Obama and the majority of Americans who voted for candidates in the House of Democrats rather than Republican candidates. But the consequences persist, which makes it much more difficult for Democrats to get a position across the country.

In the 2018 ballot, Republicans won about 50 percent of the votes cast in the US House of Representatives in North Carolina. This has resulted in 70% of the seats in the House because of heavily gerrymandered districts. The Wisconsin Democrats have won every statewide election in 2018, but have not won a majority in any of the chambers of the state legislature.

The North Carolina representative, David Lewis, who chaired the state redistricting committee who created a map so racially upset that it was overturned in court in 2016, openly confessed the politics of power behind the extreme gerrymandering. in a speech delivered in front of the state house.

"I think the election of Republicans is better than that of Democrats," he said. "That's why I drew this map to favor what I think is better for the country."

Democrats are not quite innocent here. The Democrats of Maryland have also been conducting an extreme partisan campaign, and New Jersey Democrats are now working to implement their own. But it should be noted that these efforts have been criticized by other Democrats. The New Jersey decision has been publicly condemned by the Democratic Governor of the state and by the chairman of the National Democratic Redistribution Committee. While these measures are troubling, there is simply no democratic equivalent to the GOP's systematic gerrymandering effort.

But gerrymandering is not the only way for modern Republicans to try to cancel democratic votes. The past few years have seen a bolder tactic: passing laws that overturn the results of an election won by Democrats.

In 2016, voters in North Carolina elected a Democratic governor, Rory Cooper, apparently breaking the Republican hold on the state government. But the state legislator convened a special session by passing a bill that would strip the new president of Cooper of vital powers, including his ability to end Republican control over the country's election supervision authorities. l & # 39; State. Once again, it's a model. The Wisconsin Republicans passed a similar bill in early December against Governor-elect Evers, which Governor Walker recently signed.

The Republicans were also explicit about what they were preparing in this matter. During the debate on the bill, Wisconsin House Speaker Robin Vos warned Republicans that if they did not pass the takeover, they "would have a very liberal governor who would adopt policies that this "very liberal" governor had of course been elected by the people of Wisconsin, probably to adopt the policy he had been campaigning on.

The Michigan Republicans, to them, are currently introducing a similar bill to coerce the newly elected democratic governor Gretchen Witmer

Any of these examples of state-level battles against the electoral rules could, on its own, look like an isolated incident.But when you step back and look at the history and spread of these tactics – voter identification laws, voter purges, gerrymandering, cancellation of election – it becomes clear that the national party is on board.

When a legislative body of the Republican State or An elected pushes the boundaries, others follow. When the Conservative majority of the Supreme Court issued a decision opening the door for changes to the electoral law that benefit Republicans at the expense of Democrats, Republican legislatures rushed to do the same. Some national laws, such as voter identification and gerrymandering, are openly defended by national republican leaders and conservative activists.

National critics from the party's national leaders or conservative allies have not failed to appear. media. That's how you get a party that is ready to give in to Donald Trump and his rushing rhetoric around stolen elections.

The Dusk of Republican Elites

To avoid an imminent crisis in 2020, Republican elites must withdraw from the board. Democrats who denounce Trump's penchant for inventing false accusations of fraud will not be enough to convince Republican voters that elections are legitimate. The power of partisanship is such that Republican voters will even accept even falsely false statements from their party if the other choice is to align with the Democrats.

"It is essential, says Levitsky, that the other GOP leaders speak out." 19659062] The 2018 Senate elections in Arizona offer the example of a Republican who accepts a close defeat with thanksgiving. On the night of the elections, the elections between Republican Martha McSally and Democrat Kyrsten Sinema seemed to go in favor of the Republican. But as in Florida and California, late votes reduced the total, ultimately giving Sinema a slight edge.

As usual, Trump attempted to deceive his vote by stating that there were fake signatures on Arizona ballots and that it might be time to 'call to a new election "(by spelling his own).

key Republicans did not accompany him. Retired senator Jeff Flake, whom McSally and Sinema were arguing over, tweeted that there was " no evidence " to support Trump's claims. Republican Governor Doug Ducey called for every vote to be counted. Most importantly, McSally herself conceded to Sinema immediately after non-partisan election observers called the race to the Democrats' favor.

It was an impressive demonstration of unity on the part of the leading Republicans (the Republican Party was, like my colleague, Dylan Scott). notes, one exception). But the fact that this grace is remarkable is depressing: a loser who accepts a legitimate defeat is the most fundamental behavior that can be expected of a political party in a democratic system.

Moreover, these Arizona Republicans do not speak. for the holiday in general. Flake retires, McSally has been defeated and Ducey does not have as much national influence. Arizona is the exception, and Trump is the rule.

As a result, Republican commitments to standards that protect our democracy continue to disintegrate at an alarming rate.

"What we have learned a lot in recent months For years, the nature of democracy has been based on the fact that democratic rules and norms depend on the ability of elites to agree and coordinate," he said. John Sides, a political scientist at George Washington University, "It's the choices that leaders make and what choices leaders can make."

For years, Republicans have been getting rid of their undemocratic behavior. were able to do this, the more they became brazen – Trump being the culmination of this evolution rather than a kind of outlier.We saw in 2018 how much the Republican party Trump left: they are ready to allege unfounded fraud and conspiracy after the elections they have lost.We should worry about a dangerous recovery, potentially generating crisis, in 2020.