Election rejection: fears of a contested result

The economist. In petticoats, voluminous skirts and tight corsets, the voters stepped into the polling station. It wasn't an unusual sight. Early 19th century New Jersey was notably progressive when it came to the franchise and allowed some women, as well as free African American men to vote. But look closer at the women voters and something was up. Above the empire waistlines and below the bonnets were suspiciously male faces. Or at least this is what the local Republican Party claimed. Women were more likely to vote Federalist. And so the opposition said that many female voters were in fact men who'd voted once, then changed into drag to vote again. Republicans used the accusations of voter fraud to disenfranchise the women of New Jersey. It's a move that would fit into the MAGA playbook. Donald Trump falsely claimed that the 20 election was stolen, and he's likely to do it again if he loses this November. With 46 days to go until the 2024 election. I'm John Prideaux, and this is Checks and Balance from the Economist. Each week we take one big theme, shaping American politics and explore it in depth today. What will happen if the election is contested? Republicans are already preparing to challenge the results if Kamala Harris wins the presidency because the gap between voting and certification is so drawn out and the person who wins the most votes doesn't necessarily win power. American elections demand patience and trust, but with Donald Trump on the ballot, that's unlikely. How ugly could this election get? With me this week to talk about how America's presidential election will likely go this time and how this is really talking about the process rather than the result. Who's going to win are Charlotte Howard in New York and Idris Kaloon back in Washington. Idris, you've been off reporting for this story, which is a cover story in the Economist. And so I think this is going to be one of these episodes where Charlotte and I gently grill you. We're also going to hear from Congressman Jamie Raskin and Geoff Duncan, the former lieutenant governor of Georgia. Idris, how are you doing? How were your travels?

It was good. I went to Atlanta for a few days. I hung out with our colleagues, which was a lot of fun. Went to a couple nice restaurants. Atlanta's doing really well, so it was a lot of fun to be around there.

And Charlotte, how are you? What's news from New York?

I'm doing well. I'm in New York. We're preparing for all of the world's leaders to descend next week, and that includes our editor in chief, and also various heads of state and Adris. So looking forward to having him. We're gonna do events with Adris and Zanny and David Rennie and our colleague Sophie Petter. These are some of the people who've been covering big elections around the world this year. So we're doing one event in New York on the 24th and one in Washington on the 25th. If you'd like to attend, you can go to economist.comsubscriber events and then you can navigate from there to the tickets page.

Yeah, those events will be really good. This week's episode is about how America elects its presidents, the process, and also what happens when that complicated, drawn out process collides with a political movement that that is determined to say that there's widespread fraud if its candidate loses. We're going to start by hearing from Geoff Duncan, who was Georgia's Republican lieutenant governor when Donald Trump and his allies tried to overturn the 2020 results in that state. Duncan resisted those efforts and he's now campaigning for Kamala Harris. He took me back to what happened in Georgia in 2020.

I think an important place to start is you could see it coming. One, you could see a, the loss coming because of him just becoming a worse and worse candidate, a worse and worse president over time. And so the fact that he lost wasn't an overwhelming surprise to those, I think, honest umpires. But then, two, you could start to see the seeds of doubt being sown about different notions that the election was rigged and illegal, people were voting and whatever the notion was. Never would have guessed the momentum would have taken off like it did within hours of the election. When I heard the lies starting to surface directly from Donald Trump's mouth and his top lieutenants, I called my chief of staff and said, it's our turn to push back as quickly as we can, because if we let this get out of the bag, I think it's going to be like a grass fire. And so I made those calls to the election boards. I made those calls to the Secretary of State's office, to Gabe Sterling, his top election lieutenant, and the Attorney general, and got no signs of any fraud. And that was a continuous process of asking them, was there anything new overnight? Was there anything of substance that came in? And so my initial energy was to stop in his tracks. Somebody was willing to lie and try to usurp democracy because I didn't want to see what actually happened play out. And unfortunately it did.

What kind of pushback did you get from other Republicans when you Started doing that. Not much or a lot. How did that go? Because I'm really interested. Earlier you said it was clear by 2020 that he wasn't a good candidate and wasn't a good president. But I reported on that election and talking to lots of centrist Republicans, a lot of folks took almost a kind of vow of silence. Let's just keep our heads down and hope that this blows over. Right. What kind of pushback did you get when you started making those calls? Or did you find that most Republicans in Georgia, off the record, were in agreement with you?

