The Mother of All Double Standards
Denying the legitimacy of an election is a mortal sin—except when it isn’t
There’s one surefire way to rile up a Democrat, progressive, or progressive masquerading as an independent: interrupt his or her Trump-the-insurrectionist tirade by pointing out that the ranks of the Left are full of election deniers. Usually that gets you accused of “whataboutism”—which is a mortal sin when, for example, Trump’s mendacity is measured against Joe Biden’s mendacity (a comparison that yields a statistical tie).
Seriously though, what about all those leftie election deniers? Trump may have perfected the art, but he certainly didn’t invent it. And if it’s such a terrible crime, why didn’t the Dems defenestrate Stacey Abrams, who claimed for years to be The Rightful Governor of Georgia? Not once but dozens of times, she insisted that Brian Kemp, the Republican who beat her in 2018, was an illegitimate governor. Only in 2022 did Abrams finally admit, through gritted teeth, that she lost.
So: What about Stacey Abrams?
The comrades obviously don’t want to answer that question, and they try to deflect it by charging that the questioner—me, for instance—is just alibiing for Trump. Sometimes, of course, that’s true, e.g. when the question comes from some doofus in a MAGA hat. People like that have so far mastered the art of doublethink as to believe that while Stacey Abrams is a criminal election denier, Trump did nothing wrong. But those of us whose thought processes remain in working order understand that election denial is wrong no matter who practices it, and wrong whether laws are broken or not.
A case in point is supplied by the presidential election of 2000 in Florida. On election night, the final tally gave Florida—and the presidency—to Republican George W. Bush, albeit by a razor-thin margin of less than 600 votes. At that time, Florida law mandated a machine recount if the margin was 1% or less. The recount also gave the state to Bush, by an even slimmer margin. But the Democratic candidate, Vice President Al Gore, refused to accept this outcome, and he launched a campaign to overturn the election.
Gore’s effort to reverse the outcome in Florida remained within the bounds of legality, but it’s fair to say that he and his campaign weaponized the law.
Initially, Gore demanded hand recounts in only four of Florida’s 67 counties—all Democratic strongholds. In this he had the support of Florida’s courts, especially the state Supreme Court, which at that time had a liberal Democratic majority. The Gore campaign also worked hard to get as many overseas absentee ballots as possible thrown out. Most of these were from military members, a group presumed to favor Bush. But when the absentee ballot count was completed, Bush’s margin of victory stood at just over 900 votes. Late in November, the state canvassing board officially certified Bush as the winner by a 537-vote margin. Gore contested this in the courts, belatedly demanding a statewide hand recount, but the US Supreme Court put an end to the burlesque in mid-December, at which point Gore finally conceded. Subsequently, there was much grumbling from Democrats that Bush was an illegitimate president: “selected [by the Supreme Court], not elected.”
As a matter of fact, not once during the recount circus was a result produced that put Gore ahead of Bush.
Was Gore’s behavior in 2000 as bad as Trump’s in 2020-21? No, not even close. But was it admirable or noble? No, it was not. He put personal ambition before the best interests of the country, turning the election into a battle between two legal teams. Alas for Gore, it turned out that his rival had better lawyers. Subsequently, Democrats openly questioned the legitimacy of the Bush presidency, setting a toxic precedent that poisoned American politics.
In 2004, Democrats embraced a conspiracy theory concerning voting machines in Ohio, claiming that they were tampered with to throw the election to President Bush. His opponent, John Kerry, later said that “widespread irregularities make it impossible to know for certain that the outcome reflected the will of the voters.” Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean agreed "I'm not confident that the election in Ohio was fairly decided,” he said. “We know that there was substantial voter suppression, and the machines were not reliable. It should not be a surprise that the Republicans are willing to do things that are unethical to manipulate elections. That's what we suspect has happened.” House and Senate Democrats challenged the election results under a provision of the Electoral Count Act. All this was a harbinger of things to come: election denialism, mainstreamed.
Democrats piously insist that their questioning of election results is a public-spirited defense of “our democracy.” This, of course, is self-serving cant. When an election goes their way, it’s practically treason for anyone to question its legitimacy. But when an election goes against them, no conspiracy theory is too outlandish to be embraced. In 2016, the Hillary Clinton campaign cooked up a fairy tale about “collusion” between the Trump campaign and V. Putin. And when Clinton lost, the collusion narrative was used as an excuse to reject the legitimacy of Trump’s election and undermine his presidency. But as we now know, it was all a lie.
In the period between the 2016 election and Trump’s 2017 inauguration, Democrats and progressives proposed all kinds of shady schemes to prevent him from assuming office, for instance subverting the electoral vote by courting potentially “faithless electors.” Once Trump was in, they shifted to impeachment or removal from office under the provisions of the 25th Amendment. Election denialism became a progressive badge of honor.
Then there’s the business of Georgia’s Election Integrity Act, passed in 2021 and signed into law by Governor Brian Kemp. The law revised the Peach State’s election procedures and codified some of the special measures introduced to facilitate voting during the pandemic.
The broad Left greeted this unobjectionable law with hysterical screams of rage.
Our ridiculous president fumed that it was “Jim Crow on steroids.” Going him one better, Stacey Abrams squealed that it amounted to “Jim Crow in a suit and tie.” Senator Elizabeth Warren sneered that “The Republican who is sitting in Stacey Abrams’ chair just signed a despicable voter suppression bill into law to take Georgia back to Jim Crow.” (Incidentally, this comment shows that Senator White Bread Cherokee is an election denier.) The ACLU claimed that the law made early voting and absentee voting harder for Georgians.
All this and much more barfed out by the usual suspects on the Left consisted of blatant, bare-faced lies. In the 2022 election, early voting in Georgia broke all records, and overall turnout was significantly higher than in 2020. Oh, and Stacey Abrams was once more defeated by Brian Kemp in the race for governor—by a decisive 53-46% margin.
So as far as I’m concerned, Democrats and progressives like President Biden, Hillary Clinton, Stacey Abrams, Liz Warren, John Kerry, et al. are unqualified to condemn Donald Trump on grounds of election denialism and election interference. They themselves are election deniers who’ve repeatedly demonstrated their unwillingness to accept electoral outcomes that don’t go their way. Tu quoque, comrades. Tu quoque.
In Israel the left goes one better. They foment a military coup in order to replace a freely elected government in the name of the defense of democratic values. Democratic values that don’t quite agree with the outcome of democratic elections.
Well said.