Stop the Squeal

It’s been awhile since Republicans had a big night at the polls.

Yes, yes, I know they went 27-for-27 in House toss-up races two years ago. And won total control of government as recently as 2016.

But if you’re a member of the grassroots right, the sort of person inclined to swallow Trump’s election lies about 2020, when was the last time your party experienced unmitigated success at the polls?

2020? Of course not. Trump was turned out of office, whether or not you accept the validity of the vote.

2018? Lord, no. Democrats crushed the Trump-led GOP in House races that year.

2016? A huge victory, to be sure, but marred by the fact that Trump received 3 million fewer votes than one of the most disliked politicians in the United States. The newly elected president was so insecure about that fact that he took to claiming fraud (of course) to explain the disparity.

The last unqualified blockbuster for Republicans in a national election was the 2014 midterms, when the party gained 13 seats in the House and nine(!) in the Senate. But that happened before Trump emerged as a political force. It was the Ryan/McConnell establishment that produced the 2014 wave, not MAGA.

If you’re a populist Republican, in other words, you’ve never seen the national electorate clearly signal that it prefers a Trump-led GOP to the Democratic alternative. In all three elections since he took over the party in 2016, there’s been cause for doubt that a populist movement with Trump at its head can outpoll the left in the most important races.

No wonder that election denialism has gained a foothold among the base, especially with Trump egging it on hourly. A party that’s won the popular vote in a presidential election just once in 30 years is a party primed to believe something must be wrong with the electoral process itself to explain its dismal record. Not to rehash yesterday’s newsletter, but people often turn to comforting lies to escape hard truths.

We Trump skeptics spend much of our time ruminating about what might happen if he persuades MAGA-friendly governors in swing states to overturn another presidential defeat in 2024. But there’s another election before that one, of course, and Republicans look set to do exceedingly well without any hint of chicanery.

What happens to election denialism on the populist right if the red tsunami arrives next week?

In case you have better things to do with your time than follow polling for 16 hours a day (I don’t), be advised that practically every data point published in the last 72 hours points to Democrats getting obliterated next Tuesday. What looked like a red tidal wave earlier this year and then like a red puddle amid the first flush of outrage at Roe v. Wade being overturned is back to looking like a tsunami again.

It’s hard to know where to begin. Let’s start with the generic ballot average.

Republicans hadn’t touched 48 percent in the average all year, even at the height of their advantage over Democrats this past February, and suddenly find themselves sitting there for the past 10 days. A splashy Wall Street Journal poll published this week found Democrats’ three-point lead in August has become a two-point Republican lead in the home stretch thanks to Latino voters and white suburban women. Suburban women, who were cracked up to be the beating heart of the “Roevember” abortion backlash at the polls this fall “shifted 26 percentage points away from Democrats since the Journal’s August poll and now [favor] the GOP by 15 percentage points.”

Even Morning Consult, an outlier pollster that has had Democrats ahead consistently throughout the campaign, now has the GOP tied. 

On Tuesday Gallup published a poll of the electorate measuring how Americans are feeling about their government and the state of the country and compared those results to how they felt before every midterm dating back to 1974. Biden and the Democratic-controlled Congress have the second-worst job approvals at this stage of any of the 13 election cycles tracked. Voter satisfaction with the state of the country and optimism about the economy have reached rock bottom, the worst of any cycle tested. Worse even than the 2010 bloodbath that netted Republicans 63 seats in the House.

Seats that were heretofore thought unreachable for the GOP now seem within reach. Democrats are spending in one New York district that Joe Biden won by 20 points two years ago. Sean Patrick Maloney, the head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, suddenly finds himself in a toss-up. In Nevada, Democrats are underperforming in mail voting; nationally, they’re underperforming in early voting among the young adults on whom they rely heavily. The most optimistic polling for Republicans even has Lee Zeldin and Tudor Dixon tied in their races for governor in New York and Michigan.

What we have in sum, dear reader, is a vibe shift.

I could go on and on. Another recent Gallup poll found voters’ concern about crime in their area at the highest level since 1972, an ideal result for a GOP that has run hard on that issue this fall. Meanwhile, in the WSJ poll, Republicans lead Democrats by more than 20 points on which party would best handle inflation, and the party’s base of white voters is considerably more enthusiastic to vote than the left’s base of African Americans and Latinos.

In fact, whether Latinos should still be considered part of the left’s base is an open question at the moment.