Yeah, it was a tale of two stories, much like it is today. There was this, on the surface, a unanimous Republican tone and tenor that Donald Trump was right, there must be fraud somewhere. We just haven't found it yet. But quietly, behind the scenes, with each passing day, whether it be officials that are elected in office or just Republicans in their political choices, would quietly come to me and say, gosh, it is kind of surprising that there's no proof, or that just seems unbelievable at this point. And thinking that fever would break for Donald Trump, once again, I was wrong. I take blame that I wasn't able to convince tens of millions of Republicans that Donald Trump was a liar and not worthy to be followed anywhere.

Can we talk about November this year? There's a scenario in which Donald Trump wins and then Kamala Harris concedes. There's a scenario where Kamala Harris wins and I think everybody agrees that Donald Trump doesn't concede. How likely are we to see a repeat of what happened in 2020 this time around? To what extent do you think the problems that showed up in the system in 2020 have been fixed since then? Or are you anxious that we might see a repeat?

A lot to unpack there. I'll go in reverse order. I am very concerned that Donald Trump and the MAGA crowd will once again try to launch conspiracy theories into the, you know, into the universe if Donald Trump loses. Most certainly they will. They're continuing their efforts by trying to stack election boards, change petty laws, plant seeds of doubt on social media. All of those scenarios are unfortunately playing out in communities all over the country with regard to fixing the problems from the last election. We did last election in 2020, post2020 election. What we've done for 100 plus years with elections, and that is continue to update and modernize systems based on best practices, just like every country, every business, every city government does. And that's what we did. We found inefficiencies and things of that nature, nothing that rose to even the remote stage of being a game changer for the 2020 election. We all know this. An overwhelming majority of individuals know this, even if they're not willing to admit it. And so, yes, we will continue in Georgia to have the fairest, safest, most legal elections probably in the entire country. We're the only state to have to put that on display for the entire world to see us four times in the post2020 election with mechanical audits, hand audits, machine audits, every type of audit, and we pass the test with flying colors.

And Mr. Duncan, you spoke at the DNC, gave a very powerful speech there. You've come out publicly not just against Donald Trump at some point, considerable risk to yourself, unfortunately, but in favor of Kamala Harris. And not all of Mr. Trump's political opponents have former Republicans who oppose him have made that calculus. Why did you. Why go the step further and not just oppose the former president, but endorse and campaign for his challenger?

I think it comes down to if either do I want to make a point or do I want to make a difference. If I just show up to the polls and don't vote for Donald Trump and don't vote for anybody, I just simply make a point that I don't like Donald Trump and I don't endorse his behavior or his leadership or his whatever. If I truly want to make a difference, I've got to beat him. We've got to beat them as a nation. And so to do that, I want to cast my vote forward first. I said Joe Biden, knowing that there was significant flaws with that endorsement, that I think that situation significantly improved when Kamala Harris came on board as a Democratic nominee. And I once again offered my endorsement and support because I think it truly gives us the best chance to make a difference. And I am a Republican. I will continue to be a Republican. And I'm just one of those folks that have decided to look at this problem as like a restructuring process, like a company. Right. We have a failing company. It's called the Republican Party. And I'm willing to tear things down before we build things up. And it's painful. Restructuring and reorganizing is difficult. Many people listening have been a part of that in the corporate environment. That's what I'm looking to do in the Republican Party. And to do that, we have to fire Donald Trump today.

Idris, back in 2020, you did a bunch of reporting from swing states, Arizona in particular, but also some other states on the electoral process and the counting, and you've gone and repeated that this year to see what's changed. So let's start with a recap. How were things in 2020 and the vulnerabilities in the system that allowed the challenges by Donald Trump and his team to get as far as they did?

