‘Too Big To Rig,’ but for Real This Time

Voters Deprived Donald Trump of Any Chance to Game the Results

In the run-up to the 2024 election, Donald Trump and his allies were ready to contest their loss. They laid a foundation of conspiracy theories that, like in 2020, could have been used to whip up the activist base had they been needed.

But, in the end, it wasn’t really that close. Trump swept the presidential swing states.

What had happened to the hordes of noncitizens who, Trump warned before the election, might snatch victory from Republicans?

It’s not that it was all a conspiracy theory, he and his allies suggested. No; in their telling, something else had happened. The magnitude of support for the president was simply so great that the fraud could not prevail. It was “too big to rig,” Trump would repeatedly say.

A similar thing happened last night. The threat, this time, was quite real: not imagined, en-masse noncitizen voting, but a weaponized DOJ that would exploit any contestable margin of victory, and loyal Senate Republicans ready to do the same. As we noted in The Brief, senators were making plans not to seat Mary Peltola (D) of Alaska should she win. But at this point, its clear that Democratic control of the chamber is not on a knife’s edge. Alaska hasn’t been called, but Democrats have 54 seats. Mississippi of all places may give them another. Peltola, ironically, is not currently ahead in her state’s results, though we won’t know the real winner of that race until ranked-choice results are tabulated later this month.

Trump himself set the tone, shrugging off the stinging defeat not as a referendum on the first half of his second term, but the opposite. “I wasn’t on the Ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!” he posted on Truth Social.

Separately, he got on the phone with the New York Times and said he was “absolutely willing” to accept the results.

“We’ll, you know, look forward to working with them,” he told the Times of the Democrats.

He then posted to social media a picture of a hat with the word “Veto” on it.

Democrats Win the Ability to Stop Trump From Remaking the Courts

• For better or worse, Trump’s “Veto” hat makes a valid point. Even with a roomy majority, there are significant limits on what Democrats can do unilaterally. Legislation they pass to advance their priorities will, yes, face vetoes from Trump, unless they can win his support for it. Democratic efforts at oversight will run into tedious fights over Trump’s expansive views of executive privilege.
• But, as Kate Riga wrote last night, there is one clear and extremely important area where Democrats will be able to block Trump’s agenda: judicial confirmations. That’s huge, especially given the importance Republicans, led by outgoing senator Mitch McConnell, placed on remaking that branch of government.
• Expect the Republican Senate to push hard in this lame-duck period to get as many judges through as possible.
• By Ballotpedia’s tally, Trump has confirmed 56 judges so far this term. That lags far behind the 231 judges (not including Supreme Court justices) Trump appointed during his first term, per Brookings.

Tabs

• Marshall Rawson, the neo-Confederate activist who TPM identified as a participant in the Charlottesville white supremacist rally, won a seat in the Florida legislature. “His victory makes him among the most extreme candidates elected to public office since David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard, who was elected to the Louisiana state legislature in 1989,” Christopher Mathias writes.
• Democrats won trifectas in Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Nevada. They also broke GOP trifectas in Texas, Georgia, Iowa, New Hampshire and Ohio.

Man of the Hour

It’s Anthony Constantino, a Republican sticker entrepreneur and “rapper” who eked out a victory in the upstate New York district that was once held by Elise Stefanik. We think we will be hearing more about him: with victory in sight last night, he went on a profane rant against the media and his Democratic opposition, labeling multiple people, including some who were in the room, “assholes” and “scumbags.”