How Republicans Will Overthrow the 2024 Election

Following are highlights of “Tyranny of the Minority,” by Steven Levitsky, Professor of Government, Harvard University, presented in the April 27, 2023, Pitt Speaker Series talk.

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It’s pretty clear that American democracy is at a crossroads. On the one hand, we stand at the brink of multiracial democracy, which is an unparalleled achievement. On the other hand, we stand on the brink of democratic breakdown.

The first threat is the Republican Party’s authoritarian turn. This is something that we really failed to anticipate just four years ago. We blamed the Republican Party for enabling the rise of Trump, but we did not characterize it as an authoritarian party because most Republican leaders five years ago seemed committed to playing by democratic rules of the game. That is arguably no longer the case today.

For the first time in U.S. history, a sitting president refused to accept defeat and attempted to overturn an election. But rather than oppose what was in effect a presidential coup attempt, Republican leaders enabled that coup attempt by refusing to publicly acknowledge Trump’s defeat. As of December 16th, 2021, six weeks after the election, only twenty-five Republican members of Congress had acknowledged Biden’s victory. 200 had not. And on January 6th, nearly two-thirds of House Republicans voted against the certification of Biden’s victory.

January 6 Incited by Republicans

Leading Republicans also refused to break with the extremist forces behind the January 6th assault on the Capitol. The January 6th insurrection was organized by extremist militia groups, and many Republican politicians, including the president, helped to incite the attack. And yet, Republican leaders refused to break with Trump or any other figure implicated in the violence.

• They refused to impeach Trump.
• They blocked the creation of an independent commission to investigate the insurrection.
• Crucially, they punished Republicans who defended democracy in the wake of the January 6th assault. So, Republicans who resisted Trump’s effort to steal the election or who voted for Trump’s impeachment were purged from the party leadership or censored by their local Republican parties.

At the same time, pretty extraordinarily, Republicans who endorsed the violence were rewarded. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who backed calls for the execution of Democratic leaders on social media, raised record-breaking sums in the three months following the attack. And Donald Trump has not only been protected by the Republican Party but he’s been embraced by it. Nearly all Republican leaders, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, say they will support Trump in 2024.

So, between November 2020 and January 2021, the bulk of the Republican Party refused to accept defeat, refused to denounce violence, refused to break with openly anti-democratic extremism. From top to bottom, the Republican Party has ceased to be a loyal democratic party.

Republicans will steal 2024 election.

And in fact, I think there’s now a pretty good chance that the Republicans will try to steal the 2024 election. In “How Democracies Die,” Dan Ziblatt and I argued that our constitutional system relies quite a bit on forbearance; that our system of checks and balances only works when presidents deploy their institutional prerogatives with some restraint. In other words, democracy only works when they refrain from what Mark Tushnet calls “constitutional hardball.”

We made a big deal of Republicans’ theft of a Supreme Court seat in 2016, but we did not seriously consider the possibility that constitutional hardball would be used to steal a national election. Clearly, we should have.

Republican officials across the United States are laying the legal and administrative groundwork to engage in electoral hardball. Republican state legislatures have passed more than two dozen bills to facilitate this sort of behavior, including in battleground states like Arizona, Georgia, Florida, and Texas. These measures, among other things, will allow Republican state legislatures or election boards to sideline or override local election administrations in Democratic strongholds.

• That would allow them to, for example, purge voter rolls and manipulate the number and location of polling places in Democratic strongholds.
• It would allow Republican officials to throw out ballots in Democratic strongholds.
• Crucially, new laws impose criminal penalties for local election officials deemed to violate election procedures.

So, these laws basically criminalize the kind of routine forbearance that is necessary to administer any election. They enable Republican state officials to pressure local officials to engage in petty ballot disqualification via threats of criminal prosecution. Again, throwing out thousands of ballots in rivals’ strongholds is profoundly anti-democratic, but it’s technically legal, and Republicans in several states now have the legal tools to enforce such practices.

Fake slates of electors

Even more perilously, hardball tactics may be used under the Electoral Count Act, which allows state legislatures to send alternate slates of electors to the Electoral College in the event of a so-called “failed election.” Now, that clause was intended to cover natural disasters, but it could be interpreted by state legislatures to mean any sort of contested election, including those marked by baseless accusations of fraud.

So, we could see an election in which Republican legislatures dispute statewide results and send rival slates of electors to the Electoral College. That could throw the election into the House, where state delegations, rather than individual representatives, elect the president. The Republicans will almost certainly control the majority of state delegations, and we have every reason to think that they will back their candidate no matter who actually wins the election.

Republican politicians learned several things in the aftermath of the 2020 election. First of all, they learned that the electoral system creates a plethora of opportunities for hardball means of legally overturning election results. Trump failed at that in 2020, but his effort to overturn the results revealed how it can be done. It essentially exposed the soft underbelly of American elections.