So the main vulnerability with the system is that it runs on good faith and that it's incredibly antiquated. So the Electoral College was created in the Constitution. That's how states actually select their president. The actual mechanics of it, which I think we're going to get into, are pretty complicated, and there are many steps. So every state is running their own election. Essentially, they are picking not the president, but they are picking their slate of electors that go to the Electoral College. They all have to vote in mid December. Those votes are then transmitted to Congress, and Congress then counts those votes on January 6th in accordance with the 12th Amendment and later laws that were passed. And so what happened in 2020 was that Donald Trump lost. He lost in many states, often by tight margins, but in many states nonetheless. And what he tried to do was he didn't concede, and that's something that has happened every time in American politics, but he didn't concede. And he tried to exploit the process to try to overturn the result. And so each of those steps that were just antiquated formalities before became opportunities for him to try to overturn the election, try to pursue the legal ambiguity to its breaking point. And that's what he did. So in Georgia, he called Brad Raffensperger, who was the Secretary of State, who's the chief elections officer. He asked him to find 12,000 or so votes that were needed to overturn the result. Raffensperger didn't comply. Neither did Brian Kemp, neither did Jeff Duncan. And then he pivoted to a new theory, which was that Vice President Mike Pence could essentially refuse to count the Electoral College votes of the states in which he lost. Other Republicans mounted legal challenges. They didn't come to anywhere. But ultimately, the legal theories weren't all that serious. But what it did do was engender this idea that is still present among Republicans, 70% of whom think that the election was stolen. And that process, that stop the steal process, culminated, of course, in the attack on the Capitol on January 6th. But it hasn't dissipated within the Republican Party. Trump is again the nominee. The party has spent a lot of time sowing doubt in the electoral process. And this time around, this is what the COVID piece was supposed to be about what's going to happen, what can we say, and how secure are our elections this time around?

I thought your briefing on this was excellent, Idris. And I would just add to what you said that I think it's easy to think about 2021, January 6, 2021, as the culmination of something. And rather it was in many ways the beginning. I think the norm reflected, the shifting norm reflected in the fact that not only, of course, was there this riot and invasion of the Capitol, but more than 100 members of the House voted against certifying the results of the election. That's a vote that usually is completely ceremonial. And then even after that, as you've written about Idris, there were partisan reviews of ballots in crucial swing states, namely Maricopa county in Arizona, where you had an audit conducted with an unclear source of funding by partisans. And so, to echo your point, after this extraordinary test of American democracy in 2021, have the changes that have been instituted since then made America more or less vulnerable?

And Charlotte, lots of our listeners probably live in countries where election rules for national elections are the same in every part of that country. This is not the case in in America, there's huge variation according to which state you're registered to vote in.

Yeah, I think after the election in 2000, there was a reckoning with the very weird but basic problem that you can lose the popular vote but still win the presidency. That problem is kind of familiar. The other problem that's kind of familiar is the idea that just a few swing states decide the election. So you have as few as several thousand people in a particular state with enormous power over the choice of who becomes president. But I think the other problem that has been laid bare, particularly in the past three years, is that the rules for administering elections vary so much from state to state. I mean, there are basic things like Maine and Nebraska are the only ones that let electoral votes be split among two candidates. Everyone else has a has a winner takes all system. But then you have specific rules that when an election is very closely contested and when you have actors, as we do now, who have shown what I'll call an interventionist approach to election results, those rules can really matter. So you see this in crucial swing states like Georgia and Pennsylvania, where there isn't a rule barring an elector from choosing a candidate who doesn't carry a state. So, Adris, what's your take?

So a lot of this goes back to the original design of the Constitution. So the reason that it varies state by state is that the Constitution was a federal document. And it's specifically in Article 1 it says that states decide the manner and place of elections, but Congress gets to decide the date. And the Electoral College itself actually doesn't have any requirement that there be a popular vote. In fact, at the start of the republic, state legislatures would just appoint the people who would cast the state's vote for president, and that was never changed. So the senators used to be picked by the state legislature. That was then modified by, I think, the 17th Amendment to require a popular vote. There was no requirement of that, and there's no specification of how those electors are supposed to be decided. And so really, states could decide to allocate them however they wish as long as they pass that law before the election. And if your eyes are starting to glaze over with how complicated it is, that is part of the problem as well. The fact that this is baked into the Constitution makes it a lot harder to change as well.

My eyes were not glazing over Idris, to be clear, but it is a complex and rather kludgy system for choosing the world's most powerful person. We'll go back to a previous effort to overturn the election in a moment, but before we do that, a reminder that for a few weeks we're making checks and balance free for all listeners to join us through the election and beyond. You'll need to be a subscriber, though, so if you want to sign up Search Economist Podcasts to make the most of a free trial of all of our podcasts, Charlotte Enidries what have you particularly enjoyed from our recent coverage that people who take out a subscription or a trial will be able to read or listen to.

I really enjoyed I caught up on our AI Schools briefs, basically catching you up on what's been going on in the rapidly changing world of generative AI and all of its applications. It's one of these spaces where if you look away for a few months, you come back and everything has kind of shifted its place. So it was very, very helpful to read that.

