Speaker of the House Mike Johnson is no recent convert to Donald Trump’s gospel of the Big Lie; after the 2020 election, Johnson led 100 House Republicans in filing an amicus brief supporting an effort to invalidate the results of four swing states President Joe Biden won. So it was little surprise to see him standing next to Trump at Mar-a-Lago on Friday, trying to link election conspiracy-mongering to immigration fear-mongering.
Johnson and Trump were there to propose new legislation restricting noncitizen voting, even though it is already illegal and incredibly rare. The speaker spun out a familiar and ugly fiction, claiming that as part of a plot engineered by Democrats, huge numbers of immigrants are entering the U.S. illegally and registering to vote. Democrats, Johnson said, “want to turn these people” — undocumented immigrants — “into voters.” This is a version of the white supremacist “Great Replacement” theory, which says that there is a conspiracy afoot to bring in a wave of nonwhite foreigners to replace the people Tucker Carlson calls “legacy Americans.”
The continued effort by Trump and his allies to convince rank-and-file Republicans that any election they don’t win must be fraudulent is a profound threat to American democracy. But there’s another aspect to it that has gotten much less attention: As a political strategy, it’s absolutely harebrained.
As we saw in 2020, when courts continually rejected Trump’s efforts to stop election counts or get results overturned, these attempts never succeed beyond making election workers’ lives miserable. Whether it was Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, or anywhere else, Trump tried and failed to get his losses overturned, and if and when he does the same in 2024, he’ll fail again.
Nevertheless, he has succeeded in persuading Republicans that the election system can’t be trusted. Polls show as many as 70 percent of Republicans say Trump was the true winner of the 2020 election. Every Republican politician understands how committed their voters have become to that fantasy, and so fealty to Trump’s election lies has become the test of whether you’re a “real” Republican.
The result is that the party keeps nominating election deniers who alienate the independent voters (and even some moderate Republicans) they need to win. In the 2022 Senate contests, extremist Republicans such as Kari Lake, Blake Masters and Herschel Walker lost winnable races. As long as election denial is a requirement for winning a GOP nomination, the party will continue to nominate weak candidates. And in states, like Arizona and Michigan, the entire Republican Party apparatus has been all but driven into the ground by election deniers who care more about their conspiracy theories than winning elections.
Another complication for Republicans comes in the fact that their denialism obsession is making it harder for their own voters to cast ballots. Trump has spent the last few years telling his supporters that “mail-in voting is totally corrupt” and “if you have mail-in balloting, you automatically have fraud.” When they believe him, they deprive themselves of an easy and convenient way to cast their ballots. Party officials are trying to organize mail-in voting drives, but they run up against the skepticism their own leader never stops promoting.
That’s just one aspect of a broader problem that could prove disastrous for Trump: All the talk of stolen elections could lower turnout among his supporters. After all, what’s the point of voting if it’s all rigged anyway?
This is particularly important for Trump because of a transformation in voting patterns that has occurred over the last decade. For years, higher turnout tended to benefit Democrats because of their support among those who vote only sporadically: lower-income and minority populations, young people, renters who move frequently, and so on. But that’s no longer true. Now it’s the Democrats who are outperforming in low-turnout elections, and Republicans who need the occasional voters to mobilize.
As one recent poll found, “among respondents who voted in the 2018, 2020 and 2022 general elections, Biden outpaced Trump 50 percent to 39 percent. But among respondents who were old enough to vote but voted in none of those three elections, Trump crushed Biden 44 percent to 26 percent.” If a candidate is doing better among people who don’t usually vote, he’ll have to work harder to get them to the polls, and election denialism only makes that task more difficult.
It’s possible that repeating the stolen election lie will mobilize some Trump voters by making them angry; some may even believe the lunatic claims about undocumented immigrants rushing to fill out voter registration forms. But at the same time, relitigating a previous election, rather than offering something for the future, probably turns off voters in the middle in far greater numbers.
Trump may or may not believe his lies himself, but it’s hard to imagine most of the Republican politicians lining up behind him do; the rest agree because they feel they have no choice. But whichever category Mike Johnson falls into, he will continue to demonstrate his loyalty by repeating those lies, as well as the rancid fear-mongering about immigrants his party always believes is the key to victory. If he didn’t, then he wouldn’t be speaker for long.
One has to suspect that even Johnson knows that putting so much focus on bogus claims of fraudulent votes and stolen elections is an absolutely disastrous electoral strategy. But it’s what Trump demands, so Johnson and the rest of the party will obey — no matter how many elections they lose.