Secondly, maybe more importantly, Republicans learned in 2020 that they would not be punished by voters for attempting to overturn an election. In fact, they learned that such efforts would probably be rewarded by Republican voters, by Republican activists, by local and state parties, and by many donors.

But just as it was possible for Senate Republicans to legally steal a Supreme Court seat in 2016, it is possible to legally overturn a close election result. And I see no evidence that Republicans would engage in forbearance should the opportunity to do that arise.

We think something similar is happening to the Republican Party today. The Republicans are a party of White Christians, but White Christians are a fairly rapidly declining share of the electorate. Just thirty years ago, in 1992, White Christians were more than 70 percent of the American electorate. They were an overwhelming majority. Today, they’re about 50 percent and declining. And that decline has triggered a fear among some Republicans that they’re about to lose electoral viability.

White Christians losing dominance.

But the problem is not just that Republicans potentially face a bleak electoral future; it’s that their base has come to view defeat as catastrophic. White Christians are not just any group. A few decades ago, they occupied the top rung in our country’s social, economic, political, and cultural hierarchy. They filled the presidency, Congress, Supreme Court, and governorships. They were the CEOs, the newscasters, the TV stars, the college professors. Those days, obviously, are long gone.

But losing one’s dominant social status can be deeply threatening. Many Republican voters fear that they’re on the brink not just of losing elections but of losing their country. They feel like the country they grew up in is being taken away from them. The very idea of a White, Christian America seems to be slipping away.

That sense of loss has pushed many rank-and-file Republicans towards extremism. A poll from early 2021 found that 56 percent of Republicans agree with the statement that the traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it. So, like the old Southern Democrats, fear of losing – an outsized fear of losing – is driving Republicans to simply win at any costs. That helps to explain Republican voter suppression efforts, it explains rank-and-file Republican support for Trump’s coup attempt, and it explains why Republicans may try to steal the 2024 election.

Republican systematic advantage

Today, the Democrats are overwhelmingly based in big metropolitan centers while the Republicans are overwhelmingly based in the more sparsely populated territory. That means the Republicans have a systematic advantage in the Electoral College, in the Senate, and on the Supreme Court.

That institutional bias allows the Republicans, in effect, to hold power without winning a national majority. In other words, our counter-majoritarian institutions are beginning to undermine electoral competition. They are skewing elections in favor of one party over another.

The data is pretty familiar. Republicans won the popular vote for president once in the last twenty years, yet they controlled the presidency for twelve of those twenty years. An electoral majority was not enough for Democrats to win the presidency this year; Biden had to win by at least four points to capture the presidency. It looks like he’ll probably need to win by about four points to be reelected in 2024.

The Senate is similarly skewed. In 2020, the median state was four percentage points more Republican than the nation as a whole, which means that the Democrats need to consistently win the popular vote by about four points to retain control of the Senate. So, if the Democrats consistently win, say, 51.5 percent of the popular vote for the Senate, Republicans will consistently control the Senate. It takes three election cycles to fully renovate the Senate. The Democrats have won the overall popular vote in every three-year cycle since the year 2000, and yet Republicans controlled the Senate from 2001 to 2005 and from 2015 to 2021.

In fact, in 2016, the Democrats won the popular vote for president, won the popular vote in the Senate, and yet Republicans won the presidency and both houses of Congress. This is minority rule.

Republican extremist party

Minority rule has also skewed the composition of the Supreme Court. Four of nine Supreme Court justices – Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Coney Barrett – were confirmed by senators who represented less than half of the U.S. population. And three of them – Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Coney Barrett – were nominated by a president who lost the popular vote and were confirmed by senators representing less than half the population.

Now, minority rule is bad enough, but it’s made much worse by a second twenty-first-century development, and that is the Republican Party’s transformation into an extremist and anti-democratic party. Our counter-majoritarian institutions aren’t just empowering a minority party; they are empowering an authoritarian minority party. Counter-majoritarianism and Republican authoritarianism have begun to interact in fairly pernicious ways, ways that I think could potentially accelerate democratic breakdown.

For example, the counter-majoritarian Senate protected Trump from removal despite his effort to steal an election. It blocked efforts to create an independent commission to investigate the January 6th insurrection. It has blocked legislation to shore up voter rights and protect the integrity of elections. Likewise, the Supreme Court has upheld most Republican gerrymandering and most Republican voter-suppression measures, and it may uphold Republican efforts to overturn future elections.

The United States desperately needs institutional reform. We need to entrench voting rights. We need to replace the Electoral College with direct elections. We need to democratize the Senate. We need to eliminate the filibuster. We need to reform the Supreme Court.

As I noted at the outset, our democracy stands at a crossroads. America will either be a multiracial democracy going into the 21st century, or it will not be a democracy.