I enjoyed Ann Rose obituary, as I always do. She wrote an obituary of Francisco Lupera, who was a scientist who devoted his career to studying Alzheimer's, which is a disease that is understood but which scientists have, almost uniquely among major illnesses facing the world, have been unable to really make progress on. And I very much admire all those who devote their careers to it, given how devastating a disease it is. But I found her obituary a beautiful read.

A record number of Americans, upwards of 67 million go to the polls to elect the 35th president of the United States citizens.

It was a real nail biter. As the night drew on, it seemed like John F. Kennedy was on course to win the 1960 presidential election. But it was tight. When at 4am Richard Nixon spoke to a packed room of his supporters on live television, he wasn't quite ready to admit defeat.

As I look at the board here, while there are still some results still to come in, if the present Trend continues, if Mr. Kennedy, Senator Kennedy will be the next President of the United States. The hours that followed were frustrating and baffling as the key returns hung in the ballot.

It would take until noon the next day for the result to be official.

The unexpectedly delayed climax saw Senator Kennedy the victor with a clear margin of electoral votes.

Kennedy's margin in the Electoral College was comfortable with 303 votes to Nixon's 219. But the popular vote was the closest of the 20th century. There were less than 120,000 ballots in it and tight margins in many states. Nixon publicly accepted the result, but some of his allies, including RNC chair and Kentucky Senator Thruston B. Morton, were suspicious.

I've been asked if I think the election was stolen. My comment is many people do and many people have come to me with examples of fraud and irregularity. It's my responsibility to investigate it. Where there's so much smoke, I must look for the fire.

Morton and other top Nixon aides formed a committee to investigate the results in 11 states, focusing on two in particular. Kennedy had won Illinois by just 9,000 votes and Republicans suspected the powerful machine of Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daleyza had fraudulently tipped the result in the Democrats favor. They were also sceptical of the outcome in Texas, which Kennedy had won by 46,000 votes out of the 2.3 million cast. It was home to Kennedy's Vice President, Lyndon Baines Johnson, who had influential allies in the state. If Illinois and Texas had gone red, it would have handed the presidency to Nixon. Morton was asked if Nixon and President Eisenhower approved of the effort.

I can say this, that they both know about it. They both know I'm going to Chicago tomorrow and they know the purpose of my mission. They are not participating in this. They realize that it is my duty and responsibility to leave no stone unturned and exposing any irregularities. Both of them believe in the sanctity of the American ballot, as do I.

Nixon distanced himself in public, not wanting to appear a sore loser. But some think that was just for show. There are reports that At a party that Christmas, he told guests, we won, but they stole it from us, and that he was encouraging his aides behind the scenes. In his memoirs, he wrote that there was no doubt there was substantial fraud in the 1960 election. But despite their best efforts, Nixon's allies weren't able to prove this. Their attempts to challenge the election results made no tangible difference. Historians now think that there probably was some fraud in Illinois and Texas, but not enough to change the result. The campaign did succeed in creating uncertainty about the election, with articles in sympathetic newspapers and even the New York Times a month after polling day, writing that the Illinois results remain in doubt.

John F. Kennedy of the state of Massachusetts has received for President of The United States 303 votes. Richard M. Nixon of the state of California has received 219 votes.

The following January, as the sitting Vice President, Richard Nixon had the unpleasant task of certifying the results of an election he had lost.

This is the first time in 100 years that a candidate for the presidency announced the result of an election in which he was defeated and announced the victory of his opponent. I do not think that we could have a more striking and eloquent example of the stability of our constitutional system and of the proud tradition of the American people of developing and respecting and honoring institutions of self government.

Whatever Nixon's involvement behind the scenes, it was important that he publicly accepted his defeat. If Donald Trump loses in November, he won't be so gracious. Charlotte, it's not great when people are comparing your behaviour to Richard Nixon's and holding up Nixon as an example of what to do instead. But that story is a reminder of how important some of the norms are in America's Constitution. You know, the idea that a candidate who loses concedes because this process is so complicated, and as Idris said at the beginning, it runs on trust. The behavior of the candidates is incredibly important.

