Insurrectionist Election Playbook
In June 2021, we did a Gaslit Nation episode called “Voter Suppression Emergency” where we interviewed election integrity expert Ari Berman. Guess what? We’re still in a Voter Suppression Emergency so Ari is back to share his thoughts with us again! Ari Berman is a writer for Mother Jones who closely documents dark money, voter suppression, and the ever-changing laws that GOP legislatures are using and abusing to hijack our democracy. He has long followed the power struggle for progressive values and democracy in Washington, and his books include Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America and Herding Donkeys: The Fight to Rebuild the Democratic Party and Reshape American Politics.
This week we catch up with Ari and discuss how the voter suppression emergency has turned into a voter suppression apocalypse. We get his thoughts about what’s really behind Manchin and Sinema’s obstructionism, whether the Democratic leadership’s inaction has alienated their grassroots base, why Merrick Garland has not cracked down on insurrectionists, the GOP strategy for the midterms and their dangerous placement of insurrectionists into elected offices, the new voter suppression laws enacted since 2020, the culture of threat toward poll workers and public officials, the role of dark money in shaping elections, what ordinary citizens can do to combat this threat, what tools the Democratic Party has left at their disposal, and much more!
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[intro theme music]
Sarah Kendzior:
I'm Sarah Kendzior, the author of the bestsellers, The View From Flyover Country and Hiding in Plain Sight, and of the upcoming book, They Knew, coming out this September.
Andrea Chalupa:
I am Andrea Chalupa, a journalist and filmmaker and the writer and producer of the journalistic thriller, Mr. Jones about Stalin's genocide famine in Ukraine.
Sarah Kendzior:
And this is Gaslit Nation, a podcast covering corruption in the United States and rising autocracy around the world.
Andrea Chalupa:
This week's Gaslit Nation early show available to listeners at the Truth Teller level and higher on Patreon is a big deep dive discussion into Putin's cold war rematch. We'll play some clips from it now.
[begin audio clip from bonus episode, “Putin’s Cold War Rematch”: patreon.com/posts/61632829]
Sarah Kendzior:
If you have any awareness of this situation, any understanding of the historical context and the present context, you know that this is a humanitarian catastrophe. You know that Russia has historically been an imperialist power, a colonialist power. They took Crimea and before that Russia made similar incursions in Georgia, constantly, constantly trying to reclaim territory that is not theirs. If you oppose imperialism when the United States is doing it or war, like, for example, if you opposed the war in a Iraq (which you should have), if you oppose what Israel does to the Palestinians, if you oppose what China does to the Uyghurs, I could go on and on, this is the same thing, only it's also wrapped up in this broad, deeply corrupt alliance of oligarchs, plutocrats, transnational organized crime, which is deeply immersed in white-collar crime.
Sarah Kendzior:
The reason I'm saying this is actually not to call people out, not to bitch people out, but to encourage them to look at it this way because I think that there is solidarity among a great number of very frustrated Americans, frustrated Ukrainians, frustrated Russians, anybody who has had to deal with these abuses of power from a military industrial complex, from corrupt actors, from the people who have caused incredible income inequality, hoarding of wealth, hoarding of opportunities. If you oppose that, if you oppose those sorts of actions, you should oppose what the Kremlin is doing and you should oppose what American backers of the Kremlin are doing, which tend to be, again, big corporations, incredibly greedy, corrupt people.
Andrea Chalupa:
If Putin goes deeper into Ukraine, he's going to send more refugees into Europe, which is going to inflame the far-right anti-immigration parties that the Kremlin props up across Europe, both financially and with disinformation and propaganda support.
[end audio clip]
Andrea Chalupa:
And we also answer questions from our listeners at the Democracy Defender level and higher. So sign up today to get access to all that and help support the show.
Sarah Kendzior:
We have a special episode today with a special guest. Back in June, 2021, we did a Gaslit Nation episode called, “Voter Suppression Emergency” where we interviewed election integrity expert Ari Berman. And guess what? We are still in a voter suppression emergency, so Ari is back to share his thoughts with us yet again. Ari Berman is a writer for Mother Jones who closely documents dark money, voter suppression, and the ever changing laws that GOP legislatures are using and abusing to hijack our democracy. Ari has long followed the power struggle for progressive values in democracy in Washington. His books include Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America and Herding Donkeys: The Fight to Rebuild the Democratic Party and Reshape American Politics. So, welcome back to Gaslit Nation.
Ari Berman:
Hey guys, thank you for having me back. It feels like the voter suppression emergency has now turned into a voter suppression apocalypse, but I'm sure we'll get into all of it.
Sarah Kendzior:
Well actually, you know what? Go on, because I was gonna ask you, you know, we spoke to you, gosh, what is it, January? Six months ago, half a year ago. What's our lay of the land here? What's changed since we've talked to you? Has anything in particular surprised or disappointed you? Where are we going from here?
Ari Berman:
Yeah. Well, so if we talked in the summer of 2021, I mean, at that point a number of states had already passed laws to make it harder to vote. Since then, more states have passed laws to make it harder to vote. So basically, if you look at what happened in 2021, 19 states passed 34 new laws making it more difficult to vote, which was really unprecedented. We haven't seen that since the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. And I think you have to go all the way back to the end of Reconstruction to find a period when voting rights was restricted in such a dramatic fashion in such a short period of time, but there was this glimmer of hope in the summer that maybe Democrats would do something to stop it, maybe they would actually pass legislation to stop these voter suppression efforts.
