Stopping the Next GQP Insurrection Runs Through Governor Races

by

Above: 2021-22 Gubernatorial races. (Virginia has already flipped).

Dan Pfeiffer has advice for Americans, Stopping the Next Insurrection Starts Down-Ballot:

What happened one year ago today at the United States Capitol is one of the darkest moments in U.S. history and a grave warning about what is to come. For a very brief moment, the near-universal bipartisan condemnation of the violent assault signaled the possibility that the Republican Party would turn away from Donald Trump and his dangerous strain of conspiracy theory-driven authoritarianism.

A year later, the events of January 6th, 2021 have not proven a turning point. They are a rallying cry. Trump is more firmly in control of his party today than when he was in the White House. The Big Lie is now an article of faith among Republican elected officials and voters. Most believe the election was stolen from Trump. The rest pretend to believe it in order to avoid the wrath of the MAGA base. Instead of being convicted or chastened, those who spread the Big Lie and incited the violence of January 6th have been emboldened.

A lot of the media coverage this week is looking back at what happened and who is responsible. Congress is doing the same. But we also need to use today’s anniversary to look forward. Preparations for the next insurrection are underway and out in the open.

The Next Insurrection is Coming

“January 6th was practice” has become a rallying cry for the Right. And as Bart Gellman ominously wrote in The Atlantic:

For more than a year now, with tacit and explicit support from their party’s national leaders, state Republican operatives have been building an apparatus of election theft. Elected officials in Arizona, Texas, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and other states have studied Donald Trump’s crusade to overturn the 2020 election. They have noted the points of failure and have taken concrete steps to avoid failure next time. Some of them have rewritten statutes to seize partisan control of decisions about which ballots to count and which to discard, which results to certify and which to reject. They are driving out or stripping power from election officials who refused to go along with the plot last November, aiming to replace them with exponents of the Big Lie. They are fine-tuning a legal argument that purports to allow state legislators to override the choice of the voters.

The fact Republicans are moving ahead with a plan to steal the election in 2024 without fear of consequence is frightening and depressing. The political winds heading into the midterms are at their backs. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema remain more interested in protecting their centrist credentials than American democracy. Too much of the political media has normalized election theft as a legitimate political strategy in a fruitless attempt to avoid accusations of bias.

The time, place, and plan for perhaps the greatest crime in American history have been identified. We have three years to stop it. [Actually, we have only this year to stop it.] Yet, our political leaders are either unwilling or unable to intervene.

When people ask what can be done, the list is long: keep the House and the Senate, pass the Freedom to Vote Act, reform the filibuster, fix the Electoral Counts Act, win all the elections, etc. Most of these items are incredibly challenging. Some are downright impossible due to the political environment or the bizarre predilections of a couple of senators (see above). The size of the threat, combined with the difficulty of addressing it, can feel paralyzing. But just because we can’t do everything, doesn’t mean nothing can be done. There is one achievable chokepoint that would make it nearly impossible for Trump or his heirs to steal the next election: winning key governors’ races.

Battleground Governors are Key

The Republican plan to steal the 2020 election was always doomed to fail. Democrats controlled the House of Representatives and therefore had a majority to certify the election. As importantly, there were  safeguards earlier in the process to ensure there was nothing Donald Trump, Kevin McCarthy, or Mike Pence could do to alter the results. Ultimately, that election came down to six states — Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Georgia, and Arizona.

As the New York Times wrote in a 2020 fact check:

It is up to Congress to accept the Electoral College results, which will happen on Jan. 6. Even if a state legislature were to send to Congress ballots from its own appointed slate of electors, many legal scholars have said that Congress would have to give preference to the slate sent by the governor.

In other words, Democratic governors are the anti-Trump card. In 2020, the Democrats held the governorship in four of those six states. In 2022, all six of those governors are up for reelection.

Democrats have a chance to hold the four states we had and pick up Georgia and Arizona too. But it is also possible that Republicans could end 2022 controlling the governorship in all six key battleground states. The Cook Political Report currently rates all six races as “tossups.” The good news is that every one of them is winnable. We have great candidates running in all six races:

If you are looking for a way to channel your anger on this day, you might consider supporting these candidates. I have hyperlinked the names of the candidates to their campaign websites. Another option is donating to the Democratic Governors Association.

We need to do everything we can to hold onto our narrow congressional majorities and fight like hell to pass voting rights legislation, but we can’t forget that stopping the next insurrection begins down-ballot.

