GOP primed to back Trump if he contests election

The Republican Party is now more primed to back former President Trump if he contests the results of the 2024 election than it was four years ago, when his efforts to overturn Joe Biden’s victory fell flat in courts and Congress.

Trump’s unwavering claims about the nation’s election system being “rigged” have steadily gained more acceptance among rank-and-file Republicans voters over the past four years and his biggest Republican critics in Congress have either retired or will retire soon or have lost sway.

Additionally, Trump allies around the country have worked to gain more influence over state and local election boards, which will be in charge of tallying votes and certifying the results.

Republicans are feeling increasingly optimistic that Trump will win the election, but they are girding for an intense battle if Vice President Harris is declared the winner.

“The strength of the cult of Trump amongst voters is strong so members are reflecting what their constituents want them to do,” said a Republican strategist and former Senate leadership aide.

“The other angle is there are a lot of concerns about how elections are being conducted and the power of social media and our partisan news,” the strategist said. “Republicans watch a lot of Twitter and Fox News and they see voting irregularities,” pointing out a recent Detroit News report that a Chinese citizen attending the University of Michigan voted illegally by absentee ballot and election officials weren’t able to retrieve it.

Four years ago, Trump’s claims that Joe Biden and his allies “stole” the election struck many Republicans in Washington as outlandish, though most of them extended him the courtesy of letting Trump pursue his claims in court, where they failed.

This November, the political landscape is dramatically changed.

John Ullyot, a Republican strategist and former Senate aide and Trump administration official, said GOP lawmakers and voters have become much more focused on “election integrity” since Trump left office.

“Election integrity is a top-of-mind issue for Republicans after the 2020 election and that is even more so going into 2024, because they’ve seen this before and they want to make sure we have a free and fair election,” he said.

Ullyot said the Republican National Committee has deployed an army of poll watchers around the country to assist in contesting any results Trump’s team views as suspicious.

“The steps being taken on the ground directed out of the RNC are critical — they’re way bigger than they were back in 2016 or 2020,” he said. “These are the poll watchers and lawyers who are mobilized on the ground from the Republican National Committee.

“The Republican Party as a whole is focused on maintaining election integrity unlike they’ve ever done before because they’ve seen what happens what happened four years ago and they want to make sure there are no questions about the integrity of voting this time around,” he said.

“That’s critical not only for the presidential race but senators realize it’s critical for winning control of the Senate. … The Senate is 100 percent aligned with the rest of the party, even more so when it comes to ensuring a fair vote in the swing states,” he added.

An Associated Press/NORC poll conducted in late July and early August found that Republicans are likely to trust Trump’s claims about the election results more than they trust the conclusions of state and local officials.

The survey found that about two-thirds of Republicans would trust Trump’s campaign to provide accurate information about the election results while about half said they would trust the officially certified results.

Nine in 10 Democrats, by comparison, said they would trust the certified election results.

Furthermore, only 31 percent of Republicans say that President Biden was elected legitimately, a substantial drop from the 39 percent of Republicans who said so in 2021, according to a Washington Post/University of Maryland survey published in January.

A Pew Research poll published last week found that only 57 percent of Trump supporters believe the election will be run well and only 30 percent of Trump supporters feel confident that ineligible voters will be prevented from voting.

When Trump claimed the presidential election was stolen in 2020, many Republican lawmakers in Washington viewed the idea as suspect, especially in the Senate, where the GOP leadership worked hard to defeat the effort to block the certification of Biden’s victory.

Senate Republican Whip John Thune (S.D.) famously declared in December of 2020 that efforts to block the certification of Biden’s victory would “go down like a shot dog” in the Senate.

GOP aides say Thune, who is running to become the next Senate GOP leader and needs the votes of Trump allies, won’t be nearly as outspoken this time in opposing efforts to contest the election, should they arise.

“It’s hard to see that type of triggered response,” said a Senate GOP aide, who recalled that Thune’s declaration earned Trump’s wrath and later prompted Trump to call for Thune to face a primary challenger in 2022.