Ari Berman:
And we learned recently that that is likely not going to happen. And so it's a very frustrating and dispiriting moment. I feel like there was this really once in a generation opportunity to protect voting rights that Democrats had with their very narrow majorities in Washington. And basically, because of two senators, it's not going to happen. Of course, it's 52 senators if you include the 50 Republicans that voted against the voting rights bills, but it really is two democratic senators—Manchin and Sinema—that blocked it from happening. And I was thinking about when you were talking about your intro about corruption, rising corruption and autocracy around the world, I'm just thinking, this is a story about corruption and autocracy in Washington, about two people that decided to protect dark money. And really essentially what Manchin and Sinema did is they prioritized the rights of the Republican minority over the rights of minority voters and they prioritized dark money and big money influence over making sure that everyone has the chance to vote.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah, absolutely. I know, Andrea, you probably wanna get into Sinema because I'd like to break these folks down one by one. So go ahead with your Sinema questions.
Andrea Chalupa:
Yeah, so we've been covering both Manchin and Sinema a lot on this show and we did an early episode early in the year of 2021 saying “Joe Manchin Gaslights America”. We saw all this coming, that they couldn't be trusted. In terms of where we go next with these guys, there was a local news reporter in Arizona who covers local government there who was telling MSNBC that his sources close to Sinema are telling him that she has her eye on a bigger prize, which is 2024, either as a presidential run or a VP run, but she wants all of it. Like, she's going big in 2024. And it seems like that would certainly be the case. We've outlined reasons why on our show. And also because the Democratic Party is openly declaring war on her, right? You have Voto Latinos saying they're gonna primary her.
Andrea Chalupa:
She's been censured by the Arizona Democrats. You have all these abortion healthcare groups pulling their endorsements. And so the writing's on the wall for her. What do you think, in terms of that, do you think it's headed there, that Sinema might not run for reelection in 2024? Do you think she might switch parties before 2024, which could tip the balance of power in Congress? Do you think she would? And if she were to do that, could you see her going independent because she's the quirky girl of the Congress or do you see her being a full blown Republican?
Ari Berman:
I think her political career is over. I think she ended her political career when she prioritized the filibuster over protecting voting rights. And here's why: There's no way she's gonna win another Democratic primary in Arizona. They have already found some good people to challenge her, either members of Congress or other members of the state legislature. Someone's gonna step up and challenge her so I don't think there's any way she wins another Democratic primary. I don't think she wins a Republican primary though, either. If you look at who is running in the Republican Party right now in Arizona, it's QAnon insurrectionist types. They're not gonna vote for her. She's way too moderate for the insurrectionists. And so what is she gonna do? She's gonna somehow win an independent ticket, get enough votes from Democrats and Republicans in a two-party system to become an independent?
Ari Berman:
I mean, I guess anything is possible but that seems very unlikely to me. It seems like there's really no place for her in the Democratic Party anymore and I don't think there's any place for her in the Republican Party. I think she's a useful idiot for Republicans. I think they like her to vote against Democratic bills, but I think ultimately they want a Republican in Arizona. They don't want Kyrsten Sinema. And so I don't see how she recovers from this. I think the idea that she's gonna run for president is completely laughable. She has no qualifications to run for president. She has no personality to run for president. She doesn't even hold town halls in Arizona. How would she ever deal with the scrutiny that comes with running for president? So, I think her career's over and I don't know why she did it. I don't. If you're going to end your political career, wouldn't you want to end it fighting for voting rights, not preserving a relic of Jim Crow? It just… Honestly, nothing she does makes any kind of sense to me, both substantively or politically right now.
Andrea Chalupa:
I think what you described in terms of somebody that should not be running for president—because they're just not qualified, they don't have the charisma, they would just be a terrible candidate—none of that has stopped people like Ted Cruz from running for president and Sinema is someone that has a massive lack of self-awareness. So I could see her running as an independent or a Democrat on some unity ticket with some posh Trump in some sort of gaslighting campaign to bring the polarized country together. So I wouldn't put it past her given how she behaves in this-
Ari Berman:
I mean, I guess she could be recruited for some sort of no labels ticket with Joe Lieberman or something like that, but I don't think there's any real… The point is, I don't think there's any constituency for that in American politics. I think that's been shown over and over and over. I mean, Ted Cruz was popular with elements of the Republican base. I mean, he had a constituency. He had no personality but he had a constituency and I don't think that Sinema has a constituency right now. I mean, I think basically her constituency, I guess, would be the sort of Jeff Flake Republicans. Well, those people are extinct right now. I mean, they're being extinguished. So I just don't see where she goes from here. I think that one thing that did not get nearly enough attention was the fact that Sinema and Manchin are two of the coziest Democrats with corporate America, two of the coziest Democrats with dark money and they killed the bill that would have cracked down on both dark money and voter suppression.
Ari Berman:
And there was a big, big, big campaign by corporate America, by dark money groups like the Chamber of Commerce, like the Heritage Foundation, to target Sinema and Manchin and it was successful. And I feel like all of the media coverage made it seem like they were standing on principle to uphold the filibuster as opposed to they had been bought off by big money interests that wanted to preserve the filibuster so they not just could block voting rights, but block all sorts of progressive changes in America. To me, that was a huge storyline that was just completely missed by all of the inside the beltway coverage of this issue
Andrea Chalupa:
Not here at Gaslit Nation.