Don’t forget the Secretary of State and Attorney General races as well. They all have a role in election certification.





1 thought on “Stopping the Next GQP Insurrection Runs Through Governor Races”

  1. Media critic Dan Froomkin writes at Press Watch, “The year accountability died”, https://presswatchers.org/2022/01/accountability-jan-6-republicans-media-criticism/

    Holding the powerful accountable is the noblest and most essential goal of the journalistic profession. But 2021 may go down in history as the year that our major newsrooms — shamefully — gave up on it.

    Before Trump, if you had asked Americans what was the one thing that could disqualify a party from future participation in democratic politics, they might well have said: Trying to steal a presidential election.

    Yet the people who attempted to corruptly — and, on Jan. 6, violently — overthrow the 2020 presidential election are still controlling the Republican Party.

    And rather than work daily to hold the GOP accountable, our top political journalists are glibly projecting that it will take Congress in 2022 and possibly the White House in 2024.

    This failure to hold Trump to account has been consistent ever since he declared his candidacy. When he actually won in 2016, the heads of our major newsrooms made a terrible mistake: They clung to their devotion to treating both political parties with equal deference – even though that meant abandoning their even more fundamental commitment to truth-telling and accountability. “Balanced” treatment of a profoundly unbalanced situation normalized Trump’s and his party’s behavior, no matter how dishonest, extreme and anti-democratic it was.

    Well before Jan. 6, Trump had thoroughly proven himself to be dangerous, inept at governing, corrupt and demagogic. In one of my first columns for Press Watch, in October 2019, I wrote that the main storyline of the 2020 election should be that we made a terrible mistake in 2016 and we need to fix it.

    Then, a year ago, the full extent of Trump’s degradation burst into public view. For a day or two, even the most unflappable journalists had no alternative but to acknowledge he had crossed a line. It had happened – undeniably — right in front of everyone’s eyes. ‘

    “Trump Incites Mob” proclaimed the New York Times banner headline the next morning. The storming of the Capitol by Trump supporters “amounted to an attempted coup that they hoped would overturn the election he lost,” wrote the Washington Post. It was “a breathtaking demonstration of what Trump has wrought — a mob as heedless of law and norms as he has been, willing to literally trash the fundamental institutions of American democracy,” wrote the Los Angeles Times.

    But within a few days, this sense of journalistic outrage had somehow been quenched.

    [B]ut our elite media can’t bring itself to say what kind of party that is,

    They won’t describe it as, say, dangerously delusional, or anti-democratic, or nativist, or know-nothing, or fascist.

    They won’t say that the party has crossed the line — and hold it accountable for doing so.

    With the notable exception of that AP story mentioned above, mainstream news coverage of the various Republican election moves — to restrict voting, put loyalists in charge of vote-counting, and make it easier for partisans to overturn legitimate voting results — has fallen dramatically short of stating the obvious conclusion: that the party is preparing to steal future elections.

    [B]ut it’s not Democrats vs. Republicans here.

    It’s us-who-support-democracy vs. them-who-don’t.

    Accountability Failures

    Most accountability failures these days are in plain sight, and stem from a failure of journalists to pursue consequences for lying.

    As I wrote last year, in my column on What the next generation of editors need to tell their political reporters, reporters should demand retractions from liars, publicly and repeatedly. They should deny serial liars the opportunity to use the media to spread their lies. When forced to quote liars, they should warn readers.

    They should overtly distinguish between people who, whatever their political views, have established a record of acting in bad faith, or in good.

    This should be a top priority for reporters and editors and publishers. In a world with no consequences for lying, fact-based journalism has little value.

    [T]hese days, the Big Lie is at the heart of the anti-democratic movement. But the Big Lie isn’t just a lie, it’s also a promise. And without consequences, it becomes a reality.

    [It’s] not too late for genuine accountability journalism to make a difference, although it may be, soon.

    The most urgent issue of the moment is protecting the country from ongoing assaults on the election process by the Republican Party that truly threaten to establish permanent minority rule.

    As Mother Jones CEO Monika Bauerlein wrote in December, “It’s the story that journalists should be shouting from the rooftops and reporting out from every angle, every day.”

    As Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan wrote this week, “For the most part, news organizations are not making democracy-under-siege a central focus of the work they present to the public… it doesn’t appear to be part of an overall editorial plan that fully recognizes just how much trouble we’re in. That must change.”

    Yes, shout it from the rooftops. Our country’s future depends on it.

Comments are closed.