Two Fundamental Threats Facing Democracy As Election Day Nears

Fred Wertheimer’s Weekly Note | October 27, 2022

As we head into the final days of the midterm elections, Americans are facing two fundamental threats to our democracy.

Threat One: Baseless attacks on our elections, led by former President Trump and his followers, are  dangerously undermining the faith of tens of millions of Americans in the honesty and credibility of our elections.

Threat Two: An unprecedented tsunami of big money, led by billionaires and millionaires, is flooding the midterms with money that buys influence – and results – over elections and government decisions.

The Cult of Election Deniers

A new poll found, amazingly, that 65 percent of registered Republicans still believe Trump’s unrelenting Big Lie that President Biden’s election was illegitimate – despite the absence of a shred of evidence supporting their position.

“Heads I win, tails you lose,” is now, apparently, a key Republican election doctrine.

A byproduct of the false Trump claims is a cult-like following that has produced nearly 300 Republican election deniers running this year for congressional or state offices in 48 of the 50 states.

Election deniers who lose on November 8 may well follow Trump’s game plan and refuse to accept the election results despite their loss. Those who win and end up in positions involving oversight of elections may well try to rig elections in 2024 and beyond, proclaiming, without any evidence, that their party’s candidates won elections they lost.

Trump followers continue to spread disinformation and a new poll finds that two in five voters “say they are worried about threats of violence or voter intimidation at polling stations during the country’s midterm elections.”

In Arizona, for example, armed individuals in tactical gear have been monitoring ballot drop boxes and violent threats have been made against election workers.

The results of the midterms will tell us the extent of the vital work that lies ahead to protect the integrity of the 2024 presidential election and other races.

The Big Money Tsunami

Billionaires and millionaires are pouring big money into congressional races like they’re playing in a political sandbox. And, big money buys influence and results.

Some billionaires appear to be emulating the era of the 19th-century robber barons, when some Senators were known by the powerful corporations that funded their elections rather than the states that elected them.

For example, Peter Thiel, with a reported net worth of more than $4 billion, gave $15 million to a Super PAC to elect Ohio Republican Senate candidate J.D. Vance and another $15 million to a Super PAC to elect Arizona Republican Senate candidate Blake Masters. (Thiel reportedly is giving another $5 million to elect Masters, whose race with incumbent Senator Mark Kelly has tightened.)

Should candidates Vance and Masters be elected, they may well become known as “The Senators from Peter Thiel.”

In Pennsylvania, a staggering $170 million reportedly has been spent so far in the election cycle by outside groups on the Senate race to elect Republican Mehmet Oz or Democrat John Fetterman. Oz himself has provided more than $22 million of his own money for his campaign. In Georgia, more than $100 million has been spend so far by outside groups in the race between incumbent Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock and Republican Herschel Walker.

The top 50 individual and organizational donors in this election cycle have given more than $1.1 billion to support congressional candidates, an average of more than $20 million per donor. These 50 donors, alone, provided at least $708 million to support Republicans and at least $437 million to support Democrats. And this doesn’t include the secret “dark money” contributions that donors may have made to outside spending groups.

The American people fully understand that big money from the wealthiest people and most powerful monied interests in the country buys influence over Washington decisions and turns more than 300 million Americans into second-class citizens.

Until we establish a system of public financing for presidential and congressional elections, the American people and our democracy will remain hostage to a corrupt political system in Washington.

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Fred’s Weekly Note appears each Thursday in Wertheimer’s Political Report, a Democracy 21 newsletter. Read this week’s newsletter here. And, subscribe for free here and receive your copy each week via email.