“I think it will come back to haunt Republicans,” said Jon Gilmore, a Republican strategist in Arkansas and an adviser to the state governor, Asa Hutchinson. “This opens a Pandora’s box.”
Since the 1990s, Republican presidential candidates have won the popular vote only once – in George W. Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign – with Trump counting on the Electoral College for his victory in 2016 and having no chance to run even close. of Biden without that year. In the near future, the country’s demographic changes, despite Trump’s modest inroads with people of color this year, seem likely to put the popular vote out of the reach of Republicans, making the Electoral College even more important to the Republican Party. Given the stakes, inadvertently delegitimizing the Electoral College would seem counterintuitive. For some Republicans, it’s crazy.
Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, a Trump ally and potential presidential candidate in 2024, raised concern briefly in a statement over the weekend opposing the efforts of his Republican colleagues to block the vote count. He said reversing the outcome “would endanger the Electoral College, which gives voice to small states like Arkansas in presidential elections. Democrats could achieve their long-standing goal of eliminating the current Electoral College by refusing to count electoral votes in the future for a Republican-elect president. ”
And seven House Republicans were even more explicit, warning in a joint letter that future Republican presidential campaigns were at stake.
“From a purely partisan perspective, Republican presidential candidates have won the national popular vote only once in the past 32 years,” says the Reps statement. Thomas Massie from Kentucky, Ken Buck from Colorado, Chip Roy from Texas, Kelly Armstrong from North Dakota, Mike Gallagher from Wisconsin, Tom McClintock from California and Nancy Mace from South Carolina. “They therefore depended on the electoral college for almost all presidential victories in the last generation. If we perpetuate the notion that Congress can disregard certified electoral votes – based solely on its own assessment that one or more states mismanaged the presidential election – we will be delegitimizing the very system that led Donald Trump to victory in 2016, and that it could provide the only path to victory in 2024. ”
As a matter of principle, the lawsuit on Wednesday will put Republicans in an uncomfortable position.
“They all know it’s absurd,” said Stuart Stevens, chief strategist for Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign and who worked against Trump’s reelection last year. “It’s just part of that, you know, you have people like [Sen. Josh] Hawley and [Sen. Ted] Cruz, who spent his entire life building establishment credentials, and now they find themselves in a political world in which it is negative, not positive, so they are desperately trying to prove that, although I call myself a constitutional lawyer, I am happy to destroy the Constitution. “
And while Stevens supports the idea of leaving Electoral College, most Republicans do not. In terms of hierarchical politics, undermining the Electoral College can be remembered as a profound example of how the Republican Party shot itself in the foot. A former state president of the Republican Party said: “Republicans cannot say that they are in favor of federalism and then undermine the Electoral College”.
Recalling that Democratic congressmen forced the debate over Ohio’s electoral votes after the 2004 election, former MP Tom Davis, a Virginia Republican who served as chairman of the Congressional Republican National Committee, said the Democrats “set the precedent “but that” the Republicans are now accepting and just putting it down. “
“It is a slap for voters,” he said, predicting that it will be a “legacy vote” for Republicans, in which “people will be judged in history for wanting to overthrow the Electoral College.”
Davis said he spoke to several House Republicans who were threatened with the main challenges if they disagree with Trump. But, he said, “there are some things you shouldn’t change”.
It is possible that Cotton and members of the Chamber are exaggerating concerns about the Electoral College. The post-election challenges of Trump and his allies are fraught with a series of apparent political contradictions that Republicans are unlikely to suffer long-term damage, with Republican lawmakers going so far in some cases that demand that elections in their own states be canceled – but only the presidential result, not theirs. Trump’s presidency was defined by the breach of democratic norms, and the Electoral College is not exactly on any list of endangered species.
A member of the Republican National Committee described the objections that Cruz and others plan to raise as simple “leverage” to make complaints about electoral fraud, spurring an imminent effort by Republicans in state houses across the country to tighten the vote by mail and other voting restrictions. voting. This effort, if successful, would likely help Republican nominees in future presidential elections. A prominent Republican political strategist called any suggestion of long-term implications for the Electoral College “complete bullshit -” and Frank Pignanelli, a former Democratic state legislator in Utah who now advises politicians from both parties, said: “I don’t I don’t think the Electoral College will be leaving anytime soon. ”
“Things happen so fast,” said Pignanelli, “that I think people will forget about a year from now.”
Trump himself in 2012 called the Electoral College a “disaster for democracy, ”Before counting on him to win in 2016 and reversing the course.
But if the Electoral College is relatively robust, it is also far from sacrosanct. From the perspective of the GOP, this means that it needs all the defenders it can get. Even before the November election, the majority of Americans – 61% – told Gallup that they supported the abolition of the Electoral College. And for those who would very much like to see the Electoral College tampered with, the legislative and legal maneuvers since the election – which culminated in Wednesday’s proceedings – are starting to look like a bonanza.
In the post-election turmoil surrounding electoral challenges, John Koza, whose initiative of the National People’s Vote is slowly gaining momentum, said the calls and donations to his organization have increased. Since the mid-2000s, 15 states and the District of Columbia have signed the pact that their group is promoting in which – if enough states eventually sign – they would grant their electoral votes to whoever wins the national popular vote, regardless of result in their individual states.
For Americans who may not have paid much attention to the functioning of the Electoral College, Koza said, post-election litigation and legislative maneuvering “demonstrate in spades the instability that has been around the current system for years”.
“This Wednesday thing, which is usually a total yawn, is now becoming a big event,” said Koza. “He draws attention to the problem that the entire election revolves around a handful of states on the battlefield, and 38 states are basically irrelevant in the presidency.”
Congressman Ted Lieu (D-Calif.), Who was an early supporter of the National Popular Voting movement when he was a state legislator in California in 2006, said the spectacle surrounding this year’s election certification “gives more impetus to a national popular vote to replace the Electoral College. “
He said: “None of this would be a problem if we simply obtained Biden’s victory of more than 7 million votes.”
And for Republicans who intend to maintain the Electoral College, even the risk of degrading faith in the institution is a problem. Arkansas strategist Gilmore, like many Republicans, said the fight on Wednesday could be “just a flash in the pan.”
However, he said, “It is not a flash in the pan that I, as a Republican operative and strategist who has worked for the party for a long time, want to see that spark continue.”