Few Democrats Ever See Any Republican Victories as Legitimate

Ronald Reagan won the presidency in 1980, but if you talk to certain aged progressives, they’ll insist that the reason Reagan won was that George H. W. Bush secretly met with the Iranians in Paris to persuade them to keep the hostages in Tehran until after Election Day.

In 1994, Republicans won control of the House and Senate, and ABC News anchor Peter Jennings explained to viewers that it wasn’t a real shift in the electorate, or at least not one to be respected:

Ask parents of any two-year-old and they can tell you about those temper tantrums: the stomping feet, the rolling eyes, the screaming. It’s clear that the anger controls the child and not the other way around. It’s the job of the parent to teach the child to control the anger and channel it in a positive way. Imagine a nation full of uncontrolled two-year-old rage. The voters had a temper tantrum last week . . . Parenting and governing don’t have to be dirty words: the nation can’t be run by an angry two-year-old.

Republicans had technically won the elections, but they hadn’t really won a legitimate victory.

In 2000, Democrats believed that Al Gore really won Florida and that the Supreme Court stopped a recount that would have shown him to be the winner. (Never mind that the court voted 7-2 that the recount method the Gore campaign wanted, using a hand recount in their four best counties, violated the Equal Protection Clause. The 5-4 decision was about whether an alternative method could be completed in time.)

Democrats contended that GOP victories in the 2002 midterms and the 2004 presidential election were the result of Diebold voting machines changing votes for Kerry to votes for Bush.

After the 2010 midterms, Democrats contended that gerrymandering, a bipartisan passion, was suddenly a threat to democracy. No less a figure than Barack Obama enjoyed drawing the lines of his state legislative district “to include some of Chicago’s wealthiest citizens, making the district a powerful financial and political base that he used to win his U.S. Senate seat.” A political fact of life that both parties utilized suddenly became intolerable once Democrats were in the minority again.

After the 2014 midterms, Democrats started complaining that their total vote in all Senate races combined was higher than the Republicans’ total vote in all Senate races combined, and that this somehow made the Republican majority in the U.S. Senate illegitimate, because so many of the GOP states had smaller populations.

The second-least populated state in the union is Vermont, with an estimated 623,000 residents; the 45th is Delaware; the 43rd is Rhode Island; and the 40th is Hawaii, with about 1.4 million. All of those states have two Democratic senators. I don’t hear Democrats complaining that those states are over-represented.

Then there was 2016, when President Trump won the Electoral College but lost the popular vote. The irony is that not only had Hillary Clinton lost a slew of key states that Barack Obama had won four years earlier, but that other Democrats had figured out how to win in those states in recent years. Senator Bill Nelson won in Florida in 2012, Senator Sherrod Brown won in Ohio in 2012, Senator Tammy Baldwin won in Wisconsin in 2012, Governor Tom Wolf won in Pennsylvania in 2014, and Governor Roy Cooper won North Carolina in 2016. In 2014, Iowa Democrats won the state’s treasurer and attorney-general races. These are not impossible states for Democrats to win; they’re just impossible states for a candidate as lousy as Hillary Clinton to win.

But to a lot of Democrats, Hillary Clinton’s ability to run up her margins in states such as California and New York meant that Trump’s win was somehow illegitimate.

To a certain type of Democratic activist, Trump’s victory was illegitimate because of the popular vote, the Republican Senate majority is illegitimate because of the low population of some red states, the Republican House majority is illegitimate because of gerrymandering, and now the Supreme Court is illegitimate because of the allegations against Brett Kavanaugh — and heck, maybe they’ll throw in the allegations against Clarence Thomas, too. Whenever the party they don’t like wins something, they can find a reason why the victory isn’t really “legitimate.” This is “Calvinball,” where the rules of the game are made up while you’re playing, and the purpose of the constantly shifting rules is to ensure that one side always wins.

The notion that every Republican victory is illegitimate in one form or another is not a fringe theory in Democratic circles, and if it’s not a majority within the party, then the minority who believes this is loud. Why are our politics so angry, accusatory, vicious, nasty, personal, and vindictive? Because when one side refuses ever to recognize that the other side has legitimately won an election, this kind of atmosphere is inevitable.  (Jim Geraghty)