Trump, Elections and Democracy: How We Can Move Beyond Electoral Fetishism
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
Donald Trump’s much ballyhooed public address on July 16 – an attempt to pressure Congress to approve his “Save America” election legislation – turned out to be a pitiful bust. Even Sean Hannity seemed embarrassed by a speech that claimed large‑scale “election vulnerabilities,” including hundreds of thousands of alleged non‑citizen votes and Chinese hacking of voter files but offered zero evidence of fraud in the 2020 presidential election.
Evidence or no evidence, Trump can’t stop alleging that the vote for Biden was rigged – a compulsive accusation that anti-Trumpers attribute to his inability to accept defeat, his delusional tendencies, and his intention to challenge the results of the upcoming federal midterm elections. The president’s bad motives and psychological mischigas are undeniable. Even so, his election denialism has significant causes that most Democrats avoid mentioning, since to do so could expose their own role in provoking the madness of King Donald.
Where the election of 2020 is concerned, the president is quite crazed – but what drove him around the bend? Most critics seem determined to forget that the original trauma in this case – the first serious allegations of a rigged election casting doubt on the authenticity of the voting process – were the charges made by Democratic leaders and pursued by various “deep state” agencies under Joe Biden that Trump and his campaign had conspired with the Russians to defeat Hilary Clinton in 2016.
How could a vulgar upstart and political amateur like Trump defeat a seasoned professional like Hilary? It must have been a Russian plot! Few Democrats these days have much to say about “Russiagate.” They seem to have difficulty remembering that during the 2016 campaign the DNC hired a former British spy to compile evidence of a Trump-Russia conspiracy (the “Steele Dossier”) while encouraging F.B.I. director James Comey to begin a major investigation of his own. The Steele dossier turned out to be weakly sourced and unreliable. After the election Democratic-controlled congressional committees held extensive hearings on the matter, also without significant results. And after two years more of further investigation, Special Counsel Robert Mueller issued a report stating that Russian agencies had indeed attempted to interfere with the election, but that evidence of a conspiracy implicating the Trump campaign was lacking.
All that work to “explain” Trump’s election – and with such disappointing results! Not only was the conspiracy unproved, but there was no evidence at all that Russian interference had had a measurable impact on the 2016 election. In that year six key industrial states that had voted for Obama four years earlier went for Trump by substantial majorities – not because of Russian trolls or hacked Clinton emails, but because so many working people felt that the Democrats had abandoned them. Even so, the losers could not resist charging, in effect, that the election had been “rigged” by Trump and the Russians.
It seems clear, in retrospect, that the Russiagate allegations were hardly more substantial than Trump’s subsequent insistence that the election of 2020 had been stolen. But today’s Democratic leaders take no responsibility for attempting to delegitimize a winning presidential candidate by casting doubt on the validity of the electoral process. Nor, even if “progressives,” will they admit that any of the criminal charges brought against Trump in the Biden era were hostile exercises of prosecutorial discretion. Anti-Trumpers tend to attribute their nemesis’s obsessiveness and vengefulness exclusively to his own defects of character. These defects, God knows, are plentiful. But it’s U.S. political institutions, not just Donald J. Trump’s personality, that are deformed. And most of his adversaries don’t seem to want to deal with that reality at all.
When Trump says that elections are rigged and proposes “reforms” that would suppress voter participation, one’s impulse is to spring to the defense of the current electoral system. There is certainly reason to suspect that the president is an authoritarian operator who would happily rig an election himself rather than surrender power. His fake reforms should be strongly opposed, of course. But electoral fetishism is not an effective response to his election denialism. The system as it stands is rigged in favor of candidates and policies favored by the capitalist elite: the oligarchs and their political servitors. It does need to be changed, although surely not in the ways Trump is proposing. Three sources of electoral corruption deserve particular notice: U.S. constitutional and legal norms, an evenly divided electorate, and Big Money.
1) The U.S. Constitution is a document that was intended to consolidate the gains of the American Revolution while preventing power from falling into the hands of the “mob.” As a result, even after enfranchising women, former slaves, and poor people, we have inherited a presidential electoral system that makes it possible to win an election by millions of popular votes but still lose the presidency. Our senatorial voting system gives equal representation to Wyoming’s half million residents and 34.5 million Californians, while the rules of apportionment approved by the U.S. Supreme Court permit the outrageously partisan (and racist) gerrymandering of legislative electoral districts by those in power. Meanwhile, a “winner-take-all” norm in almost all U.S. elections assures that groups constituting a voting minority will be subject for years to the dictates of those constituting a majority – even if the election was decided by a few hundred or a few thousand votes bought or coerced by powerful interests.
