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6 Jul, 4 tweets, 2 min read
What’s keeping democracy scholars up at night: An overturned election.

A party remade by Trump’s 2020 election lies could be much harder to stop in 2024.

“We should not pretend these dangers are fantastical or that these are absurd hypotheticals”

nbcnews.com/politics/polit…
In 2020, a handful of GOP officials in key roles stood up to an all-out campaign to throw out the election results and install Trump as president again.

Will they still be there in 2024 if affirming those election lies is the key test in GOP primaries? washingtonpost.com/politics/repub…
. 46% of GOP support state legislatures overturning 2020 vote, per research by @leedrutman.

Once that’s on the table, you get to scary places real quick. For one it creates a perverse incentive to run a botched election in order to justify politicians deciding results later. Image
What will the party look like after two cycles of this? What if 2024 electoral votes come down to 1-2 states with GOP govs next time and a GOP House/Senate? In 2020, there was no plausible route to overturning votes with only R support, that might not be true in 2024.

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More from @BenjySarlin

Benjy Sarlin Profile picture
29 Jun
Deep dive by @JeffreyASachs into the anti-CRT bills and how — regardless of whether you agree with their core concerns — the legislative language could prevent teaching even basic history and concepts arcdigital.media/p/laws-aimed-a…
One thing I appreciate about @JeffreyASachs approach to this story is acknowledging that both A) there is a partisan political effort going on that's deliberately lumping a lot of stuff together under "CRT" and B) there IS an actual change here that people are reacting to.
Because "CRT" is deliberately used as a vague catch-all term to categorize and then demonize things its critics don't like, you get a muddled debate where elites are arguing 1970s academic texts and long-running philosophy debates and average people about something else.
Read 6 tweets
Benjy Sarlin Profile picture
24 Jun
Biden says bipartisan infrastructure deal has to be paired with D-only reconciliation bill.

"If this is the only thing that comes to me I'm not signing. It's in tandem."

Asked about Pelosi plan to hold first bill in House until second bill arrives, says he supports it.
Biden and D leaders are quite clear heading into the bipartisan deal that it's all contingent on a reconciliation bill passing with other D priorities. R's are approving this deal knowing that's Biden's publicly stated plan. So are Manchin and Sinema.
Doesn't mean it's going to work! But everyone is going in with clear eyes here.
Read 4 tweets
Benjy Sarlin Profile picture
22 Jun
Politicians and federal nominees have been dragged down by all-white club scandals for decades and decades, it's not like there wasn't fair warning or this is some new 2020s social standard washingtonpost.com/politics/senat…
1990 washingtonpost.com/archive/politi…
1988 washingtonpost.com/archive/politi…
Read 4 tweets
Benjy Sarlin Profile picture
17 Jun
The Manchin voting rights bill is what a real negotiation between Manchin and voting rights advocates looks like, which is why the latter sound encouraged. But there's not even the beginning of a constituency in the GOP to work on this. It's a virtually 100% internal D debate.
This isn't like other issues, where there's a GOP version of how to approach it and a D one and maybe they can find some overlap. They just fundamentally are not working on the same issue here. Outside Murkowski, almost no interest in making significant federal changes, period.
In other words, the only q that matters: Are Manchin (and other Ds) willing to change the rules to pass a D-only bill on voting rights? No indication his position is budging there. If it does, this is what a deal looks like. If not, it's just an interesting thought experiment.
Read 4 tweets
Benjy Sarlin Profile picture
7 May
Trump lost and R's lost the Senate, yet R's near-universally conclude they need him. Why? They're not wrong exactly. Trump's leverage isn't so much his ability to grow the GOP, it's that he could *destroy* them if he wanted and not think twice about doing so. It always has been.
Graham is correct that Trump brings millions of people to the GOP who are loyal to him and him alone. He also repels millions more. What Graham is hinting at, but not saying is that Trump -- unique among R leaders -- is willing to tell his voters to stay home or go third party.
Trump's lack of loyalty to the GOP has been one of his biggest strengths since the start. Many in the party would have loved to expel him in 2015 when they feared he hurt the brand. But he was threatening to run as an Independent -- and they believed him. nbcnews.com/politics/2016-…
Read 5 tweets
Benjy Sarlin Profile picture
5 May
If the formula they’re using is “Trump pushing his election lies creates a risk of violence” it’s hard to see how that condition ever goes away
If the main issue they have is that it’s “indefinite” and they’re revisiting it in six months, odds are he’s still talking about it nonstop, the party is purging more Cheneys over it, and we’re even closer to the next elections. Not exactly making it easy for them to reverse.
Reading the full Oversight Board report here and it really doesn’t leave much room for Trump to fix the problem as they define it. He’s not going to renounce his prior behavior or stop doing it in the future.
Read 4 tweets

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