Carl P. Leubsdorf
“If everything’s honest, I’d gladly accept the results,” Donald Trump told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel recently. “If it’s not, you have to fight for the right of the country.”
Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
It’s an eerie echo of the warnings that presaged Trump’s 2020 rejection of his defeat: “The only way we’re going to lose this election is if the election is rigged … and we can’t let that happen,” he told a Wisconsin rally that August.
There was no way, he repeatedly said, he could lose to Joe Biden, whom he called “the worst candidate in the history of presidential politics.” And when he did, he did everything to ensure he didn’t.
That meant dozens of unsuccessful court challenges to Biden’s victories in battleground states, followed by the January 6 invasion of the Capitol to keep the House and Senate from certifying the result and, when that failed, persistent contentions it was wrong.
But what happened in 2020 may look like a walk in the park if Trump challenges the 2024 outcome. His threats to fight any result he deems dishonest may sound familiar, but his preparations to do so are not.
This time, his campaign and the Republican National Committee are planning a massive effort including legal challenges against individual voters on a precinct-by-precinct basis to ensure the election meets Trump’s standards of honesty — meaning he wins.
Trump strategist Chris LaCivita told CNN the RNC is hiring thousands of lawyers to “initiate battle on election integrity from an offensive instead of defensive posture.”
And the RNC’s definition of “election integrity” is epitomized by its decision to hire Trump attorney and prominent 2020 election denier Christina Bobb as its senior counsel for election integrity.
A former correspondent at the Trump-aligned One America News Network, Bobb became a major advocate of Trump’s unproven claims the 2020 election was stolen. More recently, she was among Trump campaign figures indicted in Arizona for trying to overturn its 2020 result.
The GOP’s projected legal campaign would dwarf the dozens of court challenges that the 2020 Trump campaign filed in the seven decisive states where narrow victories gave Biden his 306-232 Electoral College margin.
Party co-chair Lara Trump, the former president’s daughter-in-law, told Fox Business News’ Maria Bartiromo the goal is to hire 100,000 attorneys, declaring, “We want them in every major polling location across the country.
“We can’t be reactive,” she said. “We have to be pro-active.”
As part of this effort, the RNC announced it is establishing “Republican Party War Rooms” in competitive states, including an “Election Integrity Hotline” to answer calls from poll watchers and voters who have observed possible irregularities. In 2020, most such allegations were false.
Meanwhile, the Democratic National Committee plans to counter GOP efforts to restrict poll access by investing tens of millions of dollars in “a robust voter protection operation,” spokesperson Alex Floyd told The Associated Press.
The RNC has already filed lawsuits in several states against voting rules it believes help the Democrats.
In Arizona, it sued to invalidate the state’s manual for running elections, both on procedural grounds and because it allows out-of-precinct voting.
In Michigan, it claimed officials were not doing enough to maintain the integrity of voter rolls by removing deceased and ineligible voters. But the federal judge to whom the case was assigned, Jane M. Beckering, said in dismissing a similar suit that “Michigan is consistently among the most active states in cancelling the registrations of deceased individuals.”
The Michigan challenge reflects one of the most frequent complaints from those alleging widespread voter fraud: bloated registration rolls filled with deceased voters and those who have moved. But a variety of federal, state and local probes over the past two decades — including one by the Trump administration — failed to find more than scattered examples of illegal voting.
The most potentially significant RNC lawsuits seek to curb late counting of absentee ballots, claiming it somehow undermines “election integrity.” But the real target is the massive Democratic reliance on absentee ballots, which was one factor Republicans blamed for Trump’s 2020 defeat.
Lara Trump cited a lawsuit the RNC recently filed in Nevada against a law allowing officials four days after Election Day to count mailed ballots postmarked by Election Day. The RNC wants Election Day “to be the last day that mail-in ballots can be counted,” she said.
The RNC has also challenged laws affecting mail-in voting in several other states, including Mississippi, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Ironically, the legal assault on mail-in voting comes at a time that Trump and the GOP have reversed their public opposition and launched several efforts to encourage it among Republican-leaning groups. According to Axios, three Republican groups in Pennsylvania spent $1.5 million to encourage mail voting in last month’s primary and plan to spend another $8.5 million before November.
And Trump himself joined the GOP flip-flop by posting on Truth Social: “ABESENTEE VOTING, EARLY VOTING AND ELECTION DAY VOTING ARE ALL GOOD OPTIONS.”
As long as they’re counted by Election Day, apparently. Still, Trump’s basic approach remains the same as in the past two elections: contend only a rigged election can beat him and prepare to challenge the outcome if he loses.
But the extent of that challenge could far eclipse what happened in 2020.
Carl P. Leubsdorf is the former Washington bureau chief of the Dallas Morning News. Readers may write to him via email at [email protected]. This commentary is distributed by Tribune News Service. Send comments to [email protected].
