Republicans know how to win this time, even if they don't get the votes

The single most extraordinary act in attempting to overturn the 2020 election may not have been the multistate effort to install fake electors, the over 60 lawsuits Donald Trump and his allies filed citing false evidence, or even Trump’s role in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection. 

The most extraordinary undertaking of the whole tragic cycle came on Nov. 17, 2020. That’s when the most powerful man in the world, joined by the leader of his party’s committee, reached down to two low-level officials on the Wayne County Board of Canvassers and tried to pressure them to halt democracy in its tracks. 

That action failed—but only by a whisker—and it’s completely unclear what would have happened had Trump succeeded in preventing the certification of votes in the county encompassing Detroit. What’s clear is that Republicans recognized county-level officials as representing a weakness in the election process—one that could be weaponized more easily and effectively than anything at the state or federal level.

Over the past four years, Republicans have set out to consolidate their control over these low-level positions, populating these roles with Trump loyalists while facing little opposition. Now that they’ve built this democracy-crushing machine, they’re taking it for a test run.

"We've got to fight for our country," Trump told the two Republican county canvassers on that 2020 call. "We can't let these people take our country away from us." 

He bore down on these two people to halt the counting of votes in their county and force the state of Michigan to either declare itself unable to choose a slate of electors or make Trump the outright victor. It didn’t work, but the potential to exploit the power of these positions was clear. Trump supporters began angling to take these positions in the very next set of elections.

As The Washington Post reports, Trump-aligned county officials have refused to certify results following elections in five swing states since 2020: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, and Pennsylvania—exactly the states Trump disputed in the last election.

So far, none of these attempts has successfully blocked certification. Most efforts have run into state rules governing the counting of results, or succeeded only in delaying results until another authority could enforce certification. 

But don’t think of these attempts as failures. Think of them as experiments. Think of them as a tiger prowling its cage, testing each bar, and looking for a weakness. 

Republicans are investigating how these roles can be used to interfere with the quick and accurate generation of election results. They are looking for ways that, by refusing to certify the vote at the district or county level, they can prevent the vote from being certified at the state level. And they’re not even trying to keep these actions secret.

“They are playing poker with the cards up,” Tolulope Kevin Olasanoye, executive director of the Democratic Party of Georgia, told the Washington Post. “They are telling us exactly what they are going to do. We would be foolish if we sat on our hands and did nothing and watched this happen.”

The possibility of blocking certification through the actions of low-level officials represents a kind of death-by-a-thousand-paper-cuts attack on democracy. If Republicans are successful in their experiments, the reward could be a system for sabotage that’s much more difficult to fight than larger actions taken at the state or federal level. Each of these attacks could demand individual attention, complete with all the court challenges and appeals that would threaten states completing their certification by the deadline for selecting electors.

It’s retrofitting American democracy with feet of clay.

This effort isn’t happening in a vacuum. It’s not the only way that Trump is setting the stage for attacking the results if he loses this year’s election. Just as his team has been gaming the refs in advance of Thursday night’s debate, they’ve also been laying the groundwork for a more successful assault on the election results if the vote doesn’t go Trump’s way.

If Project 2025 is the autocratic agenda for what happens if Trump wins, this is the flip side—what happens if he loses. And the biggest goal is simply to make it impossible for Trump to lose.

When Trump won the electoral vote in 2016, it took most everyone by surprise, including Trump. That generated a small but important cushion around the damage that his term could generate. He didn’t understand how much of the system worked and was unprepared to staff the expansive executive branch with hundreds of people who could convert his will into action. Project 2025 is intended to address that “problem,” making sure that this time even the most extreme act meets with no resistance.

The same thing is true of the attempts to overturn the election results in 2020. Despite four years of talk, that was the first time Trump’s team had had to fight through the process, and they didn’t know what they were doing. The result was a long list of names—Roger Stone, Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, Michael Flynn, John Eastman, Jeffrey Clark—all of whom had schemes for keeping Trump in power, but none of whom was prepared with all the details and people necessary to make it work.

But they’ve had four years to prepare.

That includes keeping Trump’s base engaged through the same I-can-lose-only-if-they-cheat claims that Trump has employed since 2016, but it also means making sure that Congress is filled with more MAGA believers ready to ignore rules, laws, and the Constitution not just on Jan. 6 but also at every step in the process. 

Eight years of constant assault on the electoral system means that only 22% of Republicans now have high confidence that the 2024 vote will be accurately counted, according to a recent poll from the Associated Press/NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Independents aren’t far behind, with just 24% having a high level of confidence in an accurate result.

And if Trump has to get on the phone to call a state official, he’s unlikely to meet someone as reluctant to go along as George Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger was in 2020. Even if Trump’s top choices for four critical secretary of state roles all lost, those were only four out of 27 secretary of state elections in 2022, most of which drew little national attention. In that 2022 election, 12 Republican candidates for secretary of state campaigned on claims that Trump had won the 2020 race, according to CBS News. So did 20 Republican candidates for governor.

At every level, Trump’s supporters have been preparing. That includes replacing those Wayne County canvassers who eventually defied Trump in 2020 with members who promise to give Trump the win, regardless of the vote. Maybe that won’t break the state, but it’s certainly a bar that’s going to be tested.

Before they can implement Project 2025, they have to win in 2024. Whatever it takes.