Four years ago, Donald Trump lost a presidential election by millions of votes, declared himself the winner anyway and eventually told a mob of his supporters to go and “stop the steal,” watching television for hours as they ransacked the U.S. Capitol in search of traitorous lawmakers and his own disloyal lieutenant, Mike Pence.
In his Jan. 6 remarks on the Ellipse, Trump had encouraged thousands of his followers to “show strength” and demand that Congress deny his opponent’s resounding victory and instead hand power to the loser of the 2020 election: him. After all, the former president turned president-elect assured his supporters, the other side would do the same thing, if not worse.
“If this happened to the Democrats,” Trump assured his supporters that day in Washington, DC, “there'd be hell all over the country going on.”
In 2024, that assertion has been tested and the results are now available. In her own remarks yesterday in the nation’s capital, Vice President Kamala Harris did something her Republican opponent was demonstrably incapable of: concede.
“A fundamental principle of American democracy is that when we lose an election, we accept the results,” Harris told a crowd at her alma mater, Howard University. “That principle as much as any other distinguishes democracy from monarchy or tyranny, and anyone who seeks the public trust must honor it.”
Following Tuesday’s election, Trump is on track to win the presidency by roughly the same margin in the Electoral College as President Joe Biden. And while he is also on track to win the popular vote, he is likely to do so by millions fewer votes. But in blue states and cities across the country, there are no insurrections or even talk of any; there is depression and resignation over the fact that an undeniable majority of voters chose a candidate they view as morally unfit for office.
A few individual liberals may be in denial, but there is no election-denying industry, at least not for Democrats. There is no talk of forensic audits or voting machines being hacked by foreign adversaries (Russia, it seems, was content to suppress votes with battleground-state bomb threats), and there are no overnight experts talking about ballots being imported by China and obviously thus printed on bamboo (Cyber Ninjas, a right-wing “cybersecurity” firm, was paid $9 million by Arizona taxpayers to investigate that very claim, only to affirm Trump’s 2020 loss).
Respecting democracy, even when disappointed by its results — even, in this case, when many fear the consequences for the freedom and fairness of future elections — is a distinguishing feature between the two parties: one side does it and one side did not.
Even on his way to victory, Trump played the anti-democratic hits.
“A lot of talk about massive CHEATING in Philadelphia,” the president-elect posted Tuesday afternoon on his website, Truth Social, hours before he was declared the winner of Pennsylvania. “Law Enforcement Coming!!!”
Law enforcement never came because the entire post was a lie, either intended to suppress votes or set the stage for a post-election challenge that is no longer necessary. It will now be forgotten, no longer serving the needs of Republican messaging.
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“As soon as it started to look like Trump was going to win, the election denialism went very, very quiet,” Welton Chang, head of the social media-monitoring firm Pyrra Technologies, noted in an interview with The New York Times.
Instead of denying election results, people who had centered their entire personality around that denial instead celebrated a win. On X, where billionaire owner Elon Musk spent the lead-up to Nov. 5 amplifying conspiracy theories, talk of “election integrity” — from him and other rank-and-file deniers — evaporated as results came in. A few, like right-wing activist Naomi Wolf, claimed credit, arguing that their election-denial and army of citizen soldiers had made Democrats too scared to cheat: “They took pics of ballots and video of events. They looked up election laws. Elon Musk let them share all these.” But most on the right just gave it up, happy to accept the results and move on to taunting those who lost fair and square.
A few liberals, in the hours after the election, indulged conspiratorial explanations for why Harris underperformed compared to Biden’s 2020 victory, but none with any stature and certainly none who hold higher elected office. “It’s happening,” Kate Starbird, a disinformation researcher at the University of Washington, commented to The Washington Post. “It’s just happening at a really low level.”
In an age where millions of people get their news and opinions from dubious apps on their phone, few are totally immune to the impacts of emotionally-satisfying conspiracy theories and their viral proliferation. But one party is committed to democracy and democratic norms, and that trickles down. On the left, the conversation is about recovering from a devastating loss, not denying it and demanding that the vice president have the courage to disenfranchise the opposition.
What can we do about a country where a majority of voters backed a man who ran the ugliest campaign in modern American history? Even if many, steeped in misinformation and bad vibes, said their vote was mostly about the prices on Doordash, Trump voters clearly did not see his ugly racism, unfiltered misogyny and attempted coup d’etat as disqualifying, or see any issue with restoring him to power sans checks and balances.
American voters were told by those who know him best that Donald Trump is "the definition of 'fascist.'” A majority voted for him anyway. That is the reality that those committed to democracy are grappling with today.
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