An obscure doctrine may allow Trump to win in 2024 regardless of the popular vote
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Trump did not accept an election loss in 2020, and he may not have to in 2024. Trump supporters have begun arranging a play for winning the presidential election no matter what the popular or electoral vote would indicate. The vehicle that will place him, or a Trumpite Republican, in the White House, is the Independent State Legislatures doctrine.
This is how the play unfolds in four acts.
The first act is pretty much completed. The audience has been prepped to expect that if a Republican loses the next presidential election, it will be because of fraud. For them, that is understandable because it has already happened.
For the last year, the chant of “the election has been stolen” has been repeated almost daily by Trump, Fox News, and other right-wing media outlets or a small but loud section of Republicans in Congress. Last August, a Yahoo News/YouGov poll showed that they have successfully convinced two-thirds of Republicans that “the election was rigged and stolen from Trump.” And Twenty-eight percent of independent voters think Trump won the 2020 election. To some degree, all major potential Republican presidential candidates have signed off on that lie to secure the Trump Republican base in the primaries, should he not run.
The second act is underway now. Republicans have begun rolling out candidates that they can count on for controlling key state offices that oversee federal elections in their states. Reuters foundthat ten of the 15 Republican candidates running for secretary of state in five battlegrounds states question whether Trump lost the 2020 election.
The five states investigated were Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, and Wisconsin. Joe Biden won all of them. Three, he won by less than one percent, and Nevada and Michigan were less than three percent.
Except for Wisconsin, the secretary of state oversees the elections. These are the folks who will toss the voter’s majority vote for a Democratic winner to their Republican-controlled state legislatures if they think there has been fraud or voting irregularities. The legislatures can then overturn the popular vote if they believe it was tainted in some manner. Trump asked various state officials…