Ari Berman:
Not you guys. <laughs>
Andrea Chalupa:
Which is why, Ari, I just wanna point out to our listeners, Ari like slid into our DMS and was just like, “Girls, I'm coming back on the show.”
Sarah Kendzior:
<laugh>
Andrea Chalupa:
So Ari’s here by his own invitation because he knows he has an open invite here at Gaslit Nation.
Ari Berman:
I saw so much corruption I needed to talk to you guys again.
Andrea Chalupa:
Of course. We're all venting around a cheesecake right now. I wanted just to say that Kyrsten Sinema is on a fundraising rampage. She was in London raising money. She's raking in all this money from all these GOP supporters, GOP donors that propped up Scott Walker. So if her political career is dead, why is she amassing a war chest right now? What is that for?
Ari Berman:
Well, I mean probably to scare anyone away from challenging her. Probably so she could try to run, if she decides to run in another Democratic primary—which, again, I see as unlikely—she can try to run a scorched earth campaign against who that person is, or if she tries to run as an independent. I think she fancies herself another John McCain, even though she's never shown any of the political courage that John McCain ever did, that she will have the resources to be able to do it. And of course corporate America loves her because they go to her and Manchin to kill any kind of progressive change in this country. And so, I mean, she has now branded herself this way. The branding is very strange to me though, because unlike Manchin who represents a state that Biden lost by 40 points, Biden won Arizona, Mark Kelly won Arizona.
Ari Berman:
Arizona's a competitive state. So, I don't know. To me, you'd think she'd be positioning herself more like Raphael Warnock and John Ossoff were positioning themselves because Georgia and Arizona were basically the same in terms of the margins, a similar electorate. Georgia's more diverse but Arizona's pretty diverse, too. Sinema won because of mobilizations among young voters, mobilizations among voters of color. Yes, she did win sort of the moderate Cindy McCain types but that's not the only reason she was elected to the Senate and she just completely turned her back among the people that worked for her, that organized for her, that laid the groundwork so that she and Mark Kelly could be elected and Joe Biden could win that state. It's baffling to me that she didn't follow the lead of Ossoff and Warnock and really go all out to try to pass this bill.
Ari Berman:
I think if she had, she would've been a lot more popular among Democrats and I think she would've been totally fine in Arizona. Now, her approval ratings are just terrible. And so, I mean, maybe she believed it all. I mean, maybe she truly believes that, you know, maintaining a broken corrupt voter suppression status quo is the best thing for America, but it's hard to imagine that she sees all the restrictions on voting that are happening in her backyard that could theoretically target her and her supporters and thinks that the idea is that we should do nothing to stop this.
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Sarah Kendzior:
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Andrea Chalupa:
So we've been interviewing a lot of experts for this big series we're running in the spring on how to rebuild American democracy from the ashes and some of the experts we've interviewed, like Nancy McLean and others, have talked about this far-right, well organized asymmetrical warfare effort going back decades to hijack our democracy. And it's paying off now. That's what we're seeing. We're seeing decades of work by the Koch political network and others. So one thing you hear a lot—just chatter, people just speculating because they're so frustrated with Sinema—one accusation that does get thrown at her—which could be completely bonkers because it's just, there's a lot of just anger and frustration towards her—is that she's a plant, that she's part of their long game. Do you see any chance of that? Because the way she's just flipped 180… Because her earlier speeches as a Green Party activist or her early years as a Democrat, she's sounding like us. She's sounding like we've gotta get rid of the filibuster. She sounds like she knows what she's talking about and is a grounded person grounded in values. And then she just flips. So, like, I know money is wonderful. I know greed is a hell of a drug, but just the transformation is so dramatic. Do you see any chance that, given any of her past associations, that she might have been a long game in some way shape or form?
Ari Berman:
I don't know. I mean, I, I don't know what her motivations are. It's very hard to decode them given how she just seems to be self-destructing politically right now. I think that if you look at her career, I think basically she realized that she was never going to get elected as a Green Party organizer in Arizona and, I think, so she positioned herself as a Blue Dog in the House. So I mean, if you paid attention to her record in the House, what she's doing in the Senate is not that surprising, but she's become even more conservative and I think she's basically realized that this position will get her a lot of money, will bring her a lot of influence, will put her at the center of things, will make an indispensable-type player. And so that's the political calculation she's made.
Ari Berman:
If she just goes along with the Democratic agenda then she's just one of 50, but if she is in the center of things then she can be the kingmaker or the queenmaker and I think that's been the calculation for Mansion and Sinema. I think they're loving all of this attention. The difference between Manchin and Sinema is Manchin's actually willing to talk to people. He's willing to talk to reporters. He's willing to hold meetings. Now, a lot of the meetings he's holding are with rich donors that don't like progressive causes but I think he's been fairly open with people. Sinema won't talk to anybody. She won't give press conferences. She won't hold town halls. She did that kind of crying speech on the Senate floor that seemed incredibly fake. She's not even trying to believe in representative democracy. She's not making herself available as a representative. So, I don't know. I don't know what her long game was but I think that those interests have found her incredibly useful and they realize that she's a Democrat—or, who knows how long she'll be a Democrat?—that they can work with and that they can use. And sometimes you need that. Sometimes, you know, for the coast to succeed and all those interests to succeed, I mean, obviously they needed to elect a lot more Republicans but they also needed to buy some Democrats off in the process and they've succeeded in doing that.