Yeah, I definitely agree with that. I think that Trump is very good at making himself the victim. And he, in fairness, has recently been the victim twice with two assassination attempts since. So that's not to be ignored, of course. But the claim that he is the victim of unfair dealings in the actual administration of an election is, of course, completely unfounded. And he has used, I think, three tactics here. So one is to change the rules, try to change the rules in the administration of elections. Two is to file lawsuits about given rules in particular states. And then three is the broader question of trust in elections. So while trying to change the rules and filing various lawsuits, making statements that undermined broader trust in the outcome. That is, if I win, it's fair. If I lose, there's been cheating. And the RNC co chair said, as Adris has reported in filing one of the lawsuits, that in Michigan, Michigan was open for cheating. That was part of his announcement of that lawsuit. That's completely nonsensical, not least because the changes the lawsuit seeks wouldn't be in place for this election anyway. I think that those are the three main areas of activity. And if you look at how the rules have changed, there has been a lot of activity in the past three years, Right. So some states have moved to expand voting access to early voting, for instance. And then there have been other states that have passed laws that I think move in the other direction. And there's been a particular friends of activity in swing states, Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin. So there's been a lot going on. Adris, how would you categorize the types of changes in those states?

So it depends on the state legislature and who is in charge. So Democrats have largely been expanding vote by mail, whereas Republicans have been emphasizing voter id, including for voting by mail. You saw that in Georgia, where there was a bill passed SB202 that got quite a lot of attention two years ago. It didn't have the kind of vote suppression effect that Democrats claimed. And I think actually that's a somewhat pernicious and corrosive idea that I think Democrats have largely moved away from. You don't see much discussion about, in part because there's been so much voter turnout. I would say on the whole, the voting laws have been tweaked on the margins, sometimes in unhelpful ways. So in Pennsylvania, for example, county officials cannot pre process mail in ballots. And this sounds boring, but that means that they can't start verifying the signatures and start counting them until Election Day itself. And that is what creates this blue shift where the Democrats, at least in the last election, probably in this one, tend to vote by mail a lot more. They tend to cast more provisional ballots if they're not counted immediately. What you'll see is a vote tally that starts out more Republican lenient and gets gradually more Democratic leaning. And you saw that in Arizona last time, and that is cited. That's the number one thing that people who think that the election's being stolen will cite. They'll say, okay, on election night, Trump was winning in Pennsylvania and he was winning in Arizona. And then lo and behold, four or five days later, it's changed and it's because of this process that actually you can approve. I mean, Florida, which had famously badly run elections for a while, is now incredibly fast because they've changed these kind of mechanical procedures such that they can count them a lot quicker. The changes that have been made to the voting system as a whole, I think are fairly marginal.

Yeah, I have trouble getting my head around this because some of these changes seem, as you say, so marginal and also just so dull. Right. I mean, it's hard to get into the weeds of this without feeling like you want to immediately go read something else. But actually they, they do kind of matter, right? I mean, in Georgia, state officials can now remove county level election officials. In Arizona, there is a law now, right, that there can be criminal penalties for election workers who do relatively standard things like send a mail in ballot to a voter who didn't actively ask for one. Some of these changes just seem deeply odd on a number of levels and introduce, at the very least, I think, a sense of fear among the people who are administering these elections and possibly intimidation. And I just have trouble gauging how much they matter. And I'm not sure whether we'll know until after election day.

Idris, as part of your reporting, I know you spoke to some Republicans who are all in on the Stop the Steal movement. What did you hear from them about critiques of the electoral process in America? Do they have some fair points?

I think some of them do on narrow points. But I think it's one thing to say that voter rolls are badly maintained by states. So the list of people who are eligible to vote in a state isn't updated to account for people moving between states often. It isn't often updated to account for people dying. That doesn't mean that those people who are on the rolls are then giving fraudulent votes. But it is true that the voter rolls are frankly a mess. And I think anyone would tell you that. And I guess if you go point by point, you will see similar kinds of issues, right? Where there are states that do send out ballots or ballot requests to people who probably shouldn't receive them. Now it's probably not the case that that is amounting to fraud that is so serious that it's flipping elections. And I think that's basically the point at which they lose me. It's not that there are ways that elections could be improved. I think they could be. I mean, the problem is not really with the mechanics, it's with the narrative that's constructed. And if you want to construct a narrative in which elections are routinely stolen, I Mean, that's the thing that's really, really catastrophic.

Idris One thing that is different in 2024 compared with 2020 is that Congress reformed the Electoral Count act that was passed in 2022, so nearly two years ago. And it has an effect on how election certification, which was actually what was going on on January 6, how that would go. But the original Electoral Count act itself itself arose from a contested election at the end of the 19th century.