2) In fact, when the electorate is evenly divided, a little fraud can go a long way. Donald Trump’s partisans are unable to prove that illegal voting played a significant role in any recent election – but the idea that a relative handful of illicit votes can swing a closely fought contest is far from a paranoid fantasy. As Tracy Campbell shows in her richly documented study, Deliver the Vote (2005), serious electoral fraud has been “an American tradition” since colonial times. One recalls the presidential election of 1960, when John Kennedy defeated Richard Nixon in Illinois by 8,858 votes out of almost 5 million cast. That result was confirmed only after Chicago’s mayor Richard J. Daley, who had delayed reporting the city’s vote until the downstate (mainly Republican) vote had been calculated, announced it. Some Republicans charged fraud both in Illinois and in Texas, where the Democratic machine was also very powerful, but post-election investigations were half-hearted, no “smoking gun” proving significant wrongdoing was discovered, and Nixon – unlike Trump – was not inclined to pursue the matter after his rival was inaugurated.
3) More important than this potential for electoral fraud, however, is the permeation of American elections by Big Money: a form of legalized corruption that gives the oligarchic elite and its political representatives decisive influence over the ideas and behavior of U.S. political parties, candidates for office, and voters. Private campaign contributions have always been an outsized influence on U.S. elections, but In Citizens United and subsequent legal cases, the U.S. Supreme Court confirmed the rights of wealthy individuals and corporations to engage in a range of practices that includes creating super-PACS and funneling “dark money” into political campaigns. The floodgates opened, and in 2024 Elon Musk alone contributed around $290 million in various forms to the campaigns of Trump and other Republican candidates.
In the same election the Harris campaign outspent that of Trump by almost half a billion dollars . . . and still lost. The moral: U.S. elections are corrupted not so much by simple vote-buying as by a system that permits an elite to establish the political and ideological ground rules which limit the choices of “acceptable” candidates and policies available to voters. A major purpose of these rules is to keep the oligarchs’ basic “rights” to own and control great accumulations of capital from being subjected to challenge by elected officials.
The current turmoil in the United States, with President Trump’s popularity declining and many Democrats moving somewhat to the left, provides an interesting test of how the system works. Even though the Democratic Party’s self-declared “democratic socialists” are little more than outspoken liberals, Trump and the Heritage Foundation have started to call them communists. So far, this name-calling has not been accompanied by much repression, probably because most oligarchs understand that Bernie Sanders or AOC-style progressivism does not seriously threaten their ownership or management privileges. If these privileges are brought into question, however, a different line is likely to be drawn, and repressive measures initiated.
Many Democrats and some Republicans want to increase taxes on the rich, provide a wider range of public welfare services to working people, regulate big corporations more effectively, and shift resources from military to peacetime uses. Since the New Deal, the corporate elite has considered such demands negotiable rather than taboo. But if political organizers wish to go further, say, by capping or confiscating great wealth, advocating the public ownership of key resources, greatly reducing military-industrial expenditures, or redefining management rights (including the “right” to buy political candidates), the situation is likely to change. An oligarchy feeling genuinely threatened will define such activists as unAmerican extremists and subject them to McCarthy-style repression, or worse.
Is a mass-based anti-capitalist mobilization possible? I think so. Especially if the world capitalist system has entered a period of crisis that some theorists believe can only get worse, moderate reforms of the sort favored by Democratic progressives are likely to prove ineffective, and organizers proposing more radical changes could find themselves leading a mass movement. The fear that a genuine Left could emerge in the U.S. motivates fascistic representatives of the oligarchy like Stephen Miller to propose preemptive repression — including measures intended to “fix” the electoral rules. But the answer to such threats is not just to condemn Miller, and certainly not to sacralize the pre-Trump voting system.
For now, elements of the old system such as mail-in ballots must be protected against Trumpian vote-suppressing tactics. But the point of doing this is to lay the groundwork for a transformation that will break the power of the oligarchy and turn elections into a genuine method (among others) of self-rule. Our guiding aim cannot be simply to “defend” a deeply compromised democracy. It must be to create a real one.
