If the losing party won’t accept defeat, democracy is
dead
Opinion by
Contributing columnist
November 19, 2020 at 11:11 a.m. CST
If the
losing party can’t accept defeat, the whole enterprise of electoral democracy
is finished. Two-party competition means each party taking turns depending on
what the voters want in any given election.
President
Trump himself will never acknowledge this. But the Republican Party
institutionally must. That is the critical challenge facing Senate Republicans
and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.): When and how decisively
will they pull the plug on Trump’s desperate effort to force upon the nation a
second term that he did not earn from the electorate?
If the
United States is to adhere to its foundational premise that governments derive
their just powers from the consent of the governed, then Senate Republicans as
a party in government need to recognize President-elect Joe Biden’s
inauguration not merely as a fait accompli they cannot undo but instead the
actual choice that the voters genuinely made in this election.
It’s
true that some leading Democrats attempted to negate the validity of Trump’s
own election in 2016. Hillary Clinton conceded quickly and graciously in the
immediate aftermath of the voting. But in a 2019 CBS interview, she unjustifiably called Trump an
“illegitimate president” because of “voter suppression and voter purging” as
well as “hacking” and “false stories.”
Even
worse, former president Jimmy Carter went so far as to say, that
same year, that Russia’s interference “if fully investigated would show that
Trump didn’t actually win the election in 2016.” In repeating the point, Carter
didn’t even hedge: “He lost the election, and he was put into office because
the Russians interfered on his behalf.”
This is
wrong. Trump genuinely won the votes in 2016 that put him in the White House,
whatever the reasons the voters had for preferring him to Clinton, as most
Democrats accepted. Yes, there was outrageous voter suppression in Wisconsin,
but not enough to make the difference in that state, much less in Michigan and
Pennsylvania, which Clinton also would have needed for an electoral college
majority. It is irresponsible for Clinton, Carter or anyone else to deny the
validity of Trump’s 2016 victory.
But we
learned in grade school about two wrongs. And what Trump is doing now is much
more wrong, because an outgoing president’s attempt to delegitimate the mandate
of an immediate successor is inherently more corrosive.
Going
forward, all of us should resist the temptation for tit-for-tat score-settling.
Instead, we should reinvigorate shared premises for how to identify an
authentic electoral winner, based on an honest assessment about the ballots
cast, even when — painful as it might be to admit — more of them were cast for
the other side.
By this
standard, the GOP must get to the point where it publicly congratulates Biden
on being the one the voters wanted. If the party needs a reminder on how to do
this, the gold standard remains from its own past: In 1884, after searching for
two weeks for Tammany-type fraud, Republicans acknowledged it was “a lack of
votes, not a theft of votes” that caused James G. Blaine’s loss to Grover
Cleveland.
I
remain unshaken in my confidence that, when Congress meets on Jan. 6 to perform
its constitutional duty, it will properly announce Biden as the election’s
winner.
The
remaining questions are how many Republican senators will vote for Biden if the
matter is put to a vote through challenges to slates of electors — and, more
fundamentally, how many Republicans will forthrightly acknowledge the
authenticity of Biden’s election.
There
is no basis for denying this. Even the most conservative of election law
commentators have joined the chorus to observe that courts don’t
overturn elections without adequate evidence of invalid votes that actually
made a difference in the outcome. The Trump campaign has provided no proof of that
kind in any state, much less the three necessary to deny Biden an electoral
college majority.
This
president’s intransigence is having costly spillover effects. It is taking a
toll on Republican voters’ confidence in the election results. It is causing
the kind of corrosive behavior that occurred in Michigan, where the Wayne
County canvassing board split 2-2 over certifying its vote tallies, despite it
being obvious that Biden has won the state by a margin more than 10 times
Trump’s 2016 win. The two local Republicans quickly came to their senses, but
not before Team
Trump tweeted about its “huge win” — and now it
seems they to want to revert to rank partisanship.
The
longer McConnell and his colleagues allow this unnecessary uncertainty about
the election’s outcome to fester, the worse off our democracy will be.
