There is a fight brewing on the right over whether American democracy should be saved or dismantled. On one side, there are organized Republican efforts to persuade other Republicans that the electoral system should be trusted and that the basis for questioning results should be provable fraud. On the other side, there are increasingly sophisticated efforts to discredit the 2024 election even before it happens so as to ensure widespread chaos, and perhaps another insurrection attempt, in the case that former President Donald Trump loses again.
My money’s on the election denialists prevailing, unfortunately. They have more influence, and their audience is already primed to receive their message after years of Trump propaganda. Disturbingly, the pro-democracy wing of the GOP is a relatively fringe effort, and not nearly strong enough to compete with the lies spewed by its rival faction.
The pro-democracy wing of the GOP is a relatively fringe effort, and not nearly strong enough to compete with the lies spewed by its rival faction.
A new Associated Press report explains how one group of Republicans is striving to promote trust in the election system among conservatives. The R Street Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington, and the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University have partnered to support “a conservative agenda for democracy” by teaming up with Republicans who are administering elections. Under this initiative, a number of Republican governors, election administration officials, scholars and pro-democracy advocates in multiple states have met to discuss how to encourage Republican buy-in into the upcoming election.
This effort appears to have led at least one GOP official to operate outside of his conventional lane to foster an environment of higher trust during elections. Gabriel Sterling, chief operating officer of the Georgia secretary of state’s office, weighed in on social media on an election day last year on social media on how a voting machine clerical error in Pennsylvania could be managed to ensure an accurate final vote count. According to The Associated Press, Sterling told members of the pro-democracy group the next day, “We have to be prepared to say over and over again — other states are doing it different than us, but they are not cheating.”
Though they’re not a part of that coordinated effort, high-profile defections from the Trump camp could also play a persuasive role. In announcing his plan to vote for President Joe Biden’s re-election, former Georgia Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan, in a Monday op-ed in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, wrote, “Unlike Trump, I’ve belonged to the GOP my entire life. This November, I am voting for a decent person I disagree with on policy over a criminal defendant without a moral compass.”
Is all this enough? Theoretically, it could be helpful for combating misinformation. A powerful way to persuade someone to change their mind is to find authorities within their in-group to convince them of something they might dismiss coming from someone in an out-group; prominent Republicans can, hypothetically at least, do a lot more to engender Republican trust in the election system than any Democrat could. But at this point, it’s unclear if Republicans who believe in the election system are considered part of an in-group for most Republican voters. Trump has reoriented the party around 2020 election lies and deemed anyone who diverges from him on anything a RINO (Republican in name only).
Duncan’s defection is a powerful signaling mechanism, but the reality is that the overwhelming majority of influential conservatives who oppose Trump have already left the party, and their influence on the Republican base is minimal to nonexistent. The R Street Institute’s initiative to help Republican election officials build “a conservative agenda on democracy” sounds like it could be a good thing, but it’s unclear what these meetings are amounting to in terms of concrete programs.
But perhaps more importantly than any of this is that Trump himself is the most influential figure on the American right. He has successfully transformed the party apparatus to work as an arm of his disinformation agenda. He long ago persuaded the overwhelming majority of Republicans that Biden’s 2020 victory was illegitimate.
Lara Trump, Trump’s daughter-in-law and co-chair of the Republican National Committee, is already sowing the seeds for Election Day chaos. She recently said on Fox News that no ballots should be counted “after elections are over,” a bizarre turn of phrase considering that elections aren’t over until all ballots have been counted. Lara Trump seems to be reviving Trump’s 2020 argument that any mail-in ballots that erase an early lead he could have should be treated as prima facie proof of fraud. It can’t be overstated how baldly anti-democratic this is. Lara Trump is arguing that the very machinery of democracy that makes it reliable — taking time to count accumulated ballots that are the result of efforts to make elections accessible — should be seen as a threat to the republic. Additionally MAGA-aligned groups are joining the election denialist effort and making it more sophisticated, with one mysterious apparent right-wing nonprofit group offering to pay citizens to report fraud out of a $5 million fund. It is a minor source of consolation to know there are some conservative efforts to encourage faith in our elections, efforts that anticipate the likelihood of Trump resorting to lying to his followers if he loses again. Unfortunately, those efforts don’t involve enough Republicans and, on top of that, they’re probably too late.
Zeeshan Aleem is a writer and editor for MS NOW. 
