Trump Hates Votes. Even When They're For Him.

That's sort of good news for Biden.

Poll worker in Davis, CA, 2020 election. Image: Owen Yancher, CC

“I actually tell our people, we don’t need your vote,” Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said at a rally in Florida last week. “We got so many votes we don’t need them. We just don’t want to see votes stolen. We don’t want to say…steal the vote. We’re not going to let it happen.”

This is, to put it mildly, a very odd message to hear from a contender for any electoral office. Usually if you are running for elected office, you want people to vote for you. You encourage them to vote for you. You tell them that their votes are important. Even if you are far ahead in polls, you usually tell people they can’t trust the polls for sure, and that they need to get out there and make a voting plan—vote early, figure out where their polling place is, arrange transportation. Vote!

For Trump, though, this messaging is not unusual. During his decade in electoral politics, he’s constantly, and continually, worked to demobilize his own voters.

There’s a simple reason for that: Trump is a fascist who dislikes and distrusts electoral politics. He would rather win by cheating and violence than win actual electoral victories because he sees voting as inherently illegitimate.

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The Vote is rigged

In every election in which he has participated, Trump has worked to delegitimize election results before the votes take place.

In 2016, Trump claimed the results were rigged three weeks before Election Day, while many people were in the process of voting.

As early as May 2020, months before voting started, Trump insisted that 2020 would be “the greatest Rigged Election in history.”

And of course Trump has been babbling daily about how the 2024 election is rigged and unfair.

Some of Trump’s claims of election rigging focus on particular kinds of voters. In 2016, for instance, he baselessly insisted that 3-5 million undocumented immigrants voted for Clinton—delegitimizing an election which he literally won. In 2020, Trump insisted that Democrats in Philadelphia cheated and swung the election to Biden—again, a claim that is utter horseshit.

Trump is a racist white supremacist; he doesn’t believe that the votes of non-white people should count. In this context, when he says that the elections are “rigged,” he’s saying that any election in which Black people or nonwhite people vote is corrupt. So for Trump, elections are always “rigged” because only white Republicans are true Americans. Anyone else who votes is by definition doing so illegitimately.

But Trump doesn’t just target particular people as illegitimate. He targets particular voting methods. In 2020, Trump repeatedly lied about mail-in ballots, claiming that they were insecure and that Democrats were using them to rig elections. He’s been attacking early voting on similar (false) grounds since 2016.

Trump’s reasoning here seems to be that Democrats use early voting and mail-in voting more than Republicans. In 2020, in particular, when Covid led to a surge in mail-in voting, Trump seemed to fear it might tip the election in Democrat’s favor. He also may have believed that, since election day votes are often counted first, he could bank a bunch of early votes from Republicans if they all voted in person. That could buttress his claims that the election was stolen and provide him with fuel for a coup attempt.

Trump’s anti-voting claims backfire…

Whatever his reasons for targeting mail-in and early voting, though, Trump’s lies and conspiracy theories have incontestably harmed Republicans.

The GOP in 2022 for example desperately tried to get their voters to cast early and mail-in ballots—an effort undermined by the fact that Trump, the party leader, kept telling them not to. The election was famously a major defeat for Republicans.

In a New York special in February of this year, most analysts believe a snow storm on Election Day disproportionately harmed candidate Mazi Pilip, since (again) Republican voters have been cued not to vote early. Tom Suozzi swept to an easy victory.

Even Trump has figured out that he’s shooting himself in his tiny orange foot, and has belatedly reversed himself; he’s now calling on Republicans to vote early and by mail. But the truth is that attacking elections is in general demobilizing.

When you tell voters that elections are rigged, you’re telling them that their votes don’t matter. If the fix is in, why vote?

Republicans think that Trump’s incessant claims that voting was rigged in 2020 helped depress GOP turnout in the two Senate elections in January 2021—both of which Republicans lost, flipping the chamber.

Republican midterm struggles since 2020 have generally been blamed on the fact that Democrats are now doing better with more educated voters, a group more likely to vote in low turnout elections. But it can’t help that Trump is literally telling his base not to vote. After all, the more enthusiastic you are about Trump, the more likely you are to believe him when he says that he doesn’t need (and doesn’t want) your vote.

…But he can’t stop

Currently, polls show Trump slightly ahead of Biden. There’s a fair chance that Trump can win outright—certainly a much better chance than that he can stage a successful coup when he isn’t the sitting president. So, why does he keep insisting that the election is rigged before it happens? Wouldn’t the better strategy be to tell voters that the election is safe and that he needs their support?

It would be a better strategy—but it would also violate Trump’s core beliefs. Trump is obviously not a deep thinker, but, as a wealthy racist narcissistic asshole, he has an innate affinity for fascist logic and fascist beliefs. And fascists hate elections.

Fascists believe that authority should flow directly from the nationalist volk to the leader; the leader is the embodiment of the people’s will. The leader is then a quasi-religious figure, glowing with nationalist authority. He is not supposed to be accountable to the ballot box. He is not supposed to be accountable to the electorate. He is not supposed to be accountable to anyone. The orangeish white patriarch speaks for the True populace—which means, in practice, that the leader confers legitimacy on the people, not the other way around. The people he speaks for are the true Americans; the people he doesn’t speak for, or who defy him, are disloyal and should be culled.

In a very real sense, then, Trump and his followers see any elections—even elections they win—as an affront. Elections suggest that Trump is responsible to, and subordinate to, voters. But Trump doesn’t think he’s subordinate to anyone. That’s why he says he doesn’t need people’s votes. He has, as he says, “so many votes”—by which he means that he has been self-ordained through his embodiment of white populist will.

The upside here is, again, that telling your voters that elections are illegitimate is a good way to encourage your voters not to show up at the polls. Trump’s compulsive attacks on the 2024 election make him less likely to win that election.

The downside is that delegitimizing elections is likely to encourage violence, election denial, and coup attempts if Trump loses. And if Trump wins…well, he’s told us over and over, in a range of ways, that he wants to do away with elections. As president, there’s every reason to believe he will take further steps to do just that.