The last two weeks of any midterm campaign are always frenetic, but this year they were laced with violence, intimidation and threats to democracy itself, with Republicans applying pressure to disrupt the electoral process at multiple points of vulnerability, such as encouraging armed vigilantes to observe drop-box voting in Arizona. Both there and elsewhere a number of top Republican candidates — following Donald Trump’s 2020 example — have refused to commit to accepting the results if they were to lose their races, while more than 1,000 threats to election workers have been recorded and more than 100 election-related lawsuits fill the courts.
Then, on Oct. 28, a man obsessed with rightwing conspiracy theories broke into Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s home in the middle of the night, shouting, “Where’s Nancy?” echoing the mob that stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, and smashing Pelosi’s husband, Paul, on the head with a hammer, sending him to the ICU. The attacker’s motivation was obvious, both from his shouts of “Where’s Nancy?” and his quickly-uncovered social media history. As the Washington Post reported, the attacker “published hundreds of blog posts in recent months sharing memes in support of fringe commentators and far-right personalities. Many of
the posts were filled with screeds against Jews, Black people, Democrats, the media and transgender people.”
Rather than own up to that toxic influence, multiple GOP politicians, operatives and conservative allies doubled down by promoting more of the same fact-free conspiracist explanations. A Nov. 5 New York Times story identified 21 Republican elected officials, candidates and other prominent figures who spread misinformation or cast doubt on the attack, including Trump himself and Texas Senator Ted Cruz. It was a vicious cycle, American University professor Brian Hughes told the Times. “The conspiracy theory prompts an act of violence; that act of violence needs to be disavowed, and it can only be disavowed by more conspiracy theories, which prompts more violence.”
On Oct. 30, Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, joined the disinformation frenzy, promoting a false narrative (claiming Pelosi met his attacker at a gay bar) from known misinformation site, The Santa Monica Observer, which once claimed that Hillary Clinton had been killed on 9/11 and replaced by a body double.
Others, like Donald Trump Jr., made jokes. “The response on the right to the attack on Paul Pelosi should ring alarm bells,” Dr. Joanne Freeman, author of two books on early American political violence, said on Twitter. “By laughing at it, they are not only normalizing such violence. They are welcoming it. It’s entertaining to them. It plays well. It’s miles beyond ‘stand back and stand by.’ It’s approval.”
The attempted attack on Nancy Pelosi highlights a much broader problem: threats to members of Congress have increased 10-fold since Trump took office (from 900 cases in 2016 to 9,625 in 2021), far exceeding the capacity of Capitol police to protect them. But Pelosi is also unique. For more than a decade, she has been the focus of otherizing — often demonizing — Republican attacks, portrayed as a shadowy sinister figure in a way that no male speaker has ever been treated. In 2010, Republicans launched a “Fire Pelosi’’ project, which included lurid images of her engulfed in Hades-style flames, and just last year GOP House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy joked that “it will be hard not to hit” Pelosi with the speaker’s gavel if he becomes the next speaker. This year, through Oct. 24, they spent substantially more money attacking Pelosi ($36.9 million) than they have talking about immigration ($27.2 million). So, the GOP stampede to lie or joke about the attack
should not be surprising to anyone.
The response was far different the last time a House leader was seriously threatened, when GOP whip Steve Scalise was shot during practice for the Congressional baseball game in 2017.
“Tonight we’re all team Scalise,” Pelosi told CNN’s Jake Tapper, in a joint interview with then-Speaker Paul Ryan during the baseball game itself. “What we’re trying to do is tone down the rhetoric, lead by example,” Ryan said, “we can disagree with one another, we can have different ideas, without being vitriolic.” But today’s GOP is nothing like what it was just five years ago. It’s now deeply invested in demonizing its perceived enemies — from
political leaders like Pelosi down to ordinary poll workers, who’ve quit in droves under threats of violence since the 2020 election.
Maricopa County is also ground zero in the latest form of voter suppression: the appearance of vigilante “poll-watchers,” dressed in body armor, sometimes even armed, which has resulted in 18 criminal complaints as of Nov. 4, along with a restraining order from a federal court, and a stern warning from the county’s Board of Supervisors chair, Bill Gates, and County Recorder, Stephen Richer — both Republicans.
The idea of monitoring drop boxes developed on rightwing social media, but leading the way is an organization, Clean Elections USA, which has more than 4,500 people across the country to collect evidence for True the Vote, the organization that created the 2000 Mules movie which claimed there was widespread “ballot harvesting” at drop boxes in the 2020 election, but without a shred of hard evidence, according to an Oct. 27 report from Votebeat Arizona.
“This new project appears to be an attempt to gather the evidence missing from their first try,” Votebeat reported, and to share that evidence with local sheriffs through an organization founded by Pinal County Sheriff Mark Lamb, which says it aims to “provide local Sheriffs with the training, resources and tools to have real-time eyes on voting in their county.”
Drop boxes played a crucial role enabling people to vote safely during the peak of the pandemic in 2020, giving voters an easier way to vote than ever before. The fact that Republicans have pushed back against them so hard typifies their efforts to suppress the vote. It’s well-understood that higher turnout — especially among younger voters — will favor the Democrats. What’s less understood is how effective Republican’s efforts of
voter suppression and election subversion will be — and what new forms they will take, depending on the final outcome of this week’s elections.