We Know How This Ends
In June, Josh Berthume wrote about his prescient and dystopian nightmare, “7 Hours in November,” about how a delay in calling the election could leave us vulnerable to disinformation and lead to chaos. Events in July and August only confirmed his worries. Now he’s back with a call to action: It’s time to prepare for an election that stretches into December.
The final outcome of many races in this year’s general election won’t be known on Election Day. Donald Trump and the Republican Party are planning for a fight after November 3rd. Democratic campaigns must begin preparing to run their races for as long as it takes.
In political campaigns, budgets are built to spend the last dollar just as the polls close. The old joke among political consultants: if you want that final invoice paid, make it due on October 31st. Anything billed after that will be lost forever in the cold vacuum of post-campaign limbo.
This year, campaigns observing this tradition will be ill-prepared for the fight to come, over recounts -- or, it increasingly seems, over a complete initial count. Every campaign has a genuine need to still have gas in the tank in the weeks after November 3rd. This is troubling because it is unusual, and like so many objectively grim realities facing us, it isn’t obvious. It is hard to imagine.
Understand that I’m not only referring to the presidential race. It will be necessary to keep fighting battles over results in down-ballot races. In the days following a national election that will be cast, strenuously, as fraudulent and rigged by the operatives, candidates, and elected officials of one party (including the president of the United States), there will be more work to do. The battle of public opinion will be ongoing, as will the Democratic Party’s struggle against their own lack of infrastructure or institutional support for such an effort.
We cannot avoid huge increases in vote-by-mail, a process that Trump now explicitly says he is disrupting by withholding emergency funds for the United States Postal Service. Further, the pandemic will dramatically decrease the number of poll workers available to run elections at the local level. Combined with the favorite, familiar, and outrageous voter suppression ploy of reduced polling locations, this will inevitably result in grossly increased wait times for in-person voting. So, no matter what, the results for many races won’t be known on election night, and likely not for weeks after.
This is troubling because it is unusual, and like so many objectively grim realities facing us, it isn’t obvious. It is hard to imagine.
For these reasons, we find ourselves in a situation that demands vital preparation from any serious political operation. Democratic campaigns must be ready to spend media and staff money beyond November 3rd. Candidates must prepare to communicate for weeks after the election.
Not every candidate will need to do this. If that’s the case, it means they can help a nearby ally fight their fight, or draw attention to local battles which may be playing out statewide or in the national campaign for president. They may also simply be free to transmit accurate, objective information to the electorate about what’s happening, which will be a vital and necessary public service.
This work will be necessary: to ensure a complete and accurate count of votes, to fight disinformation, and very possibly, to ensure the election isn’t stolen outright.
Donald Trump lies to the American people every day, but he doesn’t lie about the awful things he’s planning to do. Republicans have shown, over and over, that they are willing to tolerate, downplay, or enable human suffering on an enormous scale for little more than essentially meaningless reaffirmations of the power they already have.
Consider the stakes for them now. The outcome of the election will carry brutal implications for both Trump and Republicans at large: winning means the grift continues unabated. No Republican will ever face real consequences for their wrongdoing. They won’t even have to say they are sorry for what’s happened, for giving in to authoritarianism and destroying every imaginable political and societal norm along the way.
This work will be necessary: to ensure a complete and accurate count of votes, to fight disinformation, and very possibly, to ensure the election isn’t stolen outright.
If they lose, many of them will be cast out, in penury and disgrace, by the remnants of a major political party now further radicalized and even less willing to tolerate losers than ever before. Also, some of them will go to prison.
I say this with great urgency to underscore that Trump and his enablers will do whatever it takes to win. They will be ready to keep fighting long after election day. They will be prepared with plans, ads, and messaging. They’ll also have plenty of money to run those ads, maintain staff, and pay lawyers. They can and will do this because they have no trouble imagining how this will play out. They’ve done it before, and recently, albeit on a smaller scale, in the Georgia governor’s race in 2018.
Republicans win these fights and Democrats don’t. The GOP can warp and define the reality that both sides must operate within because they don’t labor under any silly ideas about what the country ought to be, or how things are supposed to work under the rule of law.
Republicans don’t care about any of that. They don’t care about laws, policies, norms, or non-binding understandings and traditions. They are the political equivalent of a laundry mangler, built to crush and wring, ruthless and cruel and without pause or consideration for anything but their single mission. They play for keeps. They always have, and Trump has unleashed their darkest, most destructive instincts.
Just once, I’d like the Democratic Party to not be so outmatched in this dimension. This time it is possible. The chance to gain an equal footing and nullify some of the GOP’s relentless advantages rests within the Democrats’ ability and willingness to prepare.
Trump and his enablers will do whatever it takes to win. They will be ready to keep fighting long after election day.
Prep time matters -- prep time, and perhaps a cynical belief that we should assume the worst possible thing that can happen is what will happen. After all, every time the Trump administration makes a decision, they make the worst one possible. Instead of ignoring past behavior, let’s use it to predict the future.
If we are right, and the worst does happen, then campaigns which heed this warning will be prepared. They will know what to do, or at least how to begin. Preparation and planning will provide a fighting chance. And if the worst thing doesn’t happen, well, that will be a pleasant surprise here in the year 2020.
We know how this ends. We must move beyond our unwillingness to believe that Trump will do what he’s telling us he’ll do, and understand that his GOP allies will join him in that final, flailing, destructive grasp at power.
Historically, Democrats don’t know how to do this as well as Republicans do. If Democrats did, we would have had President Gore and would currently have Georgia Governor Stacey Abrams, the correct and proper outcomes of stolen elections. But we don’t, because Democrats didn’t.
I don’t know whether our institutions will hold, but it doesn’t look good. We can’t count on them to save us. The Postal Service is the latest in a long line of cornerstones of our republic being strip-mined and sabotaged.
Even so, coordinated resistance represents a solid chance to weaken the disinformation storm that’s coming. The first step -- the first functional, necessary, required step -- is a plan to keep Democratic campaigns running until December 1. After all, no one can win a fight without staying in it, all the way to the end.
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