Democrats should prepare for onslaught of voter-fraud fibs
Given that President Donald Trump spent his entire re-election campaign fabulating baseless conspiracies about election rigging, it comes as little surprise that Attorney General Bill Barr’s Department of Justice has initiated a fishing expedition into unfounded allegations of voter fraud. As the cool kids in the pundit class will tell you, this hollow exercise in Trump placation almost certainly won’t save his presidency. That doesn’t mean it’s harmless.
The barrage of lies in the last week about voting appears to be working on Trump’s supporters. According to a new Morning Consult poll conducted after the election, 70% of Republicans maintain the 2020 contest between Trump and Joe Biden wasn’t “free and fair.” That rate has doubled from polling done just prior to Election Day, even as the Trump campaign has sustained a string of defeats in its legal efforts to intervene in ballot counting. (The prime source of distrust? The Trumpian hobbyhorse of mail-in voting.)
But the fraud talk isn’t only coming from the White House. Other frontline GOP politicians such as Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz and Mitch McConnell are lending credence to Trump’s baseless claims. Such coordination doesn’t happen by accident, especially when it centers around a lame-duck president.
Look beyond just Jan. 20. Consider how that kind of message from high-profile Republican pols shapes their supporters’ confidence in the voting system. What kind of voter suppression tactics or other chicanery would that incentivize? And if the GOP continues to call into question election integrity every time the party gets a result it doesn’t like, imagine how that will affect morale among Democratic voters when one of those challenges eventually succeeds.
Trump lost enough states by enough votes that his chances of pulling off a coup seem remote. Nevertheless, the disinformation campaign could still pay off for the GOP in January: Georgia voters will take to the polls early that month to vote in runoffs for two Senate seats that will determine which party controls the chamber for the next two years. The GOP candidates for the seats, Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, have already gone on the offensive with evidence-free attacks on Georgia’s secretary of state and its electoral system.
So the Georgia runoffs represent something of a two-front war for the Democratic Party. Most immediately, they’re trying to win control of the Senate. In the long run, the races serve as the next phase in a perception battle between the two parties over election integrity.
Unfortunately for the Dems, methods for combatting such misinformation often prove elusive. The Biden campaign clearly made a priority of refuting Trump’s dishonesty about voter fraud. It presents an even greater challenge when that becomes the default position of the entire Republican Party. Dems shouldn’t wait to develop a broad-ranging messaging strategy to counter them.