You can keep stepping further and further back to survey more tiles but the mosaic that they form should be clear enough by now. It’s going to be rough for Democrats next week. Rough enough that they’re already whispering glumly to reporters about a red wave. So rough that some have skipped ahead to the postmortem recriminations stage, fueling pieces with headlines like “Democrats Debate Themselves: Why Do We Suck?”

And with a week still to go and late deciders seemingly breaking in droves toward the GOP, even the current dismal polling may not capture the magnitude of what’s coming. Nate Cohn, the New York Times election guru, warned on Tuesday that his newspaper’s latest survey drew a much higher response rate among white registered Democrats than white registered Republicans, an omen that the polling industry may once again be systematically underestimating GOP support due to “nonresponse bias.” As big as the red wave looks at the moment, the reality may be bigger.

What if it is?

What happens to the populist right’s belief that electoral outcomes are rigged against them if Republicans blow the roof off, including in deep-blue jurisdictions where they aren’t supposed to have a prayer?

Trump is reportedly preparing to cry foul over Republican electoral defeats next week because of course he is. He always does. Everyone remembers his reaction to the outcome in 2020, especially Mike Pence, but few remember that he also complained of fraud after he lost the Iowa caucus to Ted Cruz in 2016.

And fewer still recall that he flew off the handle, pronouncing the election “a total sham and a travesty” and demanding a “revolution” to overturn it, after Mitt Romney lost in 2012.

He’s at it again this year, with a special focus on Pennsylvania.

In recent months, Trump has convened a series of in-person meetings and conference calls to discuss laying the groundwork to challenge the 2022 midterm election results, four people familiar with the conversations tell Rolling Stone. In these conversations, pro-Trump groups, attorneys, Republican Party activists, and MAGA diehards often discuss the type of scorched-earth legal tactics they could deploy.

…

Trump has been briefed on plans in multiple states and critical races — including in Georgia. But Pennsylvania has grabbed his interest most keenly, including in the Senate contest between Democrat John Fetterman and the Trump-endorsed GOP contender Mehmet Oz. If the Republican does not win by a wide enough margin to trigger a speedy concession from Fetterman — or if the vote tally is close on or after Election Night in November — Trump and other Republicans are already preparing to wage a legal and activist crusade against the “election integrity” of Democratic strongholds such as the Philly area.

Pennsylvania is a juicy target for Trump. The polls have been tightening, making a “rigged election” narrative if Fetterman wins more superficially plausible. His horrific debate performance will also feed Republican incredulity that he could possibly have received more votes than Oz. Meanwhile, Pennsylvania counts mail ballots, which skew Democratic, after the in-person same-day vote, which skews Republican. That means Oz will have a significant “lead” by the end of the evening next Tuesday night that’s destined to shrink and maybe disappear as the mail votes are counted, the same “red mirage” that Trump demagogued when mail ballots carried Biden to victory in the state in 2020.

A razor-thin election in which the Democrat “comes from behind” to win will give Trump a new opportunity to cry fraud, precisely what he wants to prepare the ground for whining in 2024 that he was cheated again if he loses that election too. He may very well get that opportunity …

… unless the red wave carries Oz to a comfortable-ish three-point victory or so.

It could happen. The latest poll of Pennsylvania has Oz up by—ta da—three points. It could happen to Herschel Walker in Georgia, too. And to Adam Laxalt in Nevada, and to Blake Masters in Arizona. There’s even a chance that kooky Don Bolduc will pull the upset against Maggie Hassan, a weak incumbent, in New Hampshire. The latest poll there has him up by a point.

If Republicans run the table in the Senate, it’s a cinch they’ll overperform in gubernatorial races as well. Kari Lake is already leading her race in Arizona. Zeldin and Dixon are within striking distance in New York and Michigan. Ron DeSantis might crush Charlie Crist by double digits in Florida, staking his claim as the most electable 2024 prospect in all the land. Even Doug Mastriano could make a closer race of it in Pennsylvania than everyone expects. That’s what a red tsunami would mean.

Should the GOP win across the board, including MAGA candidates who were cracked up to be unelectable, the idea that Trump lost in 2020 because he was cheated rather than because voters were sick of him will become … complicated. The voting machines are capable of producing conservative wins, it turns out, which should have been evident to election truthers after House Republicans went 27-for-27 in 2020. In particular, if cranks like Lake and Masters win, the theory that a shadowy cabal is conspiring to keep populists out of office via massive fraud will be on thin ice.

