Thanks to Senator Joe Manchin (D-Quisling) and several of his quieter Democratic colleagues, this seems to be a likely result (boldface mine):
…it is so obvious where all of this is heading. President Trump tells a big lie that elections are rigged. This authorizes him and others to seek power in extra-democratic ways. The lie is institutionalized by state legislation that suppresses voting, and that gives state legislatures themselves the right to decide how to allocate the electoral vote in presidential elections.
The scenario then goes like this. The Republicans win back the House and Senate in 2022, in part thanks to voter suppression. The Republican candidate in 2024 loses the popular vote by several million and the electoral vote by the margin of a few states. State legislatures, claiming fraud, alter the electoral count vote. The House and Senate accept that altered count. The losing candidate becomes the president. We no longer have “democratically elected government.” And people are angry.
No one is seeking to hide that this is the plan. It is right there out in the open. The prospective Republican candidates for 2024, Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and Josh Hawley, are all running on a big lie platform. If your platform is that elections do not work, you are saying that you intend to come to power some other way. The big lie is designed not to win an election, but to discredit one. Any candidate who tells it is alienating most Americans, and preparing a minority for a scenario where fraud is claimed. This is just what Trump tried in 2020, and it led to a coup attempt in January 2021. It will be worse in January 2025…
We have to act now. This is what no one wants to hear. We want to believe in American democracy. We want to take pride in new laws, a growing economy, the end of covid. I get all of that. I want to feel that way too. I have not yet figured out how to tell this story.
It’s all the more frustrating since, as a citizen of the mainland colony known as the District of Columbia, I have no voting congressional representation to alter this outcome. Well, a huge chunk of Democrats are about to find out what that feels like, I guess.
mikethemadbiologist
It’s a hard sell to get people to care because:
1) existing “democracy” never seems to deliver much of anything to help average people.
Stimulus bills in a global pandemic were an exception and programs that date back to FDR or LBJ. It is better to have more competent managers with Biden than Trump. But accepting that comes long after you have given up your ability, to actually influence anything. And the only battles left to fight aren’t for a better future but fundamentally conservative ones of trying to preserve things like social security.
2) existing “democracy” is already undemocratic in the extreme, Wyoming has the same number of Senators as California. Trump lost the popular vote in 2016 and still we had to endure him.
3) No matter what high hopes one puts in the electoral process, whether it’s of electing a Dem majority in two legislative branches and the Presidency, the full 3-fer, changing things at anything other than the margins (LOL Dems won’t control their own members and we’ve been here before), or a Sanders presidency, it never materializes. It’s always stymied and sabotaged so nothing changes. Ordinary people pull off incredible wins in getting voter turnout time and time again, and despite the fact we have to win a super majority to have a bare majority that bare majority says “sorry we are just a bare majority, can’t do anything for you”
4) the pandemic left psychic scars. Some of us lost loved ones, health, jobs, the ability to do the normal things we want to, all trust in government at all levels, as government at all levels Dem and Rep let the pandemic rage and kill and prioritized business over even the hospital system, trust in public health institutions at all levels, trust in our fellow citizens to protect our lives in an emergency etc… The lost of all trust in public institutions and our neighbors is probably the most damaging politically. One is left living in an evil world populated by people and institutions who are either evil or incompetent and who knows which or cares that much. When one has given up on humanity, it doesn’t give one much hope for positive political changes.
5) The Dem party is not fighting on this issue, not fighting to have votes for it counted, but even though Joe Biden President of the United States won’t fight for it (bully pulpit if nothing else), Joe Shmoe with little power at all, is somehow supposed to fight for a democracy that is rigged against the popular vote to begin with, and a political party that not only wont’ fight for him, but won’t even fight for it’s own existence, that does not even seem to care if it can get elected or not.