Elections Are Only Legitimate When Republicans Win
And Even Then, Only When the “Right” Republicans Win
Maybe you’ve heard, but Sarah Palin lost her election to fill recently-deceased Don Young’s Alaska seat in the U.S. House of Representatives to a Democrat.
Before you celebrate– I admit it’s tempting– this was a special election to complete the remainder of Young’s term, which ends this year. In November, Palin and the newly elected Democratic Congresswoman, Mary Peltola, the first Alaskan Native ever elected to Congress, are on the ballot again, as is the other Republican in the race, Nick Begich.
What’s disappointing but not at all surprising is that Palin and people like Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, who has deeply invested interests in Alaskan elections, perhaps because they both begin with A or because a nutty Republican lost, immediately cast doubt on the legitimacy of the election system.
We can all be sure that they would have raised the same doubts had a Republican won a close election. They are, after all, devoted to election fairness and integrity.
Although I’m not an expert on ranked-choice voting, which is the system Alaska uses, I know it’s designed to make it harder for extremists to win because it replaces the either/or system with something else.
The exact mechanisms vary by location, but basically, instead of selecting one candidate, you rank the candidates by order of preference. Someone who gets more than 50% of the vote wins; otherwise, lower-performing candidates are eliminated and their voters’ second choices go to those candidates.
Now, to hear Republicans tell it, the voters preferred a Republican by 60-40. The basis for this is that the race came down to Peltola a little over 40%, Palin a little under, and Begich at about 20%.
That’s why they claim it was a 60-40 election for a Republican. In a sense, that’s true; 60% of voters wanted R.
But in reality, which most Republicans abandoned as Fake News years ago, almost 52% of voters did not want Palin. Consider:
“Peltola had nearly 40 percent of first-choice votes after preliminary counts, which put her about 16,000 votes ahead of Palin. Half of the Alaskans who made Begich their first choice ranked Palin second, and 21 percent did not make a second choice. The remaining 29 percent — a surprisingly large fraction, even to some of Peltola’s supporters — ranked Peltola second, flipping from a Republican to a Democrat. The second-choice support for Peltola was enough for her to hold off Palin, leaving the Democrat about 5,200 votes ahead.”
There were enough Republicans who wanted Begich but didn’t want Palin for Peltola to win.
But of course, it’s fraudulent or unfair or cheating or whatever.
I wrote about this before, but I’ll remind you:
Republicans no longer believe in democracy the way most of the rest of us do. Elections are only legitimate when they win. Even primaries that produce a moderate R over a full-blown MAGA cultist are rigged.
No matter what you think of Joe Biden, no matter how tired you are of inflation and high gas prices, and no matter what you might think of various culture-war issues, if you believe in preserving our democratic republic, please look past the pain and the noise and see that the party that wants to be the antidote is really nothing but a seditious, obstructionist movement that has no platform or policy other than mindless obstruction and hate.
Today’s Republican Party is a threat to our constitutional order. The Democrats sometimes have dumb ideas, but they are trying to address problems, not ignore or aggravate them.
Please don’t let your current challenges, real as they are, obscure what’s really at stake.
Turn out in November and vote blue no matter who. And keep doing it. Once the Republicans are a permanent minority or they revert to sanity ( the latter being unlikely), then we can fight about policies and priorities.
Right now, though, stopping Republican authoritarianism and creeping fascism is a lot more important than anything else.
Let’s do this.