Way, Way Too Big to Steal

“Stop the Steal” stopped for good?

Up to the very last minute on Tuesday, news was breaking about various attempts by Donald Trump’s DOJ to interfere in the election. Glenn Thrush, Devlin Barrett and Anna Griffin reported in the New York Times:

“The Justice Department is intensifying its investigation into the recruitment of an opponent with the same name as a Republican senator in Alaska, sending 20 letters to Democrats informing them they might be targets or asking them to preserve their records, two people with knowledge of the move said. …

“Recipients of the letters include Marc Elias, a prominent elections lawyer whose firm has represented Ms. Peltola and other Democratic candidates; one of his law partners; and at least one official at the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, one of those people said.”

In typical New York Times style, they called sending target letters on the eve of a major election "highly unusual.”

Regardless of how this case develops, it, like every other attempt by the administration to influence the outcome of the election through the exercise of state power, utterly failed. Democrats won a record-breaking victory; analysis by the New York Times forecasts a “House popular vote” victory of 12 percentage points or more, the largest in 50 years and (given the counting has not yet concluded) potentially ever.

What is most striking to me from the administration side is how little Trump professes to care. Rather than his usual bluster and lies, he appears to have given up and accepted the outcome. As Jonathan Shorman reports in News From the States:

“Ahead of the midterms, Democrats wargamed dozens of scenarios looking at how President Donald Trump might try to undermine the election, everything from seizing voting machines to falsely declaring a foreign attack.

“But when the blue tsunami arrived Tuesday night, Trump seemed to let it wash right over him.

“In a series of late-night interviews, the president said he would accept the results. He acknowledged that Democrats had performed well as they retook the House and Senate. And while he refused responsibility for Republicans’ newfound misfortune, he also spoke of cutting deals with Democrats.

“‘Yes, I’ll accept them,’ Trump said on Fox News when asked about the results. He added a short time later, ‘Congratulations to the Democrats, they did a good job.’”

Erica L. Green and Tyler Pager report in the New York Times on a similar conversation he had with Green, audio of which can be heard here. At one point he notes that Senator Lindsey Graham’s sister and candidate to fill his seat in South Carolina had lost.

“‘I’m just looking at these results as I’m talking,’ he said. ‘I see that Darline lost. Wow, that’s amazing. How do you think Lindsey would have done if he ran?’ he added, referring to Senator Lindsey Graham, who died in July.”

Trump’s tone is detached, relaxed, like it has nothing at all to do with him. And he immediately took the line that the problem was simply that he himself was not on the ballot. Of course, we all know that he very much was on the ballot, in the form of candidates in his personality cult party, many (like Graham) hand-picked by him. But if seeing things that way discourages him from trying to overturn the results, I’ll take it. Not that I think they could—but as always, the harm they can do by trying and failing is bad enough.

Indeed, Republicans seem keen to point fingers internally rather than cooking up tales of stuffed ballot boxes or noncitizen voters. Vance has focused on the Iran War specifically, and Hegseth may be the next administration scapegoat. As Jennifer Jacobs and Emma Nicholson report in CBS News:

“President Trump has been asking advisers around him and on the phone whether Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth should stay in his job, following Republicans' catastrophic losses Tuesday night, multiple sources familiar with the matter tell CBS News.

“Some White House aides have predicted some of the blame for GOP midterm losses will be trained on Adm. Brad Cooper, the head of U.S. Central Command, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine, who both played big roles in guidance on the Iran war.”

CBS later reported a rumor that Trump was considering Florida governor Ron DeSantis as Hegseth’s replacement.

Congressional Republicans may even want in on the action, as they are supposedly considering impeaching and removing Hegseth. As Adam Cancryn, Sarah Ferris, Zachary Cohen, and Alayna Treene report in CNN:

“Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, the famously anti-Trump GOP lawmaker, told CNN he plans to trigger a vote to impeach Hegseth when Congress returns next week — and multiple GOP sources said they expect it to pass.”

Like every noise of this kind made by Republicans in the Trump era, I expect impeachment and removal specifically to turn out to be a lot of hot air. For one thing, that’s a lot more work than simply asking for his resignation, and if there’s one thing that Republican members of Congress hate more than minorities, liberals, or freedom, it’s doing their jobs.

Still, one can’t help but hope. A Republican-controlled Congress impeaching and removing Hegseth would frankly be even better than a Democratic controlled one doing so for encouraging the perception that the legislature has teeth. And while MAGA has never learned good lessons from any previous loss, this is not like any other loss. Whether or not liberals truly triumph in the longer arc, whether we truly get Reconstruction or not, the implications of this loss will likely reverberate for a generation at least.

One thing is for certain: the prospects for 2028 are better than ever, and I don’t just mean the electoral math. I mean the literal security of the elections themselves. One fear that was expressed to me consistently throughout the year was that the administration would use its election interference efforts as a testing ground for what it would do in 2028. Well, those efforts were entirely pathetic and now they will have far, far fewer options in 2028 than they did this year. Democrats now hold large majorities in Congress and a majority of state executive branches. Those are the two most critical institutions for the administration of presidential elections in this country. The Trump administration hasn’t shown itself capable of influencing the outcome in any way with the power of the federal government this year, it’s unclear to me what if any useful lessons they could possibly have learned from their attempts, and their party will hold radically less power in 2028 than they do now.

It wasn’t all good news

Robbie Sequeira reports in Stateline:

“Voters in four states — Arizona, Colorado, Nebraska and Washington — are on track to pass or have passed measures to restrict transgender athletes’ participation in sports, a key policy focus of the Trump administration.

“Colorado, Nebraska and Washington’s measures were ballot initiatives, while Arizona reached the ballot by way of the legislature. …

“Arizona’s initiative, which was garnering approximately 59% support late Wednesday …

Colorado’s Proposition 134 was passing with 52% of the vote …”

We have written extensively on the rights of trans people to participate in sports, which is an obsession in right-wing media and was even one of Talarico’s specific rhetorical triangulations when Fox News questioned him about trans rights. These ballot initiatives are terrible and serve as a painful reminder that as united as we are in our repudiation of Trump at this moment, our other very important differences are not likely to go away.

While votes are still being counted because of California’s terrible system of election administration, odds are the Proposition 40, the wealth tax, will be defeated, while Proposition 42, which amends the state constitution to ban taxes like Prop 40’s, will pass. California has a long history of terrible ballot amendments, such as Proposition 13, which since 1978 has imposed strict limits on property taxes.

A fun one

This one’s for me. I missed that at the end of October, House representatives Mark Takano, Don Beyer, Sean Casten, Bill Foster, and Jay Obernolte introduced a bill to replace the old Office of Technology Assessment that Newt Gingrich killed when he was speaker of the House.

We talk a lot about state capacity at Liberal Currents. It’s one of the core things that a future Democratic trifecta will need to prioritize, as it is one of the main things that the Trump administration has crippled. But America had a state capacity problem before Trump came along and, perhaps unintuitive to many, it had a congressional capacity problem. Congressional capacity probably peaked in the second half of the 20th century. Gingrich gutted it, and the frequent turnover in partisan control since has left neither party with an appetite to invest in it.

It’s desperately needed, and I’m glad to see some members of Congress pushing for it.

Beyer also introduced a bill in July to make House races multiseat and allocated through ranked choice, a proportional representation method known as the single transferrable vote. PR is the way we end gerrymandering forever. It is also likely a good treatment (but not cure, for such things do not exist as institutional solutions) for many other ills in our party system. It is heartening to see it gaining more prominence in political circles.