Anyone who played youth sports knows the type: The whiny kid of marginal skill who constantly complained to the referee over imaginary fouls, then when they lost, shouted, “No fair! This is bull! We should have won!” We call that person a sore loser, and everyone generally dislikes them.
The president of the United States may be the sorest loser in the history of American politics, so much so that he starts his sore losing even before he has lost. With the votes still being counted after the California primaries, Trump went on one of his late-night posting whine-a-thons, saying the election was being stolen from his chosen candidates.
It’s true that counting in California is going slowly — because it always does.
“The Dumocrats are at it again! They are trying to STEAL THE GOVERNOR OF CALIFORNIA PRIMARY, AND THE MAYOR OF LOS ANGELES, PRIMARY, AWAY FROM TWO GREAT REPUBLICAN CANDIDATES. Here we go with the very late and massive numbers of MAIL IN BALLOTS,” he typed (or shouted into his phone) just before 1 a.m. on Thursday. He followed that up a few minutes later with this: “There’s BIG cheating by the Dumocrats in California. Votes are all tied up. May not be in for weeks. Under investigation by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles. Why the vote counting DELAY???”
There is, of course, no evidence of anything fraudulent happening, but what’s remarkable is that Trump’s favored candidates aren’t even losing. And the California “jungle primary” system — in which all candidates run together in the primary, and then the top two finishers go on to the general election regardless of party — gives Republicans an advantage they wouldn’t otherwise enjoy.
So what is Trump up to? On the surface, it seems like the latest iteration of an old story. Trump wants to convince people that any election Republicans don’t win is illegitimate. He’s making the argument preemptively before the results are complete, just in case things don’t go his way.
But it may go even deeper than that. As his party faces tough headwinds as the midterm elections approach, followed by the end of his presidency two years later, the president seems convinced that all elections — and therefore democracy itself — are rotten to the core. Wouldn’t it be better if we just had a king? Like him?
It’s true that counting in California is going slowly — because it always does. California has more votes to count than any other state, by far. Most of its citizens vote by mail, and mail votes take longer to process, including verifying signatures and handling all that paper. In addition, under state law, a vote that is postmarked by Election Day but arrives up to seven days later still counts, because it isn’t the voter’s fault if the Postal Service moves a little slow. That means election officials have to wait for those straggling votes to arrive. As Eric McGhee, research director at the Public Policy Institute of California, told me, “California has always taken the position that it’s better to err on the side of access than to err on the side of speed.”
That’s not to say California couldn’t make its counting system more efficient; it could spend more money on election administration to enable overstretched registrars to hire more staff and buy more equipment.
“We ask a lot of registrars, but don’t necessarily give them the resources to pull it off quickly,” McGhee said. But a slow count is better than an inaccurate one.
Trump’s effort to undermine elections is about more than whining; it’s a comprehensive assault on our electoral system.
When California went to a jungle primary after a voter referendum in 2010, some Republicans feared that in a state dominated by Democrats, they would get shut out of potentially winnable races when two Democrats made the general election. But it turned out that while there have been races for the state legislature and Congress in which the top two finishers were from one party, most of those have been in uncompetitive districts. And as a report from the Public Policy Institute of California found, “In eight November races, two candidates from the same party ran in a competitive district or a district that actually favored the other side. All but one of those races featured two Republicans.”
That can happen if there are just a couple of candidates from one party, but a lot of contenders from the other party, who split the vote multiple ways. That scenario is just one argument of many to be made against the jungle primary.
But in this primary — at least so far — Republicans are doing remarkably well in the vote. Steve Hilton, the former Fox News personality whom Trump endorsed in the governor’s race, is first in the count and looks headed for the general election. In the LA mayor contest, former reality show villain Spencer Pratt is in second place and stands a decent chance of making it to the general. In other words, both of the inexperienced MAGA TV himbos have been well served by the California system. So what is Trump complaining about?
Trump’s effort to undermine elections is about more than whining; it’s a comprehensive assault on our electoral system. The administration has demanded that states turn over their voter files to the federal government, including sensitive information such as driver’s license numbers and partial Social Security numbers, so Trump’s lackeys can decide who is and who isn’t eligible to vote. Not only that, the administration has demanded that it be given the authority to kick voters off the rolls; under the terms of the “confidential agreement” they are pushing states to sign, Trump’s Department of Justice would make a list of voters to have their ability to vote revoked, and states would have to comply. So far only Texas and Alaska have agreed to these terms; even some Republican states that turned over their voter rolls have balked at the demand that they cede authority to Trump over who can vote and who can’t.
In other words, Trump is attempting to seize control of the entire country’s elections so he can control who is allowed to vote. This is happening at a time when the MAGA-leaning Supreme Court has eviscerated the Voting Rights Act — and eviscerated the Voting Rights Act so aggressively that it looks like Black representation in Congress from the Deep South could be reduced down to zero for the first time since the end of Jim Crow.
Trump’s enemy isn’t voter fraud, which barely exists; after a decade of tireless effort, Republicans would have found it by now if it was more than a phantom. His enemy isn’t slow vote counting or mail-in ballots. It’s democracy, the ability of Americans to not only choose their leaders, but to limit what those leaders can do and hold them accountable when they commit misdeeds. That’s what Trump hates, and that’s what he’s trying to destroy.
Paul Waldman
Paul Waldman is a journalist and author focused on politics and culture.