Sean Dobson, a political analyst and campaigner as well as a longtime friend of Progressive Maryland, outlines how MAGA-GOP operatives could interfere with, and even overturn, a legitimate Democratic presidential victory. His several scenarios show that the Electoral Count Reform Act, useful as it can be, may still not prevail against operatives determined to put Trump back in office. Attention to swing states, by all large-D and small-d democratic forces, must be paid.

Future GOP Coup Attempt: 2024 Update

By Sean Dobson

Back in 2021, I posted on this blog an analysis of the most likely pathway of a strong, future, Republican coup attempt to steal the next (i.e., 2024) presidential election. My goal was to focus progressives on the best defensive measures to block it.

I’m pleased to report that Democrats did just that in 2022 when they enacted the Electoral Count Reform Act , which vastly reduces the odds that the kind of coup I sketched in my 2021 essay could succeed.

However, there remain three, all-too-possible ways Trump could end up in the White House in 2025:

1. During the election, old-fashioned Republican voter suppression could prove so effective in Georgia (the one swing state Republicans totally control) that it tilts the entire election to Trump, a scenario I judge to be quite possible considering this tossup national election could be decided by a single state.

2. As a result of the election, Kamala Harris wins in the Electoral College, but Republicans capture both houses of Congress and then simply ignore ECRA’s guidelines on how to count Electoral College votes so as to fraudulently award the White House to Trump, all while a right-wing Supreme Court declares itself unable to intervene “in a partisan political dispute”, a possible scenario considering the closeness of the battles to control the Senate and House as well as the 100+ Republican Members of Congress who in 2021 refused to certify Biden’s victory.

3. As a result of the election, Trump wins fair and square in the Electoral College by eking out popular-vote victories in places like Michigan, Wisconsin, and/or Pennsylvania, a scenario that would probably happen even as he loses the national popular vote, a scenario I judge to be alarmingly possible given opinion polls that show him tied with Kamala Harris in those very states.

Bottom line: Even though ECRA made much more difficult the kind of GOP coup attempt I had described in my 2021 essay, the odds of Trump taking the White House — fraudulently or not — remain alarmingly high. Progressives everywhere should focus like a laser right now on helping Harris any way we can to win as many swing states as possible.

 


Sean Dobson is a member of the board of Progressive Maryland. A link to the author's blog post and site is here.

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M.A. and Ph.d. from University of Maryland Merrill College of Journalism, would-be radical, sci-fi fan... retired to a life of keyboard radicalism...