Andrea Chalupa:
You've covered the Democrats for a very long time. How do you think the Democrat leadership did? What did you think of their approach in trying to win over Manchin and Sinema? They let Manchin and Sinema sort of be the face of Infrastructure. When they finally got their big infrastructure bill passed, Sinema was on the stage with Democratic leadership, praising this big bill, giving her a lot of clout in doing that. How do you think Democratic leadership handled that in trying to win them over and what do you think they should have done differently?
Ari Berman:
I think it was too much of an inside strategy on both Build Back Better and on voting rights. I think the idea was, Let's cater to Manchin and Sinema behind closed doors. Let's give them everything they want and then they'll come around. And they didn't. They didn’t come around on Build Back Better and they didn't come around on voting rights. I would've liked to see a lot more outside pressure. Now, I know the grassroots groups tried to exert pressure, but generally the view from the Democratic Party was, Let's handle this internally. Don't be too aggressive with them. We might lose them on key votes. They might leave the party. Well, in the end, you lost them on the key votes anyway and I would've liked to see Biden exert more pressure on them as well. Biden's position on calling for changes to the filibuster was always, If I call for changes on the filibuster, I'm gonna lose these guys on Build Back Better.
Ari Berman:
Well, he lost them on Build Back Better. So, I think that the President should have been out there much earlier talking about the threats that voters face, talking about how to overcome them, and talking about not just the Republicans but the Democrats that that might have been standing in the way, and put more pressure on them because I think ultimately Manchin and Sinema were able to dictate the agenda rather than other way around. And some of that's inevitable. Some of that’s inevitable in the 50/50 Senate. That’s just gonna happen and maybe everyone's expectations were raised too high, but the fact is if you're gonna make this a priority—and the Democrats’ voting rights bill was the first bill they introduced at the beginning of the Congress—I mean, if you're going to make this your priority, you have to do everything you can to try to pass it. Instead, it just seems like they let Manchin and Sinema dictate the terms of the debate as opposed to really exerting the kind of pressure on them that might have made them feel like they had no choice but, ultimately, to go along with what the party wanted. So, maybe it was unwinnable. I mean, there's lots of indications that Manchin and Sinema were never going to move on this issue, but the question is, Did they feel the ultimate amount of pressure they could have? And I think the answer is, No.
Sarah Kendzior:
Well, and also it seems that they, in the process of trying to court Manchin and Sinema and bend to their imagined whims, they have lost a core constituency (or at least are at risk of losing it), which is all of the volunteers that turned out for the 2020 election, and especially the volunteers that flipped Georgia blue and got Ossoff and Warnock in. And we've seen their understandable frustration recently, like when Biden and Harris flew to Georgia and those activists did not want to meet with them because they were tired of empty rhetoric. They want to see action. We also saw, you know, Stacey Abrams said she had a scheduling conflict but it seemed noticeable that she wasn't there. And I think that this is in response to what you were just saying, that Biden and Harris also have refused to apply pressure.
Sarah Kendzior:
They've acted as sycophants to people who are destroying the democratic process. What is going to happen now? Because, you know, obviously people will continue to fight for voting rights but they don't seem to have the backing of this administration. And I think especially younger voters, new voters from 2020, are going to look at this whole process and be like, “What's the point? You've abandoned us in our time of need and you didn't fulfill your promises.” Where do you see that going on the grassroots level?
Ari Berman:
Yeah and I think that the voting rights groups and the activists and the organizers, they liked what Biden said in Georgia, but they wanted him to say it much earlier.
Andrea Chalupa:
Mmmhmm <affirmative>
Ari Berman:
And make it much more of a priority and make it one of the top priorities of his administration. Biden's been going all around the country talking about infrastructure, but if you look at, I mean, he's basically given two speeches about voting rights; one in Philadelphia over the summer and one in Georgia, right before they were gonna vote on this bill. I mean, he's not gone on a democracy tour. He has not made protecting American democracy the central organizing principle of his presidency in a way that Republicans have made voter suppression the central organizing principle of their party. And so there's been an asymmetric warfare in terms of tactics, but also just in terms of priorities, that basically what Republicans did is they used the insurrection as a rallying cry for an insurrection through other means so that they don't need to do another insurrection because they're gonna rig the election on the front end or the back end in 2022 and 2024.
Ari Berman:
Democrats have not shown the same kind of urgency to protect American democracy until this last ditch effort in the last few weeks and that was not enough in terms of laying the groundwork for this. So I understand why people are frustrated. I don't think the answer is to give up though. I think the answer is to fight harder and figure out what other strategies you need. I mean, one thing that's pretty obvious to me is there were 48 Senate Democrats that were willing to change the Senate rules to pass voting rights legislation. And so the question is, Can you get two more in there that are willing to do it so Manchin and Sinema no longer hold all the cards. So, I think that's something to really think about in Senate races in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and other states where Democrats have a shot at winning and elected people have already pledged to change the Senate rules and to weaken or eliminate the filibuster, which I think is really important.