So the vice president is supposed to count the certificates of electors on January 6th. And that process had worked up until 1876, which was this very contested election in which three states submitted alternative slates of electors. And Congress was basically stuck on who the next president would be. And they had to appoint a commission to figure it out. That ultimately went for Rutherford B. Hayes. But to resolve this ambiguity, they passed this law, the Electoral Count act, which was supposed to govern how the counting actually worked. That law had also a lot of issues which no one bothered to exploit until Donald Trump did. People like Richard Nixon basically would certify their own losses. He was the first one to do that in over a century. But Al Gore did that as well in 2000. And so what the Electoral Count Reform act does, and this also gets very complicated, but it removes some of the potential loopholes and ambiguities that exist in Electoral Count Act. So, for example, under the old regime, only a single senator or a single House member could raise objections to the counting of a state's Electoral college votes. Now, the rule is that one fifth of each chamber has to agree in order for the Congress to start debating that point. It also tries to eliminate the chance that governors will certify the wrong slate of electors. And it clarifies that the vice president's role is ministerial rather than directly choosing who the next president is. This is the first election that's going to be run under these rules. And a lot of legal scholars think that helpfully tightened up the rules in advance of that. But there might be more ambiguities that we just haven't thought of yet.

Okay, so there are some pretty important differences when it comes to electoral process in 2024 compared with last time around. We'll be back in a moment to consider what might happen if Kamala Harris wins and Donald Trump loses, but Mr. Trump challenges the election result in November. Okay, Idris, over to you. Who are we going to hear from next?

We're going to hear from Jamie Raskin. He's a Democratic congressman from Maryland who sat on the January 6 committee. He also led the impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump for his role in those events shortly after. And we spoke about what his concerns are ahead of this election, particularly if Kamala Harris were to win in November. And Donald Trump again disputed the results.

Well, the Democrats have two jobs, and one is to win the election, and the other is to defend the election. So we have a rickety, decentralized, antiquated electoral infrastructure in process. So, yeah, we've got to be concerned about every level of it.

Can you say a bit more about that rickety process and infrastructure? So, obviously, last time around, Trump tried to exploit some of the ambiguities within the Electoral Count act that was supposed to be fixed with the Electoral Account Reform Act. States have also been tweaking their laws. How rickety is it now after all of that?

Look, the cleanest way to conduct a presidential election would be the way we have elections for governor or representative or anything else. Whoever gets the most votes wins. We have a presidential election process that has independent certification processes in each state, the possibility of. Of lawsuits being brought in each state. Think about what happened on January 6, 2021. It was ultimately a certification crisis because Trump and his forces were trying to get the Vice president, Mike Pence, not to certify the election. Of course, it wasn't his role individually to certify the election, but they wanted him to declare and announce such powers and then to, quote, return the Electoral College certificates to the states. And then they knew at that point, under the 12th Amendment to the Constitution, there would be a failure of a majority in the Electoral College, and the whole thing would be kicked over into the House of Representatives for a contingent election. And even though Speaker Pelosi and the Democrats were in control, they wanted to do that because they understood that under the 12th Amendment, we're not voting the way we usually vote on the basis of one member, one vote, but rather on the basis of one state, one vote. And they controlled 27 state delegations, and we had 22 on the Democratic side, with one state, Pennsylvania, divided down the middle. So all of which is to say the common through line here is certification. And certification takes place at every level. So, yeah, I mean, this is the essential problem, and I think we will be dealing with some variation of it. I think it's unlikely or almost impossible for it to come back again in the guise in which we saw it. After all, the vice president this time is Kamala Harris, and nobody thinks that she's going to do anything other than the Constitution demands, which is what Mike Pence did.

You just said it won't be exactly the same as what we saw last time. So what is it that you're kind of most worried about this time around, if it's going to be different from what we saw in the previous time?

Well, I mean, I'm nervous about simply not being able to forecast what the attack on the election will be. But I think knowing Donald Trump, we can all predict there will be an attack on the election. In fact, I don't think he's running a real campaign. I've been to 26 states now. I've been going all over the country, and the Democrats are meeting and caucusing and knocking on doors, canvassing. You can see vibrant grassroots campaigns everywhere, and you just never see anything like that on the Republican side. And even diminished lawn sign activity, which was something they used to have a lot of. So I don't know what they're going to try to do, but it does seem to me that their focus now is on passing laws that either get challenged at the local or state level, or challenging laws at local and state level, trying to get some case into the court system to get up to the Supreme Court. And I think that their big hope is that the election will come down to one or two states and they will have cases in the docket in the pipeline to go to the Supreme Court, because Trump believes that the justices that he packed and stacked and gerrymandered the court with in order to overturn Roe versus Wade will hang around in order to decide the election for him. But we beat Trump by three and a half million votes in 2016, in the popular vote. Even when he beat Hillary in the electoral college in 2020, Biden beat him by more than 7 million votes. And what's going to happen in 2024? Well, if you take that 7 million vote margin, you add to it millions of young voters, we're going to have an even bigger popular vote spread. I mean, there should be something like 14 or 15 million new young voters. So I suppose what I'm most worried about is that he will be able to get some case into the federal system to get up before his friends on the Supreme Court. And if it's a close election and it comes down to one state, then it could be stolen from us. That's why when I go out on the road, I've been campaigning for a landslide. We don't want one of those Bush versus Gore victories that can slip away so easily.

