The GOP-stoked elections stress-test finally hits
Tuesday’s midterm elections will show how successfully Republicans have changed America’s political DNA — including its rules about voting — in the two years since former president Donald Trump’s defeat, in a stress test that may last days, weeks, months, or all the way to 2024.
- GOP attitudes toward the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot that interrupted the certification of President Biden’s victory have shifted away sharply from calling it an insurrection, and toward describing it as legitimate protest.
- Republicans have pursued a coast-to-coast drive to rewrite election laws to end practices they blame for Trump’s loss, with mixed results.
- Trump has never let up in his attacks on mail-in votes, which could be how nearly 58 million ballots come in, while supporters of his have waged war on machine tabulation and sought hand counts that experts say are more prone to errors.
- False claims of voter fraud have fueled frequently successful GOP efforts at the state level to take control of the country’s electoral processes.
- A majority of GOP nominees for House, Senate and statewide offices — 291 of them — have either questioned or outright denied Biden’s victory in 2020.
The results from what we still call “Election Day” — even though more than 40 million Americans have already voted, according to the United States Elections Project — may not be known for days or more, a function of America’s patchwork system for counting ballots. There’s also the very real possibility of losing candidates contesting the outcomes, much as Trump did.
It will also take time to figure out what results emerged from conditions that favor one party or the other — for Democrats, the Supreme Court’s abortion ruling; for Republicans, profound unhappiness about the economy, as well as the modern precedent that a sitting president’s party gets hit hard in their first midterms — and which came out of new election rules, or both.
‘Our entire universe has changed’
My colleagues Amy Gardner and Rosalind S. Helderman dug deep on Sunday into the coming stress test.
“A majority of Trump supporters still believe his disproved claims of a rigged election. They have demanded error-prone hand counts to bypass machines they mistrust, signed up by the thousands to scrutinize balloting and even staked out drop boxes, firearms in hand, on the false belief that they were filled with fraudulent votes in 2020.”
Amy and Roz note it’s not all bleak, pointing to largely uneventful early voting, and election administrators who have given the public more visibility into how elections work in an effort to allay concerns about the process – the good-faith worries, anyway.
“‘Our entire universe has changed,’ said Stephen Richer, the Republican recorder of Maricopa County, Ariz., the second-largest voting jurisdiction in the country, which saw an extended effort by Trump allies to overturn the vote.”
- “The county has installed cameras to monitor every phase of the tabulation process, Richer said. More bipartisan observers are participating in the process, even during sleepy overnight shifts, and new fencing now encircles the building.”
Still, “[w]hile scrutiny is part of the process, officials fear that overzealous volunteers could bring with them undue suspicion and raise unfounded doubt.” Again: a feature of the post-2020 landscape.
And it’s hard not to wince after reading this paragraph: “Elsewhere in the nation, some clerks have installed plexiglass panels and panic buttons in election offices out of fear that a flood of threats could turn into actual violence.”
Amy and Emma Brown, meanwhile, reported this morning that Republican officials and candidates in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin “are pushing to disqualify thousands of mail ballots after urging their own supporters to vote on Election Day, in what critics are calling a concerted attempt at partisan voter suppression.”
Another thing to watch: the Trump factor. Since the former president has repeatedly hinted he will run again in 2024, it’s important to see the degree to which Republican voters and officials take his cues.
For example, Amy and Roz reported, he has pushed his supporters to vote only on Election Day — not early, not by mail “despite the lack of evidence that either invites widespread fraud.”
“The strategy could also amplify the ‘red mirage’ that occurred in some states in 2020 where Republican-heavy Election Day returns posted first, only to be followed by a slow trickle of Democrat-heavy returns from absentee voting. Trump has repeatedly claimed falsely that Democratic votes were ‘found’ in those states to wrest away his lead.”
Whether voters accept this time around that this is a function of established practices that date back years and not some scheme could ultimately decide whether the United States passes the stress test.
Biden, Trump holding dueling rallies on election eve
“President Biden and former president Donald Trump plan to hold dueling rallies Monday on the eve of Election Day, with Biden headed to Maryland and Trump traveling to Ohio,” John Wagner and Mariana Alfaro report.
North Korea: Missile tests were practice to attack South, U.S.
“North Korea’s military said Monday its recent barrage of missile tests were practices to ‘mercilessly’ strike key South Korean and U.S. targets such as air bases and operation command systems with a variety of missiles that likely included nuclear-capable weapons,” the Associated Press’ Hyung-Jin Kim reports.
Lunchtime reads from The Post
Election officials fear counting delays will help fuel claims of fraud
“Officials in a handful of closely contested states are warning that the winners of tight races may not be known on election night, raising the possibility of a delay that former president Donald Trump and his allies could exploit to cast doubt on the integrity of Tuesday’s midterm vote,” Tom Hamburger, Yvonne Wingett Sanchez and Patrick Marley report.
“In Pennsylvania, Arizona, Michigan and Wisconsin, officials have in recent days preemptively called for patience, acknowledging that some of the factors that bogged down the process in 2020 remain unresolved two years later. In some cases, partisan disagreements blocked fixes, and Trump’s own advice to voters on how to cast ballots may contribute to a longer wait.”