Ari Berman:
And then I think what we really need is a mass mobilization for democracy at the state and local level because what's happening in 2020 is so many people showed up to be poll workers and election officials, to volunteer for campaigns or grassroots efforts, and a lot of people went back to their lives after the 2020 election. I understand that we’re still in a pandemic and it was a very exhausting election, but the problem is the insurrectionists have filled the void. Every single day, Steve Bannon is recruiting people to be poll workers, to be election judges, to sit on county certification commissions calling for the overthrow of county election clerks. And this is a very scary prospect, that the people that attended the insurrection on January 6th could be the ones counting the votes in 2022 and 2024. And so I think even though people are dispirited, even though there was a failure by the Democrats to fight hard enough to pass this voting rights legislation, there are still things that people can do to protect American democracy. If people just give up and say, “I'm done with all of it”, then it's very clear to me the insurrectionists are going to take over every aspect of the election process.
Sarah Kendzior:
I have a question about that. You know, you have a new article in Mother Jones, which I hope everybody reads, called “The Coming Coup: How Republicans are Laying the Groundwork to Steal Future Elections” and this is a quote from that article. You wrote, “The newest and potentially most dangerous anti-democratic threat are new laws designed to give Trump-backed election deniers unprecedented control over how elections are run and how votes are counted.” So this is rather Stalinistic that, you know, it's not the people who vote that counts but the people who count the votes that matter. This is also Roy Cohn's philosophy. This is Donald Trump's philosophy. And now there is legal backing for this, which didn't exist before. Can you get into that, like how these GOP state legislatures are going to handle ballots, what kind of plans Bannon and other insurrectionists have for controlling this election in 2022 and 2024 and so forth?
Ari Berman:
Yeah, absolutely. And to me, this election subversion is the scariest part of the whole voter suppression process because it's kind of the ultimate voter suppression efforts when even if you've overcome the barriers of the ballot box, if your vote is then thrown out by partisan actors, I mean, that's really, really difficult to overcome. And I'll just give an example of how it's working in Georgia, for example. Georgia, of course, was the state where Donald Trump tried to overturn the election, where he told the secretary of state to find 11,780 votes to nullify Joe Biden's victory. And then in Georgia, what happened is the legislature removed the secretary of state who stood up to Trump as a chair and voting member of the state election board. The gerrymandered legislature instead gets to appoint a majority of the state election board. The state election board in turn has the ability to take over county election boards that it views as underperforming.
Ari Berman:
So they might take over the election board in Fulton County in Atlanta, the most Democratic county in the state where the Trump campaign spread these conspiracy theories in 2020 about suitcases of ballots being counted after poll monitors had left. And then also what's happening is local boards of election are being disbanded in Georgia. Bipartisan boards are being disbanded and they're being replaced with all Republican boards. And not only that, but there's another part of the Georgia law that says that there can be unlimited challenges to voter eligibility. Right wing groups did this in 2021. They challenged the eligibility of all of these voters in the Senate runoff elections. Ultimately, those challenges were unsuccessful. But now basically the state board of election said, You have to hear all these challenges within 10 days or you can be sanctioned by us. So, there could be all of these challenges to voter eligibility heard by all of these partisan boards.
Ari Berman:
And that could lead to elections not being certified or votes being thrown out for Democratic candidates. And so that's how the laws are changing. And there's also who is running for these kinds of positions. The secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, who certified the 2020 election, he is being primaried by someone; Jodi Hice, who’s a Republican member of Congress that voted to overturn the 2020 election. Brian Kemp, the governor—extremely conservative but certified the 2020 election—he is being challenged from the Right by David Perdue, who wanted to overturn the 2020 election. And what's happening is Republicans are changing the laws to give them more authority over vote counting, but the people who are also running to oversee these election positions, whether it's at the local level (poll workers or election judges) or at the statewide level (secretaries of state, attorney general, governors), these are people that are sympathetic to the insurrection, that want to achieve those goals through other means and that, to me, is a really scary prospect; both a combination of how laws are changing to make it harder for votes to be counted accurately, but also who's running for all of these key positions in 2022 and 2024. And then if they get elected in 2022, what are they gonna do with that power? I mean, they're running for these positions for a reason. I think they're running for these positions to effectuate an outcome like Trump wanted in 2020 but ultimately failed to secure.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah, on that note, I'm wondering, what do you make of the culture of threat that's become increasingly common since 2020, where public officials are threatened with violence, poll workers are threatened with violence, a lot of these GOP officials who did certify the election were threatened with violence, and in some cases, like with Trump and Raffenserger, there is evidence, there are phone calls, there is extensive documentation of illegal action and violent behavior, including, obviously, the attack on the Capitol on January 6th. Even me, with my pessimism, I thought that the DOJ and the Biden administration, purely out of self interest, out of wanting to protect our country and its sovereignty and its existence and prevent future violent attacks, would address these issues, especially when they are recorded over the phone, on the internet, on video, etc. What do you make of the lack of action toward those who've perpetrated these publicly documented threats to elected officials and election workers?
Ari Berman:
Yeah, it's baffling, because you'd think that preventing the guy that inspired an insurrection and tried to overturn an election from ever being in that position again would be the top priority of the US government. I mean, that would seem to be the number one priority in a free and fair election in a democracy was to try to prevent the guy that tried to overthrow American democracy from being able to do it again. And far from preventing him from doing it, his side is winning. I mean, the insurrectionists are winning right now, this battle to control American democracy and to subvert American democracy. And I think that the kind of things you're seeing at the local level—pushing out election officials, poll workers and replacing them with insurrections—I mean, that is the playbook that you guys have studied in authoritarian countries all across the world.