Idris, I want to get into some of Congressman Raskin's concerns about what the Republicans might do. But can we start with the Democrats? The way he talked about the election sounded like it was impossible that Donald Trump could win fairly, but that's not the case. Our presidential model says this race is incredibly close. Not that far away from 50, 50. So imagine a scenario in which Donald Trump did win. Would Democrats accept the result?

I think ultimately they would. Democrats have a lot of experience of winning the popular vote and losing the Electoral College. That happened to Al Gore. It happened to Hillary Clinton. Both of them conceded after exhausting legal challenges. And in Hillary's case, she didn't really mount a legal challenge. It was pretty clear that she had lost and she wasn't going to be able to overturn it. Think that the most important step, which is that the loser concedes, would happen. I think Vice President Harris would do that. There's some speculation that Democrats might be tempted by the playbook that Donald Trump attempted to unveil in 2020 and argue that maybe Donald Trump isn't qualified to be president because he's an insurrectionist as defined by Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, and that therefore, if they controlled Congress, they would try to instruct the vice president not to count those votes for him. I think that's not going to happen. I don't think Democrats are going to lose the presidency and be in a majority in both houses of Congress anyway. I don't think that they would really attempt to do that. When Democrats do lose, they. You know, I think you can look at the kind of Russia interference investigations since 2016 as a kind of way to rationalize what happened. I think that that's what they move towards rather than actually attempting to subvert the election outcome.

The other thing that has happened right, since 2021 is not just the changes that we've seen on the state level, which we've discussed, but there also were changes on the federal level. Right. To make the discretion of Congress in certifying the election, to limit it so that Congress would indeed have more of simply a ceremonial role in certifying the election, rather than an empowered one in which they could use their judgment to potentially change the election's outcome. So now it used to be that only one member of each chamber needed to lodge a complaint. Now you need a fifth of members from each chamber. It's just becoming harder. Even if there were will within Congress to meddle in the outcome, it is now legally more difficult than it was. But I agree with you, Adris. There's no evidence from Democrats past behavior or current statements that suggest they would forcibly try to change an obvious outcome of the election.

I agree with you, Charlotte, but I think there's a realistic scenario here where Donald Trump wins very narrowly. This election is going to be unbelievably close. There are some court cases brought about state election results. Those cases end up being decided by the Supreme Court, where three of the conservative members worked on George W. Bush's defence team in Bush V. Gore in 2000 and 20 Democrats accepting a result handed down by the Supreme Court that favors Donald Trump when he put three justices there. I agree with you that you wouldn't have to worry about violence in that situation, but I could imagine quite a large number of Democrats voting not to certify the election result in Congress. But Idris, let's stick with this scenario where Harris wins and Trump refuses to concede. How do you think it would go this time around?

Well, I don't think that the outcome itself would be overturned. Just as there wasn't a legal risk of that happening last time, I don't think that there is very much of one this time. And most law professors who think about this stuff day in and day out agree with that assessment. But I do think that there is, just as last time, a lot of capacity for public mistrust, capacity for violence as well and unrest, and most corrosively that half the country might still believe that a second election was stolen. That would be really, really bad. So what concretely am I worried about this time? Well, the RNC has filed lawsuits, over 100 in many states arguing that various aspects of election administration are wrong or may lead to fraud. In a lot of cases, you know, the legal challenges are not going very far. But if Trump loses, I think that these could form breadcrumbs, essentially people arguing that. See, we tried to warn you that, for example, one of the cases is in Arizona about whether or not illegal immigrants are voting. And if a judge doesn't change the law as the RNC likes or change the rules, you could see Donald Trump arguing, look, we try to fix it and the Democrats in charge of the election system didn't fix it. I think that would be how they would go about it in terms of actual governors or secretaries of state refusing to certify. I again don't think that would happen. So in 2022, a lot of Republicans were handpicked by Trump to basically pledge to overturn elections that he lost in. People like Kerry Lake in Arizona, Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania. We can go down the list but all of them lost in Georgia especially. So the risk is not at the state or secretary state level. I think that you will see if Trump loses. Some counties refuse to certify their results. You've already seen that happen in 2022, individual members on election boards, individual counties trying to not certify in order to delay the results. I also don't think that that's going to amount to a serious delay in the whole process. But I think that you will see signs like that that emerge. But on the whole, election denial is a public relations game more than it is a legal one. I think the legal ability to overturn an election is still pretty limited. And I actually think that Supreme Court and federal judges, including Republican appointed federal judges, they understand the seriousness of these cases. I think they take their oath of office a lot more seriously than members of Congress. I'm actually quite sanguine about how they would deal with these challenges if it's very clear who won and who lost.

