How Republicans win presidential elections, according to Republicans: We are the party of middle-American morals and values, and the Democrats are the party of amoral weirdos and un-American radicals, so voters naturally prefer us.
How Republicans win presidential elections, according to the mainstream media: Republicans speak more effectively to real Americans, who are mostly white, Christian people in small cities and towns who are more authentically American than those big-city coastal elitists could ever be.
How Republicans win presidential elections, according to the factual record: They cheat.
This has been true in most elections in recent American history, as I’ll detail below. But let’s start with a few examples from this election.
Last week, young voters in Wisconsin (it’s not known how many) received a text message that read: “WARNING: Violating WI Statutes 12.13 & 6.18 may result in fines up to $10,000 or 3.5 years in prison. Don’t vote in a state where you’re not eligible.” Those are sections of Wisconsin law that refer to absentee voting and the consequences of election fraud, but they could have been about jaywalking. The point was just to scare college students from out of state into thinking they can’t vote.
This is an old GOP trick. When I was a young reporter in New York, I remember instances of fliers being tucked under parked cars’ windshield wipers with messages like “WARNING: If you aren’t up to date on your utility bills, it is illegal to vote.” In Black neighborhoods, naturally. I’d imagine we’ll see a lot of this kind of thing come Election Day.
But this year, we’ll see far worse than that. Election workers, as we know, are terrified. A recent Brennan Center survey found that 38 percent of election workers had received some kind of threat. In Durham County, North Carolina, they’re installing bulletproof glass at election headquarters and equipping poll workers with panic buttons. Will armed MAGA vigilantes be showing up at polling places in Black neighborhoods in the major cities of swing states? I’d be shocked at this point if some don’t. I hope the police are ready.
Cheating takes many forms. Russian disinformation is already out there. An Axios report from September 10 said: “Russian disinformation warfare is more calculated and intentional than ever—as it employs more strategies that require hefty financial investments and long-term planning.” A prominent example: On September 2, a video was posted to social media featuring a young Black woman who claimed that Kamala Harris left her paralyzed from a hit-and-run accident 13 years ago. The whole thing was fake, according to a report by Microsoft, and came from a Russia-aligned network called Storm-1516. Who knows how extensive such disinformation is right now?
Here, supporters of Donald Trump will counter that Iran has spread disinformation to hurt Trump. And yes, that’s true. But here’s the difference. Trump and his people wink at Russian disinformation and deny they know anything about it. But when Iranian hackers emailed some officials from the Biden campaign and then the Harris campaign, those officials (a) did not respond and (b) began cooperating with law-enforcement authorities. And in any case, the Iranian meddling is a molehill compared to the vast mountain range of Russian meddling.
Finally, let’s consider what Elon Musk is up to. He’s paying people in battleground states $100 to sign a petition affirming free speech and gun rights, and he announced over the weekend that every day until the election, some lucky signatory is going to win $1 million. Since he’s not paying people to vote, this wouldn’t appear to be illegal. But it’s gaming the system in a gross and uncivic way. And who knows what kind of voter data his PAC is collecting, and to what future use the data might be put?
But there’s more. Musk has also reportedly poured $100 million into a right-wing dark money PAC that created an initiative called Progress 2028, which was purported to be the Harris campaign’s answer to Project 2025. Progress 2028 consists of fake positions that the Harris campaign has not taken: for example, “Empowering Undocumented Immigrants, Building Our Future,” and “Expanding Medicaid to Undocumented Immigrants.”
Another PAC Musk is supporting is telling Arab voters in Michigan about Harris’s strong support for Israel while simultaneously telling Jewish voters in Pennsylvania about how intensely anti-Israel Harris is.
I haven’t even scratched the surface here, but these four broad categories—voter intimidation techniques, more direct threats of violence, foreign disinformation, and super PAC and dark money skullduggery—are standard operating procedure in Republican campaigns and have only grown more extreme since Trump came along.
Republicans cheat. They have for decades. Let’s go back to the year I was born and have a look.
1960: John Kennedy won. Yeah, there was probably some Democratic cheating going on in Cook County, but it didn’t matter; JFK won 303 electoral votes, and Illinois gave him 27, meaning he’d have had a winning 276 electoral votes even if the state had gone for Richard Nixon.
1964: Johnson won in a massive landslide.
1968: Famously, the Nixon campaign committed treason here, sabotaging the Paris Peace Accords and prolonging the Vietnam War. LBJ said to Everett Dirksen, the Republican leader of the Senate, “This is treason.” Dirksen’s reply? “I know.”
1972: Nixon won in a huge landslide but still felt the need to cheat. Ever hear of Watergate?
1976: Jimmy Carter won. No record of him cheating. If Ford tried anything, it didn’t work.
1980: Surely the great Ronald Reagan didn’t cheat? Au contraire. This was arguably worse than Nixon. The Reagan campaign negotiated with the Iranian government to keep the hostages in Tehran until after the election. A Reagan operative named Ben Barnes confirmed the whole story to The New York Times in 2023.
1984: Reagan won in a landslide. So here’s one clean case. Even if they did cheat, it didn’t matter.
1988: George H.W. Bush won. Maybe no consequential outright cheating, but this was filthy Lee Atwater politics at its zenith: Willie Horton, the ACLU, the Pledge of Allegiance. On his deathbed, Atwater apologized to Mike Dukakis for the campaign he ran.
1992 and 1996: Bill Clinton won. The only cheating Clinton did was on his wife, which the public ultimately judged to be not their business.
2000: The butterfly ballot, the hanging chads, Katherine Harris, the Brooks Brothers riot, and of course one of the most disgraceful Supreme Court decisions in American history.
2004: OK, maybe George W. won this one without open cheating. Of course, there were those 11 gay-marriage referenda on state ballots. And there was the swift-boating of John Kerry: a new level of outright lying about the other candidate.
2008 and 2012: With Barack Obama’s victories, we begin to see the dawn of the era of the nutso right-wing conspiracy theory, so there were all kinds of insane allegations, but never any proof of cheating.
2016: Donald Trump. Where do we begin?
2020: Joe Biden. Again, despite the howling of the noise machine, no proof of anything untoward.
So they’ve cheated, or told astonishing lies, in nearly every election they’ve won in the last 64 years. A former GOP operative named Allen Raymond was convicted in a 2002 Election Day phone-jamming scandal, went to prison briefly, and wrote a book about all the schemes he was involved in, called How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative. Of his time in the hoosegow, he writes, he told his wife: “After ten full years inside the GOP, ninety days amongst honest criminals wasn’t any great ordeal.”
The question is why they do it.
I think the answer is basically that they have always seen Democrats and liberals, especially since the rise of the New Right in the 1970s, as not just foes but the mortal enemy, so anything to defeat them is justified. What motivates a person to send fake texts to college students? The person clearly knows it’s wrong. But he does it. It’s in service of a greater good.
So that’s the historical reason. Also—that they know their positions are unpopular and they can’t usually win on the merits, as indeed recent history has shown us, with Democrats regularly winning the popular vote.
Now add to this cocktail Trump—a guy who was raised, by his father and Roy Cohn, to believe that everyone cheats, so you just need to be the best cheater.
So all bets are off. The cheating this year is and will be unprecedented. And then there’s the stuff Trump is planning on doing after Election Day. But first things first.
