Trump and Elon’s degenerate fans, GOP preps election interference
Plus, all the races to watch on Tuesday
Welcome to a Monday night edition of Progress Report.
Vice President Kamala Harris has only been the Democratic nominee for president for a little over three months, but it has still felt like the longest election in history.
The churn of news, polls, gaffes, media failures, historic twists, and strategies was enough to make you breathless, and not just those of us who are dealing with new heart valve issues. But here we are, ready to take the leap into our future.
As I wrote last night, there are real reasons to be optimistic that Harris will be win when votes are counted — no matter how hard Trump’s cronies try to stop the counting. Tonight I’m digging into the hidden operation that Trump and his far-right maniacs prepped ahead of this election and just what it means for us.
I’ve also assembled a handy, link-filled guide to all of the state legislative races and ballot initiatives that I’ve been following this cycle. Starting Tuesday evening, I’ll be posting updates to the guide and discussing these races to a members-only chat. Here’s the link to that guide one more time:
OK, here we go.
Note: To make this work as accessible as possible, I’ve lowered the price for a paid subscription back down to Substack’s $5 minimum. If you can’t afford that right now, please email me and I’ll put you on the list for free. Every paid subscription makes it easier for me to comp one while becoming sustainable.
Trump and Elon’s degenerate fans, GOP officials prep election steal
Donald Trump has been baselessly claiming to be the victim of election fraud since before his name ever officially appeared on a primary ballot. And with Trump marking his third straight Election Day as the Republican nominee for president, his refusal to accept any sort of defeat, ever, has sparked a mass delusion that’s overtaken the Republican Party – that he can only lose by being cheated.
While that delusion is farcical, it could nonetheless play a key role in an election actually being stolen — not from Trump, but from the American public.
Instead of an inflection point that returned the party to participating in a common reality, losing the 2020 election ultimately led to a Republican Party purged of those willing to stand up for the most basic of democratic principles: whoever loses the election concedes and participates in a peaceful transfer of power.
The Capitol insurrection was just the start, and after four years of quiet preparation, the party and its reactionary allies are prepared to finish the job.
Here’s how Trump and the MAGA movement could try to overturn the 2024 election.
The Supreme Court could help hand Trump the election
The most direct way for Trump to turn a clear loss into another term in the White House would be through the Supreme Court, a body that has every natural inclination toward siding with him outside of the courtroom: He appointed three of them, Ginni Thomas is a right-wing zealot who worked hard to overthrow the election results, and Samuel Alito’s wife declared her allegiance to him via flag last year.
The Trump campaign, Republican National Committee, and related parties have been aggressively litigious this election season, pursuing every legal action available to limit who can access a ballot and have their vote counted.
State courts have tossed many of those suits, and the Supreme Court has largely affirmed lower court decisions to do the same in the waning days of the campaign, but last week, the justices decided to bless Virginia’s illegal purges of alleged noncitizen voters.
In a Friday memo concerning an RNC challenge in Pennsylvania, Alito expressed a willingness to break precedent in favor of overruling a state Supreme Court on its own election laws, a position co-signed by Thomas and Justice Neil Gorsuch.
Legal analysts are worried about the implications of that memo and shocked by the Virginia decision. In light of the GOP’s filing hundreds of state and federal lawsuits before the election, should Trump fall just short on Tuesday, the high court will likely have ample opportunity to do so again.
Flooding the zone
The right is also hard at work building public support and institutional inevitability for overturning the election. Using distorted polls and sketchy extrapolations of early voting numbers, they’ve made a Trump victory seem virtually guaranteed barring some kind of mass election fraud, the case for which they’ve been building for years.
At the ground level is a misinformation ecosystem supercharged by X.com, which Elon Musk has turned from an unintentional vessel of misinformation during the past two elections into a clearinghouse for election-related lies and a superspreader of falsified and entirely AI-generated voter fraud slop.
Though Musk’s changes have rendered the site otherwise borderline unusable, X.com’s “Election Integrity Community” has quickly become a staging ground for deceitful agents of disinformation and echo chamber for paranoid Trump supporters.
On Friday afternoon, the algorithm was serving innuendo and fantasy, bubbling up accounts like Wall Street Apes and its array of ripped TikTok videos of random Trump supporters raging about the latest (and debunked) reports of vote-switching electronic voting machines. There were alerts flagging vague rumors about “a lot of weird stuff going on” alongside anodyne photos of post offices.
In one video that blew up among the sensationalist true believers on the right, “a lot of stuff” was literally just a mailman delivering mail to an apartment complex.
Top Republican leaders fan the flames
Local figures like Leaf have served as a key link between organized extremists outside of government, activists who have infiltrated the lower levels of government, and the powerful elected officials who have quietly adopted their agenda. Despite being in Michigan, Leaf got conservative election skeptics talking recently by announcing that he’d referred his quixotic investigation into the 2020 election to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who has become one of the foremost pursuers of thinly sourced and entirely unfounded allegations of voter fraud.
After spending the past few years trying to separate transgender children from their parents, Paxton this year has focused on abusing his power to keep people of color from voting wherever possible. In August, he announced a baseless investigation into the nation’s oldest Latino civil rights group and ordered raids on the homes of some of its elderly volunteers, under the pretense that they were part of a White House scheme to fatten up the voter rolls.
“There’s a reason Joe Biden brought people here illegally,” Paxton told a radio host earlier that month. “I’m convinced that that’s how they’re going to do it this time, they’re going to use the illegal vote. Why were they brought in, why did he bring in 14 million people? He brought them here to vote.”
Other Republican lawmakers are avoiding the bombastic claims, but still using the myth of the undocumented voter in last-minute lawsuits and press conferences. In late October, Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate ordered election workers to challenge the ballots of thousands of voters based on old data. The timing was suspect, and now Pate is being sued by four naturalized citizens having their votes challenged.
This is an excerpt from my latest piece for Courier Newsroom and its network of state-focused news outlets. To read the rest, click here…
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