September 15, 2020

By Dartagnan (from the Daily Kos community)

Daily Kos

Most of us are familiar with that infamous event known as the “Brooks Brothers riot,” in which hundreds of paid GOP operatives mobilized in Southern Florida in late November 2000, to loudly obstruct the valid recounting of ballots in the contested presidential election involving George W. Bush and Al Gore.  These phony “protests,” as the media labelled them, were organized by Republican Party leaders, including Trump-pardoned convicted felon Roger Stone, and Matt Schlapp, the current chairman of the American Conservative Union. Schlapp is also the husband of Mercedes Schlapp, formerly Donald Trump’s Director of Strategic Communications, and now a member of his re-election committee.

Those demonstrators, many dressed in corporate garb (hence the Brooks Brothers reference) employed violent tactics to harass those tasked with counting the vote in Miami-Dade County. According to the The New York Times, "several people were trampled, punched or kicked when protesters tried to rush the doors outside the office of the Miami-Dade supervisor of elections.” Credulous media coverage, framing these GOP astro-turfed intimidation tactics as some type of “grassroots” uprising, ultimately prompted the Miami-Dade County Canvassing Board to shut down its recount, an action that (with an assist from the U.S. Supreme Court) helped to ensure Bush’s victory in the 2000 election.

Donald Trump has made it clear he will contest any result of the 2020 election that does not confirm him as the victor. He has already indicated he is prepared to incite violence among his supporters in order to secure that victory, and, as recent events in Kenosha and Portland have illustrated, his supporters will respond by armed threats to American citizens. Because mail-in ballots this year overwhelmingly favor Democrats, due to well-founded concerns about in-person voting in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, there is a significant possibility that at the end of the evening on November 3, Trump, who has systematically tried to disparage mail-in voting and has urged his supporters to vote in person, despite the pandemic, will have eked out a lead among the in-person ballot tally. At that point, it is likely that Trump will declare victory, and claim that any count of the remaining mail-in ballots are tainted by “fraud.” His supporters will then attempt to mobilize and harass ongoing vote-counting efforts in select swing states, in particular, such as Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, much as the “Brooks Brothers” brigades successfully harassed vote counters in Miami-Dade 20 years ago.

This is not the stuff of an active imagination, but instead a highly likely scenario.

The Trump campaign is already taking steps to intimidate local officials and lay the groundwork for legal challenges to mail-in ballot counts. And the same faces featured in the theft of the 2000 election are again making an appearance. For example, Mercedes Schlapp, whose husband’s efforts were so successful in 2000, is already laying the groundwork for the Trump campaign to accuse local officials of fraud. Further, there are already concrete efforts underway by the GOP to harass and intimidate Democratic voters at the polls, including the use of “poll monitors” to challenge the validity of African-American and Latinx votes. But as we saw in 2000, the more “physical” manifestation of this effort is likely to occur after the polls have closed.

As Ron Brownstein, writing for the Atlantic, reports, it is the memory of the stolen 2000 election that has prompted several progressive organizations to band together in order to ensure that 2020 does not feature another bad result dictated by a “Brooks Brothers riot,” and in particular to counter any anticipated Trump-inspired protests after November 3.

No one can say what exactly will happen if Donald Trump contests an apparent loss on November 3 by insisting that the results are riddled with fraud. But one prediction is safe: Democrats won’t cede the streets to the GOP again in the weeks after the election.

A wide array of progressive groups is already coordinating efforts to ensure substantial public protest after the election to defend the vote counting. Their assumption is that Trump will try to intimidate state officials tabulating mail-in ballots by mobilizing the same sort of armed supporters who poured into midwestern capitals to protest the coronavirus lockdowns in the spring and confronted Black Lives Matter protesters over the summer. The intent on the left, if it comes to that, is to meet Trump’s demonstrators with overwhelming numbers; the goal is to establish a presence more reminiscent of the street uprisings in Eastern Europe before the fall of the Berlin Wall, or the more recent prodemocracy protests in Ukraine and Hong Kong, than of anything in modern American experience.

The effort is called Protect the Results, and includes a broad coalition of liberal and Democratic groups such as Indivisible, CREW, Public Citizen, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, Color of Change, Greenpeace, People for the American Way, and yes, Daily Kos.