Ari Berman:
I mean, it's not quite as bad as receiving a horse's head in your bed <laugh> á la The Godfather, but I mean, it's pretty similar in terms of the kind of tactics they're using to just make life so miserable for people that just want to conduct free and fair elections that they no longer want to do it. And then the insurrectionists fill the void. And so I think this battle has to be fought at the federal level, but I think this battle also has to be fought at the state and local level as well. Obviously they're now paneling a grand jury in Georgia to look into what Trump did. We'll see where it goes. This has a little bit of shades of the Mueller Report all over again, to me, where people are gonna get very excited about an investigation that probably won't reach the outcome they like, but who knows, maybe it will, maybe it will.
Ari Berman:
Maybe they will, maybe Trump will be convicted. Maybe he'll never run again. I guess that would be the optimistic scenario. It seems hard to imagine it actually happening, but I do think that just overall, we need an overarching democracy strategy and it would be one that would be from the top up all the way to the bottom. At the top level, it would be preventing the people who tried to overthrow an election from ever getting in a position to do it again, preventing laws from being passed that would effectuate that outcome from being put into place, preventing people that did their jobs in 2020 from being removed or forced out of them. I mean, this is all part of an overarching strategy here. And I just don't see the urgency on any of these points by Democrats to prevent it from happening. And so I'm very worried that even though the last coup failed in 2020, all of the steps are being put in place for another one to succeed in 2022 or 2024.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah, absolutely, and I agree with you on the lack of urgency. One of the things that the Republicans have been very skilled at doing for decades is looking for loopholes and looking for unconventional ways to achieve power without technically breaking the law. So I've been sort of keeping my eye out for potential loopholes here and one article that I found, even though it came out about a year ago, but recently is by Hayes Brown from MSNBC who wrote an article saying Vice President Kamala Harris could kill the filibuster herself. And this is a small quote from it. It says, “Harris should be ready and willing to use the power she has to steer the Senate, if need be. I’m particularly taken with the idea that lawyer and author Thomas Geoghegan suggested in a 2010 New York Times op ed: If the votes aren't there to change the rules, the vice president could issue an opinion from the chair that the filibuster is unconstitutional.” So basically he's saying Harris could issue a parliamentary ruling just saying, you know, no more filibuster and therefore they get rid of it and pass their agenda. Is this actually possible?
Ari Berman:
I don't know. That's a good question. That's something that I hadn't studied enough. It wasn't coming up a lot in discussions I was having with the filibuster so I assume not, but to be honest with you, I don't know so I don't wanna speculate too much on that. One thing I'm concerned about though is now that the voting rights bills—The John Lewis Voting Rights Act and The Freedom to Vote Act—appear dead, there's this new effort to try to reform the Electoral Count Act of 1887. And I don't want to go too in the weeds here but basically this was the law that controls how Congress counts electoral votes. And, of course, what you saw in 2020 was Trump trying to get Mike Pence to basically not count the electoral votes under the very confusing language of the Electoral Count Act.
Ari Berman:
Now Congress is trying to revise it, which is probably good. Not a substitute for the voting rights bills, but probably a good idea to revise it. But here's what I worry about. One thing they could say is the vice president has no power to alter electoral college votes. Well, what if Republican legislatures in Georgia and other states decide not to follow the popular vote winner in their states and actually send these pro-Trump electors to Congress, like the Trump campaign wanted in 2020, and then Kamala Harris can't do anything about it because the Congress rewrote the Electoral Count Act in a way that actually makes it harder to prevent election subversion. So that's… Again, I don't want to get too in the weeds here, but it's worrisome that basically through this reforming the Electoral Count Act process, they could actually make it so that it would be harder to stop a stolen election, not easier to prevent one. And so we'll see where this is going but right now Republicans have a lot of different angles to try to influence the stealing of an election and Democrats haven't done a good job at all of stopping those actions from being taken right now.
Sarah Kendzior:
Do you think Democrats are aware of what you just said, of these potential dangers? Beause I feel like they're not discussing them, if they are.
Ari Berman:
I feel like they're aware of them but they're not raising the alarm. I mean, you don't have the Steve Bannon types saying every single day, “Become a poll worker, become an election official, do all of these kinds of things, work at the local and county level.” You don't see secretary of state races and state AG races and these kinds of races getting the same amount of attention on the Left compared to the Right. And maybe that will change in 2022. But the thing that I'm worried about is that what happens in 2022 is gonna determine, to a large extent, whether there's even gonna be a fair election in 2024, because if all of these insurrectionists take over county election boards, if they win secretary of state races, if they control key position in the legislature, it's gonna be very, very difficult if not impossible to have a fair election in 2024, either because voting is gonna be so difficult and people won't be able to vote, or even if they overcome these obstacles, then all of the chicanery with accounting that Trump wanted in 2020 will come into play in 2024, meaning that the people that certified the election in 2020, they will have been replaced.
