The ‘we wuz robbed’ coalition finds a home in both political parties these days
Don’t let anyone tell you Democrats and Republicans can no longer find common ground. Partisan warriors on both sides nowadays agree that any presidential election they lose has been stolen.
The “we wuz robbed” coalition began forming after the 2000 race, which came down to 537 votes in Florida. Many Democrats say the Supreme Court stole the election for George W. Bush when it stopped manual recounts of disputed ballots. But the New York Times and other media companies sponsored a complete recount of those ballots and confirmed Bush’s victory.
When Bush won reelection in 2004, the boo birds blamed shenanigans in Ohio, where John Kerry lost not by a few hundred votes but by 118,000. They were still at it in 2006, when Robert Kennedy Jr. took to the pages of Rolling Stone to ask “Was the 2004 election stolen?”
In 2008 and 2012, Republicans claimed that a community activist group called ACORN put Barack Obama over the top with phony voter registration forms. (Employees had faked forms to get paid for work they didn’t do.) For those who doubted that story could overshadow Obama’s massive popular vote margins, there was birtherism, the charge that Obama was born overseas and thus ineligible to serve.
No one knows who the first birther was, but we know who rode the myth to the threshold of political stardom. Donald Trump reshaped American politics and revolutionized the science of election fraud, claiming to detect it long before any votes were cast and even after he won.
If Trump gave voters their first experience of a sore winner, Hillary Clinton played a classic sore loser. Depending on what day it was, she blamed her loss on misogyny, the media, Russia, her campaign staff, voter suppression, or white women who let men tell them how to vote. Nearly three years after the election, she insisted Trump was an illegitimate president.
Meanwhile Trump prepared to become exactly that in 2020 if the voting didn’t go his way. He repeated his allegations of foul play in 2016 and 2018 and predicted more of the same next time. As always, he saw anger, suspicion and chaos as his best political tools and worked his thumbs to the bone cultivating all three.
He got help. Democrats never stopped talking about stolen elections. Some swore that Vladimir Putin had used the magic of Facebook to install Trump as president and would do so again. Some portrayed the debate over early voting and mail-in voting (which involved differences of degree and not of kind) as democracy’s last stand. Joe Biden was moved to the point of triple adverbs: “I really, really, really believe we’re on the cusp of what could be the most corrupt process that we’ve seen in a general election if we don’t monitor this every single second.”
If you tired of hearing your political opponents wail about stolen elections in 2020, you could flip the channel and hear your own side wail. In the end, an election allegedly beset by rampant voter suppression surpassed 2016’s record turnout by 21 million. And of the dozens of lawsuits filed to “stop the steal” on Trump’s behalf, a single inconsequential suit in Pennsylvania succeeded.
A democracy with no confidence in its elections is living on borrowed time. Any mystery about what comes next was cleared up at the U.S. Capitol on January 6. While the blame for that spectacle rests entirely with Donald Trump and his followers, the political environment that made the unthinkable less so was a bipartisan project. Both parties have encouraged a perception that stealing elections is neither difficult nor rare.
In truth it is both. Keeping it that way will fall to Democrats until Trump’s star fades. Drop the hyperbole about Jim Crow, guys, and resist the temptation to fight fire with fire. This particular fire can only be fought with facts.
Michael Smith is a freelance opinion writer in Georgetown, Kentucky.