The Cook Political Report is out this morning with a midterms vibe check, and Democrats have to like what they see: Across the 36 competitive districts most likely to decide control of the House of Representatives, “Democrats hold a six-point advantage on the generic congressional ballot, 50 percent to 44 percent,” the authors write. “Voters here are deeply frustrated with Trump and are willing to overlook their antipathy to Democrats in order to put a check on the president.”

Maybe the resistance party should give up on restoring their battered reputation and just lean in. “Vote Blue: Odds Are You Hate Us Less.” Happy Thursday.

Old Man Yells ‘Rigged Election’

by Andrew Egger

It’s remarkable that it’s become so unremarkable to say: Yesterday, the president of the United States claimed that an election outcome he disliked had been the result of election fraud.

“A RIGGED ELECTION TOOK PLACE LAST NIGHT IN THE GREAT COMMONWEALTH OF VIRGINIA!” Trump fumed . “All day long Republicans were winning, the Spirit was unbelievable, until the very end when, of course, there was a massive ‘Mail In Ballot Drop!’ Where have I heard that before—and the Democrats eked out another Crooked Victory!”

Even in the crowded catalog of Trump’s bogus fraud claims, this one stands out as laughable. The entire substance of the claim is that the election was fraudulent because Virginia’s biggest counties, with the most votes to count, took the longest to count them. “Longest” being a relative term: the race had been called within two hours of polls closing.

Yet even within that two-hour window, some Trump allies were already laying the predicate for Trump’s argument: “New Virginia election results show opposition to the Democrats’ redistricting plan now leading 53% to 46%,” Laura Loomer’s show account Loomer Unleashed tweeted at 7:49 p.m. Tuesday. “However, Democrat controlled Fairfax County, one of Virginia’s most populated counties, still refuses to release its election results. Sadly, a swing could be coming soon.”

But at no point had allegations of misconduct come from any actual on-the-ground Republicans. No one in the Fairfax County GOP alleged any funny business yesterday. Party Chair Katie Gorka—wife of C-list Trumpworld figure Sebastian Gorka—decried the Democrats’ “hollow, shameful victory,” but made no allegations of fraud. When I reached out to the county party to get her response to Trump’s allegation, she did not reply. I live in Fairfax County, so just for fun I swung by the party office to see if anyone there had heard about any fraud: the friendly pair of front-desk volunteers I talked to, Bob and Nancy Hoyler, said that “we haven’t really heard anything about that.” (Then again, Bob added, “they never tell us anything.”)

Nor were the White House or the Republican National Committee eager even to attempt to substantiate Trump’s claims. When I asked where specifically the president was claiming fraudulent votes had been counted, a White House press aide simply referred me back to his post. RNC spokeswoman Kiersten Pels, by contrast, pivoted to attacking the fairness of the gerrymander—again without touching the substance of Trump’s claim.

“46 percent of Virginians voted Republican in the last federal election, yet Democrats are rigging the system to cling to power and silence voters they can’t win over,” Pels said. “This map is an unconstitutional partisan power grab designed to disenfranchise millions of voters and tilt the playing field.”

Hey guys! Your boss doesn’t just think the measure was unfair! He thinks Democrats literally dropped in fraudulent votes and stole the election! Isn’t anyone going to look into this?

Figuring out what to make of all this requires us to hold two ideas in friction at once. On the one hand, this is all faintly silly old-man-yells-at-cloud stuff. Trump’s brain is so cooked that he immediately believes that literally any election result that fails to go his way must have been the result of fraud—to the point where even his own aides seem faintly embarrassed at having to cover for him.

And yet we can’t ignore the fact that he’s managed to pull a large chunk of the country and all the dizzying powers of the federal government down into his own mania as well. It’s difficult to overstate just how widespread truly kooky election-integrity beliefs have become within Trump’s GOP: Just this week, a Reuters/Ipsos poll found that 46 percent of voters, including 82 percent of Republicans, and 38 percent of independents, think there are “large numbers of fraudulent ballots cast by non-citizens in U.S. elections.”

What Trump and his allies have created over the years is a self-sustaining and self-reinforcing base of electoral nihilists. In past cycles, convincing such people that the fix was in usually required the mass propagation of specific lies: rigged voting machines from Venezuela, 2,000 Mules-style ballot-stuffing operations, batches of phony ballots snuck into the count by dastardly poll workers. But now this crowd’s cynicism has achieved orbital velocity; it no longer requires additional thrust. When Trump points at any given election and shouts “rigged!”, he no longer needs anything resembling a smoking gun: A giant chunk of the electorate is ready to go along.

Six years ago, Donald Trump attempted the most brazen theft of a presidential election in our lifetimes—a full-court legal and extralegal press to deny his defeat and stay in the White House that culminated in a deadly riot in the U.S. Capitol. And he keeps taking actions to remind us explicitly of his total lack of remorse: Pardoning every January 6th criminal, pursuing criminal charges against those who stood in the way of his theft attempt, enforcing a government-wide soft ban on anybody acknowledging that he actually lost.

We’re not going to