Republicans probably won’t win every tight race. Maybe Fetterman will pull it out, or Masters will fall just short. Trump will have an opportunity somewhere on the map to whine about a rigged vote. But the idea that any particular narrow defeat was the product of corruption will be harder for GOP voters to believe in the context of a massive red wave that delivers victories across the map. If Lake wins in Arizona and Masters loses by a point or two, a perfectly plausible outcome, what’s the logic of the “conspiracy” that would explain that result? If Republicans flip the House and the Senate but a few gubernatorial nominees, like Dixon, lose, will even diehard MAGAs believe that fraud explains her defeat?

To mount an effective “Stop the Steal 2.0” campaign, Trump needs multiple narrow Republican losses in key races, ideally by candidates who were expected to win. And as we’ve seen from the polling above, that’s just not a likely outcome to the midterms anymore.

Of course, Trump’s consolation prize will be getting to crow that some of his more dubious endorsees, from Oz to Masters to Walker, turned out to be winners after all. He’ll cite that as evidence that the country may in fact have an appetite for a second Trump term in 2024. When DeSantis accuses him of being unelectable in the next presidential primary, Trump will point to his Senate record this year as proof that American voters are, if anything, growing more MAGA-fied over time.

Nor should we overestimate the ability or willingness of true-blue populists to draw the right lesson about 2020 from a red tsunami this year. Yesterday I posted a clip of Trump voters explaining the January 6 attack alternately as an Antifa operation and as a patriotic effort to prevent Democrats from stealing the presidency. Anyone capable of squaring that logical circle is also capable of talking themselves into believing that voting machines were rigged in 2020 yet somehow unrigged by 2022.

“It was the election audits we did that cleaned the machines up,” Trump will inevitably tell them to explain the contradiction, nonsensically. Or, if Oz hangs on in Pennsylvania after Fetterman’s mail votes are counted, Trump will take credit for having forced the state to clean up its act in processing ballots when he contested the election there in 2020. The midterms would have been rigged if not for the heroic, groundbreaking legal work of semi-lucid star attorney Rudy Giuliani.

Trump and the RNC will also point to grassroots efforts to “monitor” the election this year as a key bulwark against fraud. Republicans have reportedly recruited six times as many poll watchers for the midterms as they did in 2020. Some volunteers are staking out drop boxes, photographing voters—and their license plates—as they deposit their ballots, which drew a DOJ complaint about intimidation on Monday. You stopped the steal this time, Trump will tell them if a red wave sweeps Republicans to victory. Democrats wanted to cheat but couldn’t.

But even those predictable self-serving arguments carry risk. If the GOP wins this year and cites its “election integrity” initiatives as the reason, a Trump defeat in 2024 will be hard to explain. “Why didn’t the same election integrity measures stop Democrats from stealing the election from him again?” some will wonder in the aftermath.

I have no great confidence that a party in which two-thirds of voters believe the 2020 election was corrupt will wise up once they see their party winning at the polls without Trump on the ballot. “The election was rigged” is less a matter of considered opinion than a profession of faith, and faith doesn’t yield to something as flimsy as evidence. If a star populist like Lake were to lose narrowly, having led in most of the final polls, it’s easy to imagine her galvanizing a violent “Stop the Steal” backlash around the outcome in Arizona even if Republicans clean up nationally in other races. It won’t make sense, but election lies don’t need to. They just need to help true believers cope with a reality they find otherwise intolerable, that most Arizonans don’t want to be governed by a crankish Trump apostle.

Still, politics is a game of inches, and witnessing a Republican wave at the polls probably will move GOP opinion a few inches toward skepticism of Trump’s election conspiracy theories. Some righties might resent him for continuing to babble on and on about 2020 while they’re busy popping the champagne over the glorious landslide of 2022. Some of his rivals for the nomination, like DeSantis or Pence, might even dare to point out that the results of this year’s election cast doubt on his theory of how he lost in 2020. (It’s unlikely that either has the nerve, admittedly.) A few more inches toward skepticism of Trump on the right is a few inches closer to a post-Trump future, possibly a few inches closer toward a different nominee. Or a few inches closer to another narrow Democratic victory over Trump in 2024.

If you’re bummed about a red wave crashing down, there’s your silver lining.