Black voters in Florida express fear, confusion as DeSantis election laws kick in
“Tuesday will mark the first major election in Florida since the legislature pushed through changes impacting voting in the Sunshine State. Voter advocates say the laws disproportionately impact Black voters — making it harder for many to vote — and have created an environment of confusion and fear,” Lori Rozsa reports.
“It is now illegal to turn in more than two ballots that don’t belong to a close relative. There are new restrictions for organizations that help register voters. And shortly after its inception, DeSantis’s Office of Election Crimes and Security announced deputies had made 20 arrests — 15 of them involving Black voters accused of voting illegally.”
Indigenous voters, gaining influence, look to mobilize
“Indigenous voters have become a major power center across the country in recent years, including in 2020, when the Navajo Nation and other Indigenous voters helped flip Arizona for President Biden. This Congress saw the first Native Hawaiian and Alaska Native elected and seated alongside enrolled members of tribes from Oklahoma and Kansas. The Senate confirmed Deb Haaland, a member of the Pueblo of Laguna, as the first Native American to serve as interior secretary,” the New York Times’ Emily Cochrane and Mark Walker report.
“It is a trend that is expected to continue on Tuesday, when races that will determine control of both the House and Senate may come down to razor-thin margins in states with sizable Indigenous populations.”
Trump is calling Republicans to ask ‘how many’ times they’ll impeach Biden
“Trump in recent months has repeatedly asked ‘how many’ times Republicans plan to impeach the president if they take control of the House, the sources said. He has also, the sources said, asked about what they would do to impeach certain high-ranking Biden administration officials. Trump’s questions have touched on potential timelines for any potential impeachment inquiries, as well as on how much support impeachment has in the Republican conference,” Rolling Stone’s Asawin Suesaeng and Patrick Reis report.
Senior White House official involved in undisclosed talks with top Putin aides
“Officials said that U.S. national-security adviser Jake Sullivan has been in contact with Yuri Ushakov, a foreign-policy adviser to Mr. Putin. Mr. Sullivan also has spoken with his direct counterpart in the Russian government, Nikolai Patrushev, the officials added. The aim has been to guard against the risk of escalation and keep communications channels open, and not to discuss a settlement of the war in Ukraine, the officials said,” the Wall Street Journal’s Vivian Salama and Michael R. Gordon report.
As midterms near, Biden faces a nation as polarized as ever
“These are frustrating, even perplexing times for Mr. Biden, who according to confidants had expected the fever of polarizing politics to have broken by now and was surprised that it had not. The presidency he envisioned, one where he presided over a moment of reconciliation, is not the presidency he has gotten. He thought that if he could simply govern well, everything would work out, which in hindsight strikes some around him as shockingly naïve if somewhat endearing,” the NYT’s Peter Baker writes.
In a shift, U.S. says companies are pivotal to climate talks’ success
“With war, inflation and electoral chaos preoccupying world leaders, the Biden administration is looking for corporations to take center stage as the world’s biggest annual climate change event gets underway in Egypt,” Evan Halper and Timothy Puko report.
What time the polls close, visualized
“Poll closing times vary from state to state, from county to county, and in some parts of the country, from town to town. The earliest results in most states are reported by local voting precincts soon after polls close there. Every state also has different rules for how officials process and count ballots, and these rules determine how quickly results are released,” Ashlyn Still, Lauren Tierney and Kevin Uhrmacher report.
How a GOP Congress could roll back freedoms nationwide
“If Republicans win control of one or both congressional chambers this week, they will likely begin a project that could reshape the nation’s political and legal landscape: imposing on blue states the rollback of civil rights and liberties that has rapidly advanced through red states since 2021,” Ronald Brownstein writes for the Atlantic.
“Over the past two years, the 23 states where Republicans hold unified control of the governorship and state legislature have approved the most aggressive wave of socially conservative legislation in modern times … With much less attention, Republicans in the U.S. House and Senate have introduced legislation to write each of these red-state initiatives into federal law.”
Everyone thought this Republican would be easier to beat. He may win anyway.
“During the primary, Democrats and Republicans seemed to agree on at least one thing: Don Bolduc would be the easier candidate for the Democratic incumbent to beat,” the Boston Globe’s Emma Platoff reports.
“Yet in the final days before the midterm elections, the hard-charging, Trump-supporting former Army brigadier general is polling neck-and-neck with that incumbent, Democratic Senator Maggie Hassan, in a race that could decide control of the US Senate.”
At 4 p.m.: Biden will participate in a virtual reception for the Democratic National Committee.
Biden and first lady Jill Biden will leave the White House for Bowie, Md., at 5:45 p.m.
At 7 p.m., the Bidens will participate in a rally for Wes Moore, the Democratic candidate for governor of Maryland.
The Bidens will leave Bowie for the White House at 8:25 p.m. They will arrive at 8:35 p.m.
A total lunar eclipse will turn the moon blood red on Election Day
“Hours before citizens across the country cast their votes in a contentious midterm election, a sinister red moon will loom in the sky. The last total lunar eclipse of 2022 is set to stain the moon red during the wee hours of Tuesday morning. Residents across both coasts will be able to watch the spectacle for just under 90 minutes,” Amudalat Ajasa reports.
Thanks for reading. See you tomorrow.
