“I think it’s something that will haunt Republicans again,” said Jon Gilmore, a Republican strategist in Arkansas and an adviser to state Gov. Asa Hutchinson. “It opens a Pandora’s box.”
Since the 1990s, Republican presidential candidates have only once won the popular vote – in George W. Bush’s re-election campaign in 2004 – with Trump relying on the Electoral College in his 2016 election and having no chance of even running near Biden without it. . year. In the near future, it looks like the changing demographics of the country, despite Trump’s modest interference with coloreds this year, are likely to place the referendum out of the reach of Republicans, making the Electoral College all the more important to the IDP. Given the interests, it may seem unintuitive to accidentally delegitimize the Electoral College. For some Republicans, it’s nut.
Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton, an ally of Trump and a potential presidential candidate in 2024, briefly raised the concern in a statement over the weekend against the efforts of his Republican colleagues to stop the counting of votes. He said overturning the result “would jeopardize the Electoral College, giving small states like Arkansas a vote in presidential elections. Democrats could achieve their long-standing goal of eliminating the Electoral College by refusing to vote in the future” to count for an elected Republican president.
And seven House Republics were even more explicit and warned in a joint letter that future Republican presidential campaigns were underway.
“From a purely biased perspective, Republican presidential candidates have won the national referendum only once in the past 32 years,” said representatives Thomas Massie of Kentucky, Ken Buck of Colorado, Chip Roy of Texas, Kelly Armstrong of North Dakota, Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin, Tom McClintock of California and Nancy Mace of South Carolina. ‘They were therefore dependent on the Electoral College for almost all the presidential victories in the last generation. If we uphold the idea that Congress may disregard certified voting votes – based solely on its own judgment that one or more states mismanaged the presidential election, we will have delegitimized the system that led Donald Trump to a victory in 2016, and it could be the only way to victory in 2024. ”
As a matter of principle, the proceedings on Wednesday will put the Republicans in an awkward position.
“They all know it’s absurd,” Stuart Stevens said. He was the chief strategist for Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign in 2012 and who worked against Trump’s re-election last year. ‘It’s just part of it, you know, you have people like [Sen. Josh] Hawley en [Sen. Ted] Cruz who has devoted his entire life to the establishment of credentials, and they now find themselves in a political world in which it is negative, not positive, and therefore they are desperately trying to prove that, although I myself am a constitutional advocate mention, I like to shred the Constitution. ”
And while Stevens supports Electoral College, it’s not most Republicans. In terms of rank politics, the rape of the Electoral College can be remembered as a profound example of the IDP shooting itself in the foot. One former Republican president of state said, “Republicans can not say they are for federalism and then undermine the electoral college.”
Recall that after the 2004 election, Congress Democrats debated the voting votes in Ohio, former President Tom Davis, a Virginia Republican who served as chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, said the Democrats’ set the precedent. created ‘, but that’ Republicans now take it and just run it into the ground. ”
“This is a slap in the face to voters,” he said, predicting that it would be a “legacy vote” for Republicans in which “people in history will be judged by whether they want to overthrow the Electoral College.”
Davis said he has spoken to several House Republicans who are threatened with primary challenges if they do not go along with Trump. But, he said, “there are just a few things you should not tamper with.”
It is possible that members of Cotton and like-minded Housemates exaggerate their concerns about the Electoral College. The challenges posed by the election by Trump and his allies abounded with a number of apparent political contradictions that Republicans are unlikely to suffer in the long run, with Republican lawmakers going so far as to say that demand that the election of their own states be declared – but only the presidential result, not theirs. The Trump presidency has been defined by democratic norm-breaking, and the Electoral College is not exactly on any list of endangered species.
One member of the Republican National Committee described the objections that Cruz and others were planning to “leverage” to promote complaints about voter fraud, which heightened a looming attempt by Republicans in state houses across the country to reach out by mail and tighten other voting restrictions. This attempt, if successful, is likely to help Republican nominees in future presidential elections. One prominent Republican political strategist called any proposal for long-term implications for the Electoral College ‘complete bull —-‘, and Frank Pignanelli, a former Democratic state legislator in Utah who now advises politicians from both parties, said: “I do not think the Electoral College will disappear any time soon. ”
“Things are moving so fast,” Pignanelli said, “that I think people will forget in a year.”
Trump himself in 2012 called the Electoral College a “disaster for a democracy”, ”Before we rely on 2016 and reversal.
But if the Electoral College is relatively solid, it is not sacred either. From the GOP’s perspective, this means he needs every defender he can get. Even before the November election, a majority of Americans – 61 percent – told Gallup they supported the abolition of the Electoral College. And for those who would very much like to see tampering with the Electoral College, the legal and legislative maneuver since the election – which ends on Wednesday – has begun to look like a bonanza.
In the maelstrom after the election around voting challenges, John Koza, whose National Popular Vote initiative is slowly gaining steam, said the calls and donations to his organization are no more. Since the mid-2000s, 15 states and the District of Columbia have signed the agreement promoting their group, in which – if enough states eventually sign – they will award voting votes to whoever wins the national referendum, regardless of the outcome in their individual states.
Koza said that Americans who had not paid much attention to the workings of the Electoral College in the past, the lawsuit and legislative maneuver after the election “give a space of the instability that the current system has existed for years.”
“This thing Wednesday, which is usually a total yawn, is now becoming a major event,” Koza said. “It focuses on the problem that the whole election revolves around a handful of battlefield states, and 38 states are basically irrelevant in the presidential election.”
Rep. Ted Lieu (D-California), who was an early supporter of the National Popular Vote movement when he was a state legislator in California in 2006, said the spectacle surrounding this year’s election certification gives greater impetus to a national referendum to replace the Electoral College. ”
He said: “None of these things will be a problem if we achieve Biden’s victory of more than 7 million votes.”
And for Republicans who want to retain the Electoral College, even the risk of losing confidence in the institution is a problem. Arkansas strategist Gilmore, like many Republicans, said the fight Wednesday “could only be a flash in the pan.”
However, he said: “It’s not a flash in the pan that I, as a Republican operator and strategist who has worked in the party for a long time, want to see the spark continue.”