I have a very good friend who voted for Trump in 2016. Although I purposely haven’t asked, I fully suspect that she did so again in 2020. However, despite being a no-questions-asked Republican, she is otherwise a remarkably decent, fun, intelligent human being whom I trust implicitly. Imagine that.
Anyway, I remember talking to her the day after the 2016 election. While I was mostly just numb, my friend wanted to complain about how she felt seriously harassed by the women in her office – most of whom had worn pantsuits that day in solidarity with Hillary Clinton. My friend wasn’t joking. She felt threatened.
Those of us who were on the losing side of the election were in shock and mourning. We certainly didn’t like the outcome, but we weren’t in denial and we weren’t questioning the results. We were sad for ourselves and for our country and we were searching for a way to deal with it as best we could – some, apparently, with a sartorial choice.
I found myself actually having to remind my friend that her candidate WON. While she should have been ecstatic, she only felt aggrieved. My soul was crushed; my friend felt persecuted by Anne Klein.
Since I fear that my friend might be among the 52% of Republicans who still believe that Trump won again this year, avoidance of the topic has thus far been my preferred approach. While I’ll eventually need to have the associated discussion, I’m focused for the moment on the larger, sadder landscape inside which my friend is perhaps one blade of red grass.
While the 2016 elections saw the Republican party take complete control of the both the Executive and Legislative branches of the country, many Republicans still managed to feel victimized. While Clinton gave a nice concession speech the very next day and offered to work with Trump on behalf of our country, this set of Republicans still wanted more. They weren’t content to just win. They weren’t content to just have their win acknowledged. They would have only been content if the losers recognized that their win was righteous. Even in victory, Republicans remained combative. There could be no Loyal Opposition. Any opposition was a threat.
And this was after an election that they won.
Since many Republicans thought that life was massively unfair to them after a 2016 win, their entrenched denial of a 2020 loss was all too predictable. A majority of Republicans continue to be persuaded that any election they lose is rigged by definition.
In reality, American elections ARE rigged – but in favor of Republicans:
- Our founders saw the U.S. Senate as the means to guarantee that all states would retain a voice in the federal government. Thus, California’s 40M people and Montana’s 1M people are both represented by two Senators each. This was by design.
- On the other hand, the U.S. House was intended to be the people’s chamber but the founders didn’t foresee gerrymandering. Thus, Republicans won only 48% of Wisconsin’s 2020 vote but walked away with 63% of its U.S. House seats. (While Democrats have also gerrymandered states, Republicans have turned it into an art form that is far more pervasive.)
- In Presidential elections, the antiquated Electoral College has turned into a perversion of democracy where some voters are demonstrably more important than others. Thus, while every 670K people in New York get exactly one Electoral Vote, every 192K people in Wyoming get the same one vote. In other words, a Presidential voter in Wyoming is 3.5 times more important than a voter in New York. The fact is that Biden received over 6 million more American votes than Trump. It is ludicrous that we’re still discussing this election.
The authors of our Constitution intended it to protect the minority from the tyranny of the majority; they did not intend it to enable the tyranny of the minority.
While I’m worried about the sheer number of Republicans that don’t appear willing to accept electoral math, I’ll grant that there are fringes in both parties that will always be unable to accept any reality that doesn’t match their expectations. The fact that one of those fringes is led by the President of the United States is, for the moment, beside the point. I’ll also gloss over the additional fact that the rest of the leadership of the Republican party has made the political choice to placate Trump’s base rather than defend democratic norms and demand an orderly transition.
Of much greater concern to me is that there are sane, smart, good people within the Republican party who sincerely believe that they are perennially oppressed when the numbers indicate that they themselves are the oppressors. Furthermore, this year’s Republican statehouse wins virtually guarantee the continuation of Republican oppression for another decade.
To put it bluntly, that sucks. I don’t like it at all. However, I accept that reality and I’ll work within the system to overcome it where possible and change it over time. That’s the way democracy works.
Conversely, Republicans need to recognize that there was no widespread fraud in the 2020 election. There was no grand conspiracy to deny Trump the second term to which he thinks he was divinely entitled. Democrats did not steal the Presidency; they won it. That’s also the way democracy works.
It is well past time for good Republicans to stop playing the victim card.
And I guess it’s also time to have that discussion with my friend.