When the congressional committee investigating the coup attempt at the United States Capitol issued a subpoena for Donald Trump, Chairman Bennie Thompson justified the decision by saying, “He is the one person at the center of the story of what happened on Jan. 6.”
Trump will never testify, of course, but that’s not the point. That summons is a political document, not a legal one. It’s part of the Democratic strategy to make Trump “the center of the story” on Nov. 8, Election Day, not just Jan. 6, Insurrection Day. And that strategy employs two related themes.
The first is aimed at reminding voters that Trump himself, and his fervent supporters, stand for incivility and instability. It brands them as radical extremists, not true conservatives; they don’t cherish traditions, they trash them, just as they trashed the Capitol.
The second theme looks forward, not backward. It sounds a warning that many Republican candidates this fall have swallowed Trump’s Big Lie about a rigged election and are poised to seize the machinery of government in many crucial states. It was Republicans who cried “Stop the Steal” after the 2020 vote. It’s now Democrats and Never Trump Republicans who are worried about electoral thievery in 2024.
“Our institutions only hold when men and women of good faith make them hold,” argued Rep. Liz Cheney, the Republican dissenter who serves as vice chair of the Jan. 6 panel. “We have no guarantee that these men and women will be in place next time.”
This strategy makes political sense. Outside his core base in MAGA Nation, Trump remains deeply unpopular. Republican Paul Ryan, the former speaker of the House, recently called him unelectable, and animosity toward Trump generates far more energy among Democrats than admiration for Joe Biden.
Moreover, the threat to democracy posed by his acolytes is very real. “More than 370 people — a vast majority of Republicans running for … offices in November — have questioned and, at times, outright denied the results of the 2020 election,” reports The New York Times.
Bloomberg News describes the danger: “If these contenders win in November, they could upset the 2024 election by refusing to allow certain voting machines to be used, forcing large groups of voters to re-register, making it harder to vote by mail or, in a worst-case scenario, declining to certify an election result. Some have already promised they would take these actions.”
The threat is particularly acute in a swing state like Arizona, where Kari Lake, the GOP nominee for governor, has repeatedly refused to concede that Biden won the last election. The party’s nominee for secretary of state, Mark Finchem, was in Washington on Jan. 6 and justified the uprising by tweeting that it is “What happens when the People feel they have been ignored, and Congress refuses to acknowledge rampant fraud.”
In Michigan, another battleground, the Republican candidate for governor, Tudor Dixon, snarls, “Steal an election then hide behind calls for unity and leftists lap it up.” The party’s choice for secretary of state, Kristina Karamo, one of the most vociferous deniers in the country, proclaimed, “It’s time for us decent people in the Republican Party … to fight back. We cannot have our election stolen.”
Two scholars from the Brookings Institution, Norman Eisen and Elaine Kamarck, sum up the challenge posed by these deniers: “The 2022 midterms may well be the first elections ever where the elections themselves are on the ballot.”
Unfortunately for the Democrats, the economy threatens to overwhelm every other factor. Despite Biden’s cheerleading efforts — he called the economy “strong as hell” while eating chocolate-chip ice cream in Portland, Oregon — 71% of voters polled by CBS expect the economy to be “slowing or in a recession” next year while only 14% predict an upswing.
The latest Times survey contains equally bad news for the Democrats: “With inflation unrelenting and the stock market steadily on the decline, the share of likely voters who said economic concerns were the most important issues facing America has leaped since July, to 44% from 36% — far higher than any other issue. And voters most concerned with the economy favored Republicans overwhelmingly, by more than a two-to-one margin.
“Seventy-one percent of all voters said democracy was at risk — but just 7% identified that as the most important problem facing the country,” added the Times.
Democrats are right — Trump and democracy are both on the ballot next month. But so is the economy, and that’s likely to be “the center of the story.”
(Steven Roberts teaches politics and journalism at George Washington University. He can be contacted by email at stevecokie@gmail.com.)