Adam Green, a co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, another group participating in postelection planning, told me that he can “guarantee” that “we will not have asymmetric warfare this time around. We won’t have litigation on the left and thuggery and election disruption on the right.” If Trump tries to stop the counting of mail-in ballots after Election Day, or otherwise tries to short-circuit the results, Green predicts, the scale of protests would be that of “the Black Lives Matter protests on steroids, as people come into the streets to defend their democracy and to defend the counting of votes.”

The ultimate purpose of the effort, of course, is to ensure a fair election, but the added spectacle of hundreds of thousands of potentially disenfranchised voters peacefully marching in the streets is intended to convey a message not only to those counting the votes that we are on their side, but to the media as well.

From the Protect the Results website:

A core principle shared by supporting organizations is a commitment to nonviolent, peaceful actions. All actions that are sponsored, organized, or listed on this page are intended to be nonviolent and peaceful. We expect all participants to act lawfully at all times and to seek to de-escalate any potential confrontation with those who disagree with our values.

As Brownstein observes, the absolute necessity for this effort has been borne out (unfortunately) by the anti-Democratic and anti-American attitudes that Republican voters have amply demonstrated over the past four years, as the Republican Party has morphed into a Cult of Trump. Brownstein cites research just published by Larry Bartels, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University, which confirms that the mentality of the average Republican has undergone a remarkable turn since the rise of Trump towards authoritarianism, violence, and virulent opposition to democratic ideals.

In a national survey he conducted in January, just over half of Republican voters (including both self-identified Republicans and independents who lean toward the party) strongly or somewhat agreed with the statement that “the traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it.” Just under half agreed that “strong leaders sometimes have to bend the rules in order to get things done.” About two in five agreed that “a time will come when patriotic Americans have to take the law into their own hands.” And almost three-fourths concurred that “it is hard to trust the results of elections when so many people will vote for anyone who offers a handout.”

A particularly jarring finding of that research is that only one in four Republicans disagreed with any of the above statements.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Bartels found that the biggest predictor of Republicans’ embrace of an authoritarian mindset is not age or education. Rather, he reports that “hostility toward the nation’s growing racial and ethnic diversity—the central chord of Trump’s messaging—was the single best predictor of a willingness to abandon democratic precepts.” In other words, those Republicans most likely to abandon what we consider as “American” ideals are the ones most motivated by racial hatred. And Trump has stoked their racism to a fever pitch, priming the very people most willing to attempt to invalidate our legitimate elections to do exactly that come November 4.

Americans need to understand that these people do not represent our country's interests, but as demonstrated by the thousands of Black Lives Matter protests that swept across this nation this spring, their actions can only be countered by overwhelming numbers of ordinary Americans, peacefully protesting. Rashad Robinson, the executive director of Color of Change, interviewed for Brownstein’s article, emphasizes that a key component of the Protect the Results strategy will be a coordinated effort to put pressure on corporations, businesses, and civic leaders to speak out against such intimidation tactics by Trump’s base of support.

Brownstein also notes, probably too optimistically, that opposition could come from elected officials within the Republican party itself, and cites the example of conservatives’ abandonment of former Kentucky governor Matt Bevin when he attempted to challenge the results of his 2019 loss. That abandonment, however, is largely attributed to sheer dislike of Bevin by the Republicans in the Kentucky GOP, and does not take into account the party’s cultish obeisance to Donald Trump.

The Biden campaign has preemptively announced it is well-equipped to handle the bogus legal challenges that the Trump campaign intends to mount in the event Trump cannot fairly win the election. But the Biden campaign cannot overshadow the threatening aspect of armed neo-Nazis and “militia” terrorists banging the doors at local election boards and auditoriums where these recounts will take place. That can only be achieved by sheer numbers of people demanding that the ballots be counted.

In sum, it isn’t going to be pretty, and for the most part we Democrats will be on our own, faced with a party now quite literally in thrall to fascism. These groups and the many sure to join them in the next few weeks will have our back, but ultimately it may come down to every one of us taking a stand, in the streets.

Posted with permission