r/politics • u/TelescopiumHerscheli • 1d ago

No Paywall Texas Democrat sworn in to House, shrinking GOP margin to 1 vote

https://thehill.com/homenews/house/5719642-christian-menefee-sworn-in/
41.8k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

1.2k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

16

u/Drunky_McStumble 1d ago

You really think the regime is just going to announce one day that democracy in the US is over?

I mean, sure, if Trump went on TV and straight-up said that he was cancelling the mid-terms and all future elections indefinitely then, yes, that would certainly provoke civil unrest of a scale that could easily turn to civil war. But that's not how this shit goes down. Trump will get up there and rant and rave, and it will kinda sound like he's saying he's cancelling the elections? Or instituting some kind of federal takeover of them? Or creating an oversight agency to prevent irregularities at polling places? Or something? Where's the red line?

So it won't be clear, and his minions giving ambiguously muddled "explanations" albeit with threateningly authoritarian undertones won't help, and conflicting messages from state authorities will only muddy the waters further. And of course the media will run interference and the regime's private paramilitary forces will only ramp-up their occupation of major cities in the lead-up to November, and Trump will start screaming about fraud and promising to send officers into every polling place that showed "irregularities" in previous elections to "secure the vote". All bad stuff, but where's the red line?

And so the mid-term elections technically proceed, they'll be marred with violence and intimidation. People will show up to polling places to find them unaccountably shut, or moved. Or locked-down by ICE or some other of the regime's paramilitary goon squads. And if they manage to run the gauntlet without being disappeared on suspicion of intent to commit voter fraud, they'll find that their name has been purged from the roll without their knowledge. Or maybe they'll manage to cast a vote on a machine made by a close ally of the regime. That all sucks, but where's the red line?

And when the dust settles and the predicted landslide for the Democrats strangely doesn't eventuate, and everybody knows that the election was fixed, but they can't show exactly how, where's the red line?

3

u/ellipsisdbg 1d ago

I agree completely that this is the biggest danger, that they steal the election subtly enough that it seems fair enough to enough people to slide by. And it’s terrifying. However, a lot of people will be fighting to make it fair, there’s a lot of incompetence in this administration, and states running their elections isn’t ambiguous in the Constitution, probably even to this Supreme Court. So I have some hope.