But the Republican efforts didn’t stop there. In what the source dubbed an “AstroTurf recruitment process,” the NRSC had “allies that were seeding these new polls pretty aggressively into progressive digital spaces.”
There were several recruitment phone calls and text messages that went out to Democrats and high-propensity voters across the state that would urge voters to contact and advocate for Crockett to join the race, the source said.
“That was really a sustained effort that we orchestrated across the ecosystem for several months,” the source said. “Not only was it getting positive news coverage, but her office was directly having traffic driven to it in terms of phone calls urging her to run.”
This is one of those things which is technically not illegal but there was a long-standing gentleman’s agreement that it was outside the bounds of respectable politics. There might have been some rumors floating around (ie: people were floating the idea of Democrats voting for Trump in the 2016 primary because it was thought he’d be easier for HIllary to beat) but nobody came out and said yep, we take responsibility for doing this and aren’t ashamed about it.
I’d like to catalogue what things still remain in this category in order to keep an eye on if/when each individual thing eventually erodes.
Some things I can think of (correct me if these have happened):
Widespread voting in the other party’s primaries to pick the weakest candidate (rumors over the years but I’ve never seen a confirmed case).
Paying people to move from safe states to swing states.
Timing road construction/public transit delays/other inconveniences into the areas of town most likely to vote for your opponent.
Until this cycle, I would have considered paying people to vote to be illegal but Musk proves it’s apparently defacto legal since he never got punished so a bunch of different ways of paying people to vote outside of Musk’s specific instance haven’t been tried yet but I assume will soon.
What about paying people not to vote? Would it be legal for a business owner in a state with no early or mail in voting to give the day off to stores in the more conservative areas of the state but give bonuses for working long hours without break in the stores in the more liberal areas? What if he were to target people individually based on voter roll data? Is there any law against this?
Beyond just elections, this year for example, Mike Johnson for the first time refused to seat Adelita Grijalva for 50 days to stall the release of the Epstein files which is apparently legal but unprecedented. What other tricks like that are still waiting in the wings for someone brazen enough to try for the first time?
What are other tactics, that at least some credible people have speculated would be politically effective, but have been held off on being tried for whatever reason, but might become the new normal for the US political future?
Like organized voting? I don’t know about that, but it’s super common here in Texas for pragmatic Democrats or Democrat-leaning people to vote in the Republican primaries in order to actually have a say in who gets elected, because most of the time, the GOP primary is the actual election that matters, not the general one.
I’m not sure whether you can ever really have a “confirmed case” as we have secret ballots. Moreover, if the strategy backfires (as it did most recently in Georgia), nobody will be bragging about their part in it. But it definitely happens, in fact I’ve heard people talking about it in every GA primary since I’ve been following politics (about 30 years).
In PA, counties are run by a 3-person commission. The election law allows each party to submit only 2 names so the minority party gets represented. In the county I partially grew up in the Republicans would get 15,001 Republicans to register as Democrats. one to run for the commission under the Democratic label and the rest to vote for them in the primary.
Openly in this case would mean not just people independently doing it out of their own volition, but the opposing party or some other entity actively pushing for it and not denying that’s what their doing.
We recently changed the primary elections so that the top two candidates would run against each other in the general. In many districts, the Republican candidate would have no chance. This change gave us two Democrats running against each other instead. It worked pretty well. The elections were a real choice between two serious candidates.
In the most recent primary for senate, one democratic candidate ran ads about how awful a certain popular republican was. As a result, the republicans all voted for him and Steve Garvey took second place. Of course he lost in the general in November.
Also known as the Claire McCaskill gambit. In 2012 the Democratic incumbent McCaskill, facing an increasing conservative tilt in Missouri, ran commercials criticizing Todd Akin, the most extreme conservative of the three Republicans in the primary. This boosted Akin’s visibility in the race and energized the extreme conservative wing of the Republicans while alienating just about everyone else. As McCaskill herself wrote, “Never before had I been so engaged and so committed to another’s race.”
Akin won the primary, but proved to be too radically conservative even for Missouri voters, and McCaskill won the election by five percentage points.
The danger, of course, is that you’re not just rolling the dice on the other side’s candidate maybe not turning out to be unpalatable; it’s also that, even if it pretty much would work, what happens if the other side does likewise and so both sides wind up running an unpalatable candidate?
My father tells me that in Taiwan, back in the day, there used to be people who’d dress up as political activists for the opposing party and false-flag them by knocking on people’s doors at 2 or 3 AM with the purpose of pissing off them and getting them to vote against the party. I wonder if that’s legal in America. Of course, America is a Second Amendment nation so that might be risky to health.
In light of all the conspiratorial doomsaying about how Trump is going to somehow “cancel the election” or “declare martial law” and become president for life, I decided to try and figure out the most plausible way a party actually could subvert the Constitution and elections to install a dictatorial president in 2028.
Here’s what I came up with;
In the midterms, Republicans hold the majority in the House and gain seven seats in the Senate, providing them with a filibuster-proof majority. (In the real world, the plan falls apart right here, because IMO Democrats are likely to win a majority in both houses in the midterms, but I digress.)
Said majority exercises its Constitutional authority to choose the time at which presidential electors shall be appointed, and postpones it until a date to be determined later.
The Republicans maintain their House majority in the 2028 Congressional election, which unlike the presidential election they have not rescheduled.
When the new Congress convenes in 2029, said majority elects a Speaker.
Trump’s term expires on 1/20/2029, and since no new president has been elected, said Speaker becomes Acting President until such time as Congress bothers scheduling a new election.
I don’t think this is likely to happen, but it’s the most plausible method I can think of that complies with existing law and precedent.