A current Monmouth poll reports:
While 60% of Americans believe Biden won the election fair and square, 32% say he only won it due to voter fraud. Three-quarters (77%) of Trump backers say Biden’s win was due to fraud. Murray added, “The anger among Trump’s base is tied to a belief that the election was stolen.”
It is imperative that the Biden team recognize the importance of these numbers, and do all they can to bring them down.
Why?
- Because when Biden becomes President, he will face a Republican Party in Congress whose inclination will be to cripple his Presidency and make him fail— and will have the power to obstruct (unless both 1) the Democrats win both seats in the Georgia runoff for Senate and 2) the Democrats manage to dispose of the filibuster).
- Because the proportion of the American people --and in particular of the Republican base -- who regard the Biden Presidency as illegitimate will be an important determinant of whether the course of obstructionism will be politically viable for the Republicans in Congress.
(All that’s quite apart from the dangers of violence that can be outgrowths of a community of belief among Trump-supporters that they’ve been robbed.)
(It should be recognized that the ability of the Republican world to delegitimize Barack Obama with the birther lie — illegitimate because supposedly born in Africa, not in the U.S. as required by the U.S. Constitution — played a part in freeing the Republicans to behave disgracefully toward him. In the minds of many on the right, the birther lie robbed Obama of the “respect for the office” factor that has traditionally fortified American presidents.)
There are big battles to come. But what happens now will help determine the balance of forces in those future battles.
So the forces aligned with our President-Elect should be executing whatever strategy they can come up with that will be most effective in defeating the Trumpian lies about the election, and bringing down those numbers Monmouth is reporting.
“Most effective.” That is in no way to deny the difficulty in reaching and persuading any of those 77% of Trump voters who believe Biden has won by fraud. (I know first hand how hard it is to penetrate the Republican cult, having run for Congress as the Democratic nominee in a 2:1 Republican district, and publishing weekly op/eds in newspapers in that congressional district).
But that difficulty does not mean that nothing can be accomplished. And the best possible effort must be made while the beliefs are not yet hardened into the concrete of partisan dogma.
A strategy of messaging should be sought that is powerful in both 1) establishing in the minds of the Republican base the truth about the election; and 2) discrediting the liars who have been making baseless accusations in an unjustified assault on our constitutional order.
Denying the legitimate right of Democrats to wield the powers of the presidency has become a standard weapon in the Republicans’ ceaseless grasping for power, and their war on our democracy. So far, the Republicans have not paid a price for this disgraceful conduct. On the contrary, they have benefitted from it.
Obama paid a price for forfeiting the battle — in the minds of the Republican base — over his legitimacy; he never really denounced — in powerful terms -- what the Republicans were up to with the birther maneuver.
Biden — now being assaulted by another set of delegitimizing lies (this time not about being born in Africa, but with manifestly baseless claims of election fraud) -- should not make the same mistake.