But the aide noted that when Thune said that in 2020, it “seemed perfectly reasonable” at the time, as the vast majority of Senate Republicans didn’t take Trump’s claims of a stolen election seriously in December of that year and the following January.

Trump-backed proposals to reject slates of electoral votes from Pennsylvania and Arizona in 2021 failed resoundingly in the Senate by a vote of 92-7 and 93-6, respectively. They had more support in the House, where 138 Republicans voted to object to certify Pennsylvania’s electors and 121 of them voted to object to Arizona’s electors.

But the Republican conferences in both chambers have since become more conservative and more closely allied with Trump — and one of Trump’s biggest private critics among Senate Republicans, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), is stepping down from his leadership post at the end of the year.

A second Senate Republican aide said Trump’s unsubstantiated claim of widespread election fraud “has been normalized” among Republican lawmakers on the Hill. But the aide pointed out that Congress passed the Electoral Count Act at the end of 2022, which raised the threshold for lodging an objection to a state’s electoral slate, now requiring at least one-fifth support of both the Senate and the House to advance it.

The bill, which was spearhead by Senate Rules Committee Chair Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), also identifies each state’s governor as responsible for submitting certificates identifying its electors and requires Congress to defer to slates of electors submitted by a state executive pursuant to the judgments of state and federal courts.

The Senate Republican conference has changed substantially since December of 2020, as several of McConnell’s closest allies — traditional Reagan-Bush Republicans who were not big fans of Trump — retired. These departed old-school Republicans include former Sens. Lamar Alexander (Tenn.), Roy Blunt (Mo.), Richard Burr (N.C.), Rob Portman (Ohio), Pat Roberts (Kan.) and Pat Toomey (Pa.).

They have been replaced with MAGA-allied Republicans such as Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.) and Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.), whose names are being floated as potential Trump Cabinet picks; Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), Trump’s running mate, and Sens. Ted Budd (R-N.C.) and Roger Marshall (R-Kan.).

“JD Vance would look to [Sens.] Josh Hawley [R-Mo.] and Ted Cruz [R-Texas] and others who have led the charge in the past. It will be the same individuals who were willing to stand up and object during the last election who will be the ones in the Senate that will support the House efforts to object to electors,” said a second Republican strategist, who mapped out a likely scenario if Trump again contests the election results.

Trump says the only way he could lose would be if the election was “corrupt”; he has already accused Democrats of “cheating” in Pennsylvania.

The GOP strategist said Democrats are also hinting at filing their own challenges if Vice President Harris loses, predicing chaos after Election Day if the contest is narrowly decided either way.

“It’s interesting that we’re already going down the same road” as 2020, the strategist said. “Both parties really need to step back from these efforts to overturn elections and look at the Electoral College as a proceeding where they have the power to disemfranchise whole slates of electors. …. It’s not good.”

Several Republican operatives pointed out that Democrats contested President George W. Bush’s victories in 2000 and 2004 and said that is empowering more Republicans to support such a challenge this time around, especially if Trump pushes it.

Of the seven Senate Republicans who voted to convict Trump for inciting insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, only three will return to Congress next year: Sens. Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), Susan Collins (Maine) and Bill Cassidy (La.). Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), one of Trump’s fiercest Senate GOP critics, is retiring at the end of this year.

In the House, only two of the 10 Republicans who voted to impeach Trump in 2021 are running for re-election: Reps. Dan Newhouse (R-Wash.) and David Valadao (R-Calif.).

Trump recently renewed his call for supporters to oust Newhouse, who is running against fellow Republican Jerrod Sessler, even though Newhouse has strong scores from the National Rifle Association and is solidly anti-abortion. They were the top two-vote getters in the Washington district’s all-party primary.

Trump endorsed Stressler and cited Newhouse’s impeachment vote in calling him out as a “RINO.”

Trump allies also have more influence over local election boards.

Reuters reported last month that nearly half of the election boards of the five largest counties in each of the seven battleground states have members who have expressed sympathy for Trump’s claims that the election is highly susceptible to fraud.

An 88-page report by the Center for Media and Democracy, a progressive nonprofit watchdog group, found evidence that state election officials in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin have previously denied the legitimacy of the 2020 election or have spread false claims about voter fraud.