Election Deniers Preemptively Cry Wolf

Hello! It’s the weekend, this is The Weekender. ☕

Welcome back to another day in the nuclear aftermath of 2020.

We’re weeks away from Election Day, but that hasn’t stopped election deniers from already calling the midterms a farce.

During a CNN interview last weekend, Arizona Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake refused to clarify whether she’d accept the results of her election if she lost. “I’m going to win the election, and I will accept that result,” she told the host. That kind of illiberal obstinacy may have stood out pre-Trump, but this year’s she’s just one of many: 11 other Republicans in high-profile races also either said they wouldn’t accept their potential loss or refused to clarify.

Even voters are prepping to question unfavorable results. This week, two new polls found that some voters were skeptical about the legitimacy of the midterm elections: Only about half of those polled by the Associated Press said they had high confidence in the results, and 28% of voters polled by the New York Times said they had “little to no faith” in the accuracy of them.

Trump’s repeated insistence that the 2020 election was legitimate undeniably played a part; 58% of Republicans told the AP that they still believed Biden’s presidency was illegitimate. But as Sabato’s Crystal Ball managing editor Kyle Kondik told me, it may also reflect a “sore loser mentality.”

“The broad trend in American life is distrust of all sorts of different institutions,” he told me, “so this is kind of part and parcel of what you see in other walks of life.”

Still, distrust metastasizing across voters and candidates could lead to weeks of conspiracy theories at best, lengthy legal fracas at worst, after November 8.

More on other news below. Let’s dig in. 

— Kaila Philo

Dearie Me

Judge Dearie, Trump’s preferred special master in the Mar-a-Lago records case, finally had enough of the former President this week. At a hearing to discuss progress in the case, Dearie emphasized to Trump and federal prosecutors that he needed them to back up their claims with evidence, and that he would take a skeptical eye towards claims that personal records were covered by executive privilege — a protection afforded to certain official, White House records.

On Thursday, both Trump and the DOJ faced a deadline before Dearie: update him on what documents in an initial batch of records were privileged, and where the parties disagreed. The DOJ filed its letter, saying that Trump was making outlandish claims, including that two records were both personal and subject to executive privilege. Trump did not file an update, only writing a letter to claim that his deadline was Monday and to accuse the DOJ of being wrong. Dearie, in a pique, demanded that Trump file his letter, saying that he was now “untimely.” Sad!

— Josh Kovensky

Clean-Up On Aisle Debt Ceiling 

Republicans have been popping up on network shows to walk back the plans they — oops — willingly went public with in recent days (and, policy-wise, months ago).

The pressure to tidy up only increased as Democrats started actually talking about the revelation that Republicans intend to hold the debt ceiling hostage to force cuts to Medicare and Social Security, should they win at least one chamber of Congress.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) popped by CNBC this week to protest that he said nothing about cutting those programs — only, vaguely, “strengthening” them — but maintained that he wouldn’t keep lifting the debt ceiling until this administration learned some dang fiscal responsibility. 

Debunks: 

• The debt ceiling has nothing to do with future spending, it’s all about money that has already been appropriated
• Republicans suspended the debt ceiling multiple times under Trump’s tenure, even while they supercharged deficit spending with the 2017 tax cuts
• If Republicans were so full of conviction that these programs needed to be reformed, why didn’t they do it under two years of unified control during the Trump administration?
• Per the Republican Study Committee budget, they do want to cut the programs, including by making more people ineligible
• It is in no way fiscally responsible to threaten to let the United States default on its debt, which would throw the global economy into chaos

President Joe Biden whacked the GOP on this issue in a brief speech Friday.

“They’ll threaten the very foundations of the American economy if we don’t meet their demands,” he warned.

But he also dismissed repealing the debt ceiling as “irresponsible” — one of the strategies Democrats have floated to defang this recurring Republican threat. Democrats could also, through reconciliation, jack up the debt ceiling so high that Republicans can’t weaponize it anymore — if they can get over the squeamishness of whatever mileage Republicans will get out of falsely accusing them of spending some astronomical amount of money.

— Kate Riga

• Bannon Gets Jail Time: A D.C. federal judge sentenced Stephen K. Bannon to four months in prison on Friday for contempt of Congress, charges that stemmed from him dodging a subpoena issued by the January 6 committee last year. U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols for the District of Columbia also imposed a $6,500 fine. Nichols said that he would stay the execution of the sentence so long as Bannon filed a “timely” appeal.
• On Friday, one of the 20 formerly incarcerated Floridians arrested in August by Governor Ron DeSantis’ (R) Office of Election Crimes and Security on voter fraud charges has had his case dismissed. The Florida Office of Election Crimes and Security was set up this year by DeSantis after myths of widespread voter fraud proliferated from the 2020 election.
• New in TPM Cafe: What Politicians And (Especially) JD Vance Don’t Get About The Overdose Crisis
• Three years ago, when President Trump ordered an investigation into the origins of the Trump-Russia investigations, he set expectations at a high level. “Today’s action will help ensure that all Americans learn the truth about the events that occurred, and the actions that were taken, during the last Presidential election and will restore confidence in our public institutions,” Trump said in a May 2019 statement, delegating to Attorney General Bill Barr massive authority to declassify records from the intelligence community. Now, what started then appears to be on the verge of concluding with the second loss of Special Counsel John Durham at trial.