I think that's a really good point, Adris. And I think your distinction about the legal changes versus the broader PR effort is important. And I don't think we should diminish, and I don't think you did. But I just want to underscore how important the broader PR move remains. Just the idea that there is a continuous push from this campaign to delegitimize the basic outcomes of the election is problematic, not just because there may be real backlash after the election at a Harris win. And I think the Capitol will be well protected this time. People learn from January 6th. But I don't think we should rule out that there might be some level of unrest. But the point of politics is not actually about the horse race. It's about what comes next. It's about the person in the White House who has the ability to help America deal with very, very big problems in the 21st century. And if you have a huge share of the country who just doesn't think that that person is legitimately elected, and there are people within the party who continue to pledge fealty to Donald Trump because to a point that has been made by some of our colleagues, you know, Donald Trump may continue to seek power. Again, it's not out of the realm of possibility that Trump or a member of his family remains in American politics and continues to perpetuate this lie that he deserves to be in power. I just think that adds a toxicity to the job of governing. You can't actually do anything, or it's much harder to get things done. In that environment. So I think the communications effort that Donald Trump wages extremely well becomes not just a matter of comms and pr, but a matter of substance because of what it does to the basic job of running the country.

Right. So I think it's important to be clear here what we're saying and what we're not saying. America's presidential election may not go completely smoothly, but there will be a winner and there'll be a peaceful transfer of power eventually in January. But even if the stop the steal stuff fails as a legal movement, as happened in 2020, it can still succeed in some ways as a political movement. And among other things, that makes it extremely hard for the Republican Party to move beyond Donald Trump, because very large numbers of Republicans, so Drew said earlier, 70% at the moment, don't accept that he lost. And if you think your candidate didn't lose, why would you move beyond them? Well, I expect this won't be the last conversation we have about election administration in the 45 days before the vote, but let's leave it there for now. I have a quiz for you. Question one. Earlier, we heard about the 1960 election. The winner, John F. Kennedy, was the first president born in the 20th century. Who was the second?

Hmm.

Was it.

Ford?

I think it would have been LBJ. He wasn't born in the 19th century, was he?

LBJ is the right answer. He seemed much older than Kennedy, but there was only, in fact, nine years between them.

I should have answered that more confidently. I would say lbj.

It was right. Even though you're a bit tentative. Question 2. JFK was born in 1917. When was Nixon born? A few years. Either side gets your point.

Okay. He was Eisenhower's vice president. I think he was, like, 40. So I'm gonna say.

I would say 19.

19. 10.

11.

It was 1913. So? So 1911 is a smidgen closer. Question three. Both JFK and Nixon were elected to Congress for the first time in the same year. What was the year?

Oh, I know this. Hold on.

1948.

No, I think it's later than that. I think It's. I'll say 1954.

It was 1946.

Oh, Idris.

Nixon actually beat Kennedy to the Senate. Nixon was elected as senator in 1950, JFK in 1952. I think that's two. One to Charlotte.

By a hair.

By a hair.

I'll take it.

Excellent.

Actually, I think, Idris, you should just contest the results.

Exactly.

File some lawsuits.

Fair. Fair. Don't want to be a sore loser.

You'll have your chance to get your revenge next week. Okay, that's it for this episode. Thank you Charlotte thank you, Idris.

Thank you, thank you.

This episode was produced by Harriet Noble and Marguerite Howell. Jonny Allen is our sound engineer. Thanks to Becca Jackson for her help with this episode. If you like the podcast, then please let people know and leave us a rating and a review. You can also get in touch with us via email. The address is podcastseconomist.com and if you're not already with us as a subscriber, you can search Economist Podcasts to sign up for a free trial. In the meantime, thanks very much for listening. We'll have more checks and balance next week.

Sam.