The 2024 Election Already Isn’t Normal
One party heads toward a typical primary season. The other remains gripped by an authoritarian revenge fantasy.
In a survey of swing-state voters one year out from the 2024 election, a New York Times/Siena College poll asked an unusual question: If Donald Trump were convicted and sentenced to prison, would you still vote for him as the Republican nominee in the general election?
This is, quite obviously, the first time that voters have had to consider the impact of four separate indictments and potential jury verdicts on their choice for president. Tucked amid a slew of other, more typical questions—Are you likely to vote? Which candidate are you more likely to support?—inquiries like “Do you think that Donald Trump has or has not committed any serious federal crimes?” are a reminder of just how bizarre the 2024 presidential race already is. One political party is going through the motions of a more or less typical primary season, featuring humdrum anxieties over whether an incumbent president who exists well within the norms of American politics is up to the challenge of reelection. The other remains gripped by an authoritarian revenge fantasy piloted by a man under indictment for attempting to overthrow the same government that he now wants to lead.
[David A. Graham: The cases against Trump–a guide]
The disjuncture will only become more absurd as the general election moves closer: Trump’s Washington, D.C., trial over his involvement in the January 6 insurrection is currently scheduled to begin on March 4, the day before Super Tuesday, and litigants in multiple states are seeking to disqualify him from the presidency under the Fourteenth Amendment for his role in the riot.
Early in Trump’s time in office, his opponents coalesced around a guileless plea against complacency: “This is not normal!” The 2024 election is definitely not normal. (And it’s not even 2024 yet.) Many of the systems in place for administering the election and ensuring the integrity of the vote are struggling under the weight of political attacks by Trump’s allies and supporters. The same lies about 2020 that Trump used to justify his would-be coup on January 6, and on which he continues to campaign for a second term, are also distorting the deeper systems that underpin the 2024 vote.
In 2020, election workers experienced a wave of harassment by Americans who believed that the election had been stolen from Trump. That abuse has continued in years since: According to a survey this past spring by the Brennan Center for Justice, one in three election officials reported being harassed, and almost half expressed worry about the safety of their colleagues. Many offices have also struggled under the burden of massive public-records requests by Trump supporters seeking, among other things, evidence of fraud in the 2020 election.
These working conditions have led many officials to quit—which may leave many jurisdictions unprepared in 2024. “We’re going to have elections in 2024 in many places that are being administered by first-time election administrators,” Tiana Epps-Johnson told me and my colleague Benjamin Wittes in a recent podcast interview. She leads the Center for Tech and Civic Life, a nonprofit that raised money in 2020 to support local election offices suddenly in need of funds to adapt to the unprecedented circumstances of holding an election in the midst of a pandemic. The “well-being of election officials and election workers is being significantly impacted by this environment,” Epps-Johnson said—and “that’s also true for the constellation of organizations that are working every day to support those public servants.”
She was speaking from experience. After November 2020, her organization was deluged with threats and litigation stemming from far-right falsehoods about its supposed role in stealing the election. The organization has had to pay millions of dollars in legal fees to counter these claims. Even after courts dismissed many of the lawsuits as frivolous, Republican legislators in more than 20 states have pointed to these allegations to justify bans on private grants to election offices. Without additional public funding, that could leave local officials struggling to find the resources to register voters and operate polling places. Nine GOP-led states have also cut ties with another nonprofit assisting with election administration, the Electronic Registration Information Center—a bipartisan organization that allows states to share up-to-date voter information with one another—after the group became the focus of conspiracy theories about supposed Democratic efforts to steal future elections.
While persistent lies about the integrity of the 2020 election have created new and greater challenges for election administration in 2024, existing systems for countering those lies are straining under pressure from pro-Trump Republicans who argue that any such effort represents a scheme to silence conservatives. The shock of Russian election interference in 2016 led to a surge of interest among government agencies and technology companies in mitigating the potential damage of online propaganda related to elections. In 2020, companies such as Meta and Twitter worked alongside independent researchers and both federal and local officials to identify and respond to potentially harmful falsehoods—from rumors spiraling out of control to influence campaigns by foreign governments. That effort wasn’t perfect—although the vote itself went off relatively smoothly, the drumbeat of election lies broadcast by Trump in the following months laid the groundwork for the violence of January 6. But this network represented a major improvement over what had been available in 2016.
Ideally, that network would now be tuned up and ready to go for 2024. Instead, it’s been stymied by a backlash that’s best understood as another manifestation of the anger directed at election workers. In Congress, Representative Jim Jordan’s Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government has relentlessly pursued independent researchers who responded to election falsehoods in 2020—many of whom are struggling under the weight of legal fees and expansive records requests that might sound familiar to harried election administrators. The outcome of all this is what lawyers call a “chilling effect,” dissuading researchers, technology companies, and government agencies from working to counter falsehoods this time around.
Meanwhile, a legal campaign by Republican attorneys general and GOP-aligned groups has cast doubt on the permissibility of government outreach to social-media platforms. Perhaps struggling to navigate this uncertainty, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security have limited communications with technology companies about election integrity. DHS has likewise pulled back from efforts to provide resources to help election administrators respond to misinformation. The right-wing backlash to these programs focuses on claims about censorship of Americans’ speech, but this retrenchment also hamstrings efforts to respond to foreign influence campaigns.
The picture going into 2024 isn’t entirely grim, especially when it comes to legal avenues through which Trump might seek to cause chaos. The Electoral Count Reform Act, quietly passed in December 2022, significantly limits the ability of bad actors in both Congress and the states to meddle with the electoral count. And the Supreme Court’s May 2023 decision in Moore v. Harper rejected the most aggressive variations of a constitutional theory that Trump backers could have used to upend the next election process.
[Quinta Jurecic: The court eviscerates the independent state legislature theory]
Still, enterprising litigants and state officials could press on Moore’s ambiguities to challenge aspects of state election administration—just as they could raise baseless objections to the certification of the vote, as some election officials scattered across the country did in the 2022 midterms. They might not win in court. But they could do a lot of damage even without a formal legal victory. As with efforts to overwhelm election workers and dismantle the systems designed for mitigating falsehoods, the goal is less to achieve a concrete outcome and more to feed the persistent and baseless doubts about the integrity of American elections that Trump has relentlessly stoked since even before his 2016 victory. “Their whole goal is to destabilize our system,” said Kentucky Secretary of State Michael Adams of the flood of information requests to county clerks from 2020 election deniers. This is, unfortunately, the new normal.