The far right’s new focus on local politics, briefly explained

On Saturday, a peaceful rally of supporters of former President Donald Trump came and went, with heavy police and media coverage and only a handful of arrests. Before the event, DC officials focused on preventing a January 6 recurrence – but more than eight months after the uprising, far-right groups have shifted their focus to more local issues that could nonetheless have a huge impact on national politics.

According to Jared Holt, who researches domestic extremism for the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, right-wing extremists like those who stormed the Capitol were “shit scared” of another event on Saturday as the 6th Führer, including Trump, warned their supporters to stay away from the rally, claiming it was a trap.

Ultimately, according to an estimate by Washingtonian Andrew Beaujon, only about 100 people turned up – far fewer than some predictions before the rally – and the demonstrators were at times outnumbered by media representatives.

Good morning from * that * rally at the Capitol that everyone was talking about. We’re about an hour from the official start time, and it’s not surprising that we’re working with a ratio of around 10 media per participant. A classic rock mash-up runs through the sound system @VICENews pic.twitter.com/EywP6XidJe

– Tess Owen (@misstessowen) September 18, 2021

But the anemic attendance at Saturday’s event doesn’t reflect the waning right-wing enthusiasm for Trump’s election lies – his supporters are only changing tactics, pushing for like-minded politicians to be elected and changing state legislation to match a false narrative of electoral fraud .

“Many are instead applying this political energy to local and regional scenes,” Holt told Vox’s Aaron Rupar last week.

Specifically, that energy has manifested itself in a far-right push to intimidate current federal and local electoral officials, many of whom played an important role in pushing back Trump’s 2020 election fraud conspiracies, and a new wave of pro-Trump. to install election officials.

It is a tactic that could have a major impact on future US elections and is raising the alarm about extremism experts.

“Let’s go [far-right movement figures] Propose each other could also help cement power and influence its movements won during the Trump years, ”Holt wrote in his Substack newsletter last week. “After all, few people really get involved in local politics. That has a lot of influence on a committed movement. “

Turning a false narrative into political power

The local impact of Trump’s election lie was most visible in some of the battlefield states that switched to President Joe Biden in the 2020 election.

In Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, for example, election officials from both parties have been inundated with harassment from Trump supporters, including explicit death threats. And it’s no small problem: Reuters has identified hundreds of similar threats across the US, although victims have found little recourse to law enforcement.

The harassment was so severe that around a third of all electoral workers feel unsafe at work earlier this year, according to a Benenson Strategy Group survey for the Brennan Center for Justice.

And, as the New York Times reported on Saturday, there is now a legal defense committee, the Election Official Legal Defense Network, which specifically supports election officials who are subject to harassment and intimidation.

In many of the same states where officials have been relentlessly harassed, far-right personalities are trying to make them unemployed. In Georgia, for example, Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who repeatedly defied Trump to confirm that Biden won both Georgia and the 2020 election, is opposed to a Trump-backed key challenger, Rep. Jody Hice (R-GA ), meet.

According to Politico, Hice voted against certifying Electoral College results in January and has continued to promote lies about electoral fraud ever since. Shortly after Hice announced his offer in March, Trump issued a statement praising Hice as “one of our most outstanding congressmen.”

“Unlike the current Georgia Secretary of State, Jody leads forward with integrity,” Trump said in the statement. “Jody will stop the fraud and bring honesty into our elections!”

Nor is Hice the only foreign ministerial candidate to have welcomed Trump’s electoral fraud rhetoric. Candidates like Mark Finchem in Arizona and Kristina Karamo in Michigan, both of whom Trump endorsed, could have a significant view of how the elections in these states are going if the actual vote count is done by the counties and parishes.

Finchem parroted allegations of electoral fraud and supported a fake “check” of the vote count in Maricopa County, Arizona, the AP reported. Finchem, a current representative of the state, also admitted he was at the Capitol on January 6, but claims he stayed 500 meters away and only found out about the attack later.

Like Finchem, Karamo has also supported false claims of election fraud: According to the Detroit News, she made allegations of election fraud during the 2020 election and told Michigan state senators that she had witnessed two cases in which election workers had favored voting papers of the Democrats misinterpreted, and she appeared alongside MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell at a June rally, spreading other unsubstantiated allegations of election fraud.

As Politico pointed out earlier this year, the real power of foreign ministers varies from state to state and is often more “ministerial” than anything else – but the risk of pro-Trump election officials having a high-profile platform to support electoral conspiracies is very high big real.

“There’s a symbolic risk, and then there’s … a functional risk,” former Kentucky Secretary of State Trey Grayson, a Republican, told Politico in May. “Any foreign minister who is a senior electoral officer will have a megaphone and media platform during the election. Much of power is the perception of power or this megaphone. “

The Democrats have a plan to roll back efforts to subvert elections

Candidates like Hice, Finchem and Karamo all have yet to win primary and general elections – by no means a sure thing – if they are to become the best electoral officials in their states. But even without electoral conspirators in the secretaries ‘offices, some states like Arizona and Pennsylvania have already begun to scratch the framework of their states’ electoral laws.

On Wednesday, the GOP Interstate Operations Committee in Pennsylvania took another step towards “forensic review” of 2020 election results as it is currently conducting in Arizona when it voted for a subpoena for voter information – including information that is normally not public , like the last four digits of the voters’ social security number.

And in Arizona, where a bizarre “review” of the 2020 elections has been going on for months, Arizona Governor Doug Ducey has also taken steps to curtail the power of Arizona Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs. In June, Ducey signed law removing Hobbs’ power to defend the results of an election in court.

“This is a petty, partisan seizure of power that is total retaliation for my office,” Hobbs, who is running for governor, told NPR.

“That will be clear when my term ends,” she said. “It’s legally questionable at best, but likely unconstitutional at worst.”

However, the Democrats are making some attempts to roll back right-wing attempts to undermine future elections. In August, the House of Representatives passed the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which should help restore the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) recently tabled her own suffrage law, the Freedom to Vote Act, aimed at that to prevent the very same electoral subversions that Republicans are trying to impose in several key states.

However, like the earlier Democrats’ suffrage act, the For the People Act, this bill has essentially no chance of becoming law under current Senate rules, as the filibuster means that a minimum of 10 Republican votes is required.

The Senate Democrats could end the filibuster or create a spin-off for voting legislation with a simple majority of 50 votes, but this path seems unlikely, thanks in part to continued opposition from Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV).

And with efforts like this in a deeply polarized Congress, Trump supporters peddling electoral fraud conspiracies can continue to penetrate local races and laws.

“I don’t think we’ve ever been to a point so poor for democracy,” Christine Todd Whitman, former Republican governor of New Jersey and co-chair of the United States’ United Democracy Center, told CNN last week. “I think it is a great danger because for the first time I see that it is being undermined – our democracy is being undermined from within.”

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