How Trump will reject a Harris victory
He's building a narrative of illegitimacy
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There’s still a long way to go in this election, but right now things are looking positive for Kamala Harris. She’s up 2.8% in national polls, leading by large margins in the key swing states, and even erasing Donald Trump’s lead on who would be better to handle the economy, something it’s rare for a Democrat to be ahead on. Meanwhile, Trump is experiencing a public meltdown, ranting about how Harris is supposedly using image manipulation to make her rally crowds look bigger and how it’s “unfair” that he has to run against her. I repeat: there’s a long way to go. But things are going better than the wildest dreams of Democrats only a month or so ago.
This poses a big problem for the credibility of right-wing politicians and media, because this wasn’t supposed to happen. According to them, Harris is a “DEI hire”, “dumb”, “low IQ”, and a “bitch”.
For a normal observer, this raises a pretty obvious question: if she’s so stupid, why is she running rings around Trump? But there are few on the right that want to ask this question, much less answer it. Instead, they’re leaning into a different narrative - one that’s designed to call the legitimacy of any Harris victory into question and lay the groundwork for another attempt to steal an election in the aftermath.
The narrative has three strands. The first is to claim that the way that Harris became the Democratic nominee was somehow illegitimate. Right-wing figures have variously called her ascent to the nomination a “coup”, “election interference”, and “an attack on democracy”. In their telling, the victims of this coup are the Democratic primary voters who voted for Joe Biden to be their nominee - never mind that polls overwhelmingly show that these voters actually prefer Harris. Alongside Democratic primary voters, the other victims are apparently poor little Donald Trump and his campaign, who were tricked into campaigning against another candidate only to find themselves actually facing Harris. In perhaps the most Trumpian moment of the meltdown so far, Trump even demanded that he be reimbursed for the money he’d already spent campaigning against Biden.
The second strand of the narrative is to claim that the enthusiasm which we are witnessing for Harris’ campaign is somehow fake. One prominent conservative writer called the coverage of Harris’ momentum in the race a media “psy-op” designed to create the impression of excitement and enthusiasm where none really exists. As Harris has started packing stadiums full of excited supporters, this claim has become harder to sustain, leading to absurdities like the idea that she’s manipulating images to make her crowds look bigger. Such desperate resorts serve a crucial psychological purpose for the right, which is incapable of admitting that Harris is actually sparking genuine excitement among the electorate. Remember, according to them she’s a dumb DEI hire who is incapable of doing anything right. They can’t admit they’re losing to her, so instead they need some other way to explain her apparent support.
The third part of the narrative is an attempt to present Harris as a threatening outsider - someone who cannot legitimately be succeeding in this race, much less win it, because she is fundamentally un-American. As I’ve written before, part of this attack is racial - by mispronouncing her name and questioning her racial heritage, Trump is suggesting that Harris is an alien who does not belong in America. The same impulse can be seen in Elon Musk’s absurd claim that Harris is “literally a Communist”, an attempt to place her way outside of the ideological mainstream. In 2020, the core of Trump’s attempt to steal the election was the suggestion that the votes of African-Americans and other minorities in places like Detroit and Atlanta were somehow illegitimate and ought not to be counted. In 2024, he’s going straight for the candidate herself, suggesting that she cannot legitimately win or hold office.
The purpose of all of this is clearly to create a rationale for another attempt to steal the election in the event that Harris wins. If Harris seized the nomination undemocratically, enjoys no real public support, and is fundamentally unfit to hold office, then any victory she might appear to win can only be the result of fraud. And if Trump can convince his supporters that Harris only won as a result of fraud, he can mobilize another ‘Stop the Steal’ movement to try to overturn the result. He’ll do this partly on the basis of identity - the rage of his white base at being beaten by an African-American woman - and partly on the basis of spurious claims about how the campaign and election were somehow conducted illegitimately.
In the inevitable event that we see such an attempt, the way to head it off is for Harris not just to win, but to win convincingly. Attempts to mess with the certification of the election results might succeed in a single state like Georgia, but they’re unlikely to succeed in three or four states. That means that a small Electoral College victory will be fragile, whereas a blow-out will not be. Democrats already face a disadvantage in the Electoral College, meaning that often - as in 2000 and 2016 - simply winning the popular vote isn’t enough to take the presidency. Now, for as long as Trump is around, even narrowly winning the Electoral College isn’t enough - the victory has to be so incontestable that not even the lies and fanaticism of MAGA can stand in its way.