Ari Berman:
The Republicans that certify the elections will have been replaced by people that don't want to certify elections if Democrats win them. And I don't think there's enough of a sense of urgency here from the Democratic Party. I mean, I think basically the position of Biden was, Let's pass sensible bipartisan policies and that will break the fever in Washington. Well, first off, they haven't passed enough of those policies. And number two, the fever wasn't gonna break either way. The fever has only gotten worse in the Republican Party right now. Whatever it was… If it was 102, now it's 104 in terms of where the fever is right now and Democrats aren't doing enough to stop it, and they're not doing enough to proactively pass legislation that will give them something to run on in 2022. And so it's shaping up to potentially be a very ugly midterm election, not just an ugly midterm election where Democrats would find themselves out of power, but an ugly midterm election in which insurrectionist Republicans would find themselves in power. And these are not gonna be the same Republicans that were even elected in 2020. These are gonna be much more extreme people that I think will be willing to abuse the power of their office in ways that we haven't seen in a very long time, if ever.
Andrea Chalupa:
I wanna just jump in there with a question. First, I wanna make a point on the parliamentarian vice president solution. Obviously, if Kamala Harris came into the Senate and said, “There's no more filibuster”, you would have Manchin and Sinema withholding their votes or voting No or voting Present to protect the filibuster on their principled stand of protecting minority rights, right? So that solution is a non-solution. The second thing is, I wanted to ask, you've been covering Democrats for a very long time, do you see any strategy at all that they're going to try to protect their party from any future Sinemas? Meaning where's the Koch political network money going now? Where's the US Chamber of Commerce money going now? Which members of Congress could be co-opted next? So, if the grassroots are being depended on to protect our democracy by voting in overwhelming numbers and waiting in long lines for hours, and yet we're bringing in people to Congress who are being bought off, why can't the Democrats weed out those members from their party? Why can't they be vigilant and say, “If you accept money from the US Chamber, you're gone.”
Ari Berman:
That kind of gets at why some of the dark money stuff was in the Freedom to Vote Act in the first place, because it has bipartisan influence. The idea that the Republicans are the only ones that are bought off by corporate America is clearly not true, and I've thought for a long time that the way our campaign finance system works, the way our elections are run just incentivizes corruption. The dark money stuff in the Freedom of Vote Act was a good start but it didn't go nearly far enough. And we have a series of harmful Supreme Court decisions, not just Citizens United, but this whole idea that money is speech has just opened up a huge door to political corruption that is very, very difficult to unwind in both parties, to the point I made earlier.
Ari Berman:
I mean, I think that's one reason why it's important to elect more Democrats. I mean, when Harry Reid changed the Senate rules so that they could actually appoint Barack Obama's judges, they had 55 Democratic Senators. They didn't have 50. They lost three Democrats, one of whom was Joe Manchin. So there would've never been any kind of rule change if there had been 53 senators instead of 55. And so it's very, very difficult to do things with 50/50 majorities, and I think people got their expectations raised because Democrats did control Washington. But they controlled Washington on such a marginal extent when you consider that Manchin and Sinema were the people that you had to get through to pass anything. And they sort of fell in line early on with the coronavirus relief package, and they negotiated an infrastructure bill that honestly could have been signed by Ronald Reagan or Richard Nixon or any Republican president. There wasn’t anything particularly progressive about it.
Ari Berman:
But when it came down to actually do big, bold things, they stood in the way. I think that's the problem with having 50 Democrats. So I think one of the solutions here is to try to elect more Democrats, but it's hard to elect more Democrats when the Democratic Party doesn't seem to have a message that responds to people's needs and doesn't have a message that democracy is under threat and we're going to protect it. And that, to me, is the problem here. One of the solutions—not the only solution—is to elect more Democrats, but the people that are killing the Democratic agenda are making it a lot harder to do that because how can Raphael Warnock or Mark Kelly go back home and say, “Reelect me” when Sinema and Manchin have just pulled the rug out from under them. So that's the conundrum that they face right now and it's not an easy one to get around.
Andrea Chalupa:
So there's a lot of incredible grassroots organizations that support Democrats and there are a lot of dynamic Democratic leaders, so where is this vacuum of power coming from in the Democratic Party in terms of their abysmal messaging? Is it because it's the same people that have been in the system for so long and they just have this racket of loyalty of who gets the big contracts for running campaigns and being consultants and so forth that they've just become so complacent? What's the sort of surgical move here to remove whatever's standing in the way from taking advantage of all the great talent that is out there in the grassroots movement on the Democratic Party’s side. What's standing in the way of that?
Ari Berman:
We need more Warnocks and fewer Manchins. I mean, that's really what it is. You look at someone like Reverend Warnock. I mean, he was a preacher. He was an organizer. He was not a politician and I think that's one reason why he's so refreshing and why he's so elegant is because he hasn't played that same kind of political game his entire life, compared to someone like Joe Manchin who's just been a lacky of the coal interests and a product of the corrupt West Virginia political machine for so many years. I think that there's a way to rise through the ladder in both parties and it's usually the people that check all the boxes on their resumes that are able to be the best fundraisers, that do all those kinds of things.
Ari Berman:
And, ultimately, that doesn't appeal to a lot of people. I mean, that's why people are cynical about the political process. And I think they feel like both parties are kind of bought off here and it's hard to argue with that when you see some of the results right now. So I would like to see just new faces in the Democratic Party. And understand that, yeah, there's a lot of problems with the Republican Party, but I think also the Democratic Party is far from perfect right now either. They nominated an old white guy because they felt like that was the guy that would beat Donald Trump, but he was never the most inspiring guy in the first place. Now that his approval rating is lower, he's a lot less inspiring than he was before. And so I think Democratic Party is in need of new blood here and I think that was obvious throughout this entire debate over voting rights just in general the last two years, that that's just status quo. Politics is probably not gonna cut it right now, particularly when you have a Republican Party that's just radicalizing by the day, by the moment.
