Your Periodic Reminder: Rigged Elections Prevent Important Legislative Fixes

The cumulative effect of tolerating, rather than abolishing, rigged elections is evident in today’s Congress

Prior to the 2018 midterm elections, turnout figures and political trends were easily predictable. For eight decades leading into them, it wasn’t difficult to establish benchmarks that, if achieved, showed the obvious trajectory of election outcomes, like “if we get this many votes here, we will win.”

Oh, yeah, well the Republicans got smoked in the House that year, right?

For sure - the GOP got crushed, losing 42 seats and handing the House back to Nancy Pelosi. But did you know the GOP, led by the hapless Paul Ryan, had 6 million more votes than they did when they flipped 62 Democrat seats red in the 2010 midterm?

It is quite clear to me that the 2018 midterms were the first pass at what happened to our 2020 election, and since it went with the grain of the standard midterm outcome (president’s party gets clobbered in the House), no one so much as raised an eyebrow - especially since the consolation prize was a Republican expansion of the Senate majority. It took the loss of a monumental historical figure holding the presidency two years later to really wake people up to what a mess our elections have become. A vast majority of Republicans today believe the 2020 presidential election was determined by massive cheating, but most stop short of scrutinizing down-ballot outcomes. In my published figures, Republicans would have won these Senate seats alongside Trump’s reelection in 2020 without the rigging:

• Arizona (McSally)

• Georgia (Loeffler)

• Georgia (Perdue)

• Michigan (James)

• Minnesota (Lewis)

In 2022, add another:

• Nevada (Laxalt)

In 2024, bake in three more:

• Michigan (Rogers)

• Nevada (Brown)

• Wisconsin (Hovde)

There are other seats on the fringe of my estimates that cause me to hesitate - like both Arizona Senate seats from 2022 and 2024, but I’ll play it conservative for the sake of this exercise. I won’t even get into how many House seats were wiped out through the same tactics, contributing to today’s extremely narrow majority.

Could you imagine Trump today with 62 Senate seats? That is what he would have if he had the 9 above in support of his desired legislation in the Senate. With the SAVE Act looming on the horizon, the impact of election rigging is brought into full focus.

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Impact of Rigging on Legislation

If you’re unfamiliar with the SAVE Act, read the above article before advancing further in this one. This piece of legislation is front and center in the battle for election integrity and perfectly captures exactly my frustration with deflated majorities directly linked to electile dysfunction*.

(*when you have difficulty maintaining an election, your election lasts for longer than four days, you have a sudden severe and noticeable lost of interest in voting, and in the worst cases - premature inauguration)