By now, it is an event as regular and predictable as the tides: a Democrat wins an election, and Donald Trump says that that election was rigged. There does not need to be any evidence for this; indeed, there never is. Trump will say it anyway.
He rallies the rightwing media ecosystem to spread the lie; he convinces his followers to believe it. That this, by now, a repetitive spectacle, devoid of suspense, does not mean that it is not dangerous.
This time his target is California, where the state’s quixotic election rules but staunchly Democratic electorate mean both that results from last week’s elections are still not complete, and also that they are unlikely to go Trump’s way.
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The state has an open primary in which candidates from all parties compete on the same ballot, and the leading two go on to a November general. One of Trump’s preferred candidates seems set to eke out only a very narrow victory, if a victory at all, in the governor’s race: Democrat Xavier Becerra leads, and seems likely to face the Trump-endorsed Republican Steve Hinton, who has narrowly edged out another Democrat, Tom Steyer, for the number two spot.
In another contest, the race for Los Angeles mayor, Trump’s pick, the reality television star and political neophyte Spencer Pratt, has been beaten back by a charismatic young progressive Democrat from the city council, Nithya Raman, who will now go on to face the incumbent Democrat Karen Bass.
As has long been his habit, Trump claimed, when it became clear that he might not get his way, that the election was unfair. In a post on Truth Social the day after the election, he wrote: “The Dumocrats are at it again! They are trying to STEAL THE GOVERNOR OF CALIFORNIA PRIMARY, AND THE MAYOR OF LOS ANGELES, PRIMARY, AWAY FROM TWO GREAT REPUBLICAN CANDIDATES. Here we go with the very late and massive numbers of MAIL IN BALLOTS”.
He has since doubled down on the false claim, throwing a tantrum and walking out of an interview with Meet the Press on Sunday after NBC’s Kristen Welker pushed back on it. The comments reflect a preview of what is likely to come in November, when Republicans seem poised to lose seats in Congress amid a backlash to the Trump regime’s era of high prices, civil rights violations, and rightwing culture-war excesses: every election with a Democratic victor, and particularly the close ones, will be declared invalid, fraudulent and null, and it is likely that victorious Democrats will have to fight tedious and expensive legal battles in order to be duly seated. The only fair elections, it seems, are the ones where Republicans win.
It’s not just that Trump’s whining and lies about the California elections were predictable. They were in fact predicted. The Golden state is notoriously slow to tally votes, having adopted a number of policies that are meant to make voting easier, but which also have the consequence of delaying final outcomes.
In California, all voters receive a mail ballot – which are more labor-intensive and time-consuming to count than in-person ballots. About a quarter of those who respond don’t do so until election day itself, which further delays the final tally. And as in other places, Republican fearmongering and disinformation about mail-in voting means that there is a partisan split within voting methods, with Democrats more likely to vote by mail and Republicans more likely to vote at the more speedily-counted in-person polling places – meaning that as the votes are counted, what initially seems like a Republican lead is often obliterated by Dem-leaning batches of mail-in ballots, creating yet more opportunities to spread conspiracy theories and allegations of fraud.
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All of this is a well-established pattern with orderly, banal and decidedly non-conspiratorial explanations. But Democrats and state officials have long worried that the glacial speed of the count would create an opening for Donald Trump’s lies.
“The longer the voting count takes, the more mis- and disinformation spreads,” wrote California governor Gavin Newsom in a letter to election officials across California’s 58 counties last month, before election day, urging speed.
But it’s not clear that a more streamlined and efficient vote counting process in California would have prevented Trump and others from spreading lies about supposed election fraud. His objections, after all, are not grounded in facts, and there’s little reason to think that an even more abundantly plain set of facts could dissuade him from making them.
Rather, what Trump and his acolytes call “fraud” in California’s elections is less about the procedure of vote casting and vote counting, and more about what they see as the fraudulent claims to government, citizenship and representation by people who disagree with them.
What is “fraudulent” in the California governor’s race is not that Tom Steyer, the narrowly defeated progressive, ran such a robust campaign relative to the Republican Hinton; it’s that a progressive was allowed to run at all.
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What is “fraudulent” in Nithya Raman’s defeat of Spencer Pratt in the LA mayoral contest is not that she did not get the votes, but that the kind of younger, more progressive, more forward-looking voters she attracted in Los Angeles are granted the same right to vote, the same dignity of citizenship, and the hoards motivated by white grievance and inchoate resentment who have so long backed Trump and his allies.
What is “fraudulent” is the very idea of progressive governance, which is also why, of course, it is pointless to point out that Trump only claims “fraud” in elections where he doesn’t like the result. The “fraud” he sees is in the very concept of democracy, in the idea that people who don’t agree with or fawn over him might have a say, too.