Andrea Chalupa:
So in terms of chances in 2022, I remember all the pundits saying that there's no way the Democrats would take Georgia and then they pulled off a miracle taking both Senate seats. What is your scenario for the Democrats pulling off a miracle in the midterms, at least holding on to both chambers, even if we're still stuck where we are? What path needs to happen?
Ari Berman:
Well, I mean, first off, there's gonna have to be a tremendous amount of voter education and voter mobilization at the local level to overcome some of these restrictions on voting because we're already seeing the impact of them. Like in Texas, we're seeing, after they passed a new voter ID law for mail ballots, we're seeing the number of rejected mail ballots increase by 700% in large urban counties. So we're already starting to see the impact of these restrictions because the laws that were passed in 2021 are going into effect now in 2022. So we're gonna need to see a huge level of mobilization against these efforts, like we saw in 2020 when so many people put an emphasis on how to have your vote counted and cast correctly during a pandemic. We're still in that similar situation today. And then I think the Democratic Party is gonna have to convince voters that they stand for something and that if you reelect them that they're gonna do something, that they're going to keep pushing to change the filibuster rules to pass rights legislation, that they're gonna keep trying to push on climate change and abortion rights and all these other things that people care about.
Ari Berman:
Right now, that message isn't getting out there. It feels very passive. Every single day, the Republican Party is out there recruiting more and more people to try to overthrow future elections and the Democratic Party is losing people to knock on doors, to become poll workers, to run for campaigns. And so that asymmetry is really what needs to change and I think that we need to realize 2022 is not a normal midterm election. Yes, you can be frustrated with the Democratic Party, but if you don't vote, if you don't participate, the insurrectionists are gonna take power. And once they take power, they're not gonna give it up willingly. So I think that we need to frame the 2022 election as a referendum on American democracy, because I don't think people are seeing it that way. I think they saw it that way in 2020, but I don't think you're seeing it that way in 2022. A lot of people aren't even paying attention right now to the things that are going on, and voter turnout always decreases in a midterm election, but it can't be a catastrophic decrease and it can't just be that the insurrectionists have all the momentum, but all the people that believe in American democracy decide they don't wanna participate for one reason or another. That opens the door to the insurrectionists taking over
Andrea Chalupa:
Who are the grassroots organizers and organizations that are doing valuable work right now to mobilize voters?
Ari Berman:
A lot of groups doing good work. In the Southern states, Black Voters Matter is a great organization. There's lots of groups that are doing voter protection work, like the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights. There's groups that have been working in places like Georgia, like The New Georgia Project. Groups that are working in Arizona, like Lucha, that have been organizing for a long time. So there's a lot of groups that are out there and I think that if you're frustrated with the Democratic Party, work at the grassroots level. You don't have to work for Democrats. You can work for groups that believe in American democracy and you can support it that way because these groups have been fighting the good fight. They're not the ones to blame here for what's happening.
Ari Berman:
They're doing everything they can to try to protect voting rights, to try to mobilize voters. It's just that they really needed this federal legislation to get them over the hump because, basically, that would've been a huge asset. All of these laws that would've made it easier to vote, that would've stopped the election subversion, would've made it so much easier to organize voters and now, state by state, it's a long, hard slog. It's not unprecedented. It's what we've been dealing with for the last decade, but nonetheless, it is difficult to fight these battles county by county, state by state, locality after locality. But that's where we're at right now. So I think that people just need to dig in and realize that, you know, the solution is not gonna happen overnight, but not participating in 2022 will make it so much harder to fight for democracy in 2024 or in the future.
Andrea Chalupa
Final question: Biden did pass some executive orders last time we spoke to protect voting rights. Do those matter or do they all come down to state level enforcement?
Ari Berman:
There's a limited amount that the federal government can do when it comes to voting. And we've seen some executive orders by Biden, but it sort of tinkers around the edges. The Justice Department has litigated in certain states. They've sued Georgia, they've sued Texas. I would like them to file more lawsuits. Now, the problem is that those lawsuits are going before conservative-dominated courts, including ultimately the Supreme Court. So this is one of these areas where we might disagree, but I understand why they've been cautious because you know whatever loss that you file is going straight up to John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett, unlikely to achieve a good outcome, but there's still things the Justice Department can do outside of litigation to prevent voter intimidation, to enforce what remains of the Voting Rights Act. And so I'd like them to use those tools. There's obviously been lots of litigation fought at the local level as well, but I mean, there's not one thing that you need to do now. You need to do everything right now.
Ari Berman:
I mean, you need to use the power of the presidency. You need to use the power of the Justice Department. You need to use all of the tools available at the state and local level to defend American democracy. The federal legislation would've by far have been the most effective way to combat these voter suppression efforts. That's why it was such a big push by Senate Democrats to pass these things, because it would've done so much to stop these kinds of efforts. But failing that, it really is kind of an all of the above approach and it's not something that's gonna succeed overnight. It takes a lot of pushing and a lot of hard work to try to protect voting rights and that's where we're at right now. I just hope that it succeeds
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