Only 19 percent of Democrats and 56 percent of independents believe that former President Donald Trump should be allowed to stand for election in 2024 following moves by the states of Colorado and Maine to remove Trump from the Republican primary and general election ballot, according to the latest CBS News-YouGov poll taken Jan. 3 to Jan. 5.
Instead, 81 percent of Democrats and 44 percent of independents think states should take Trump’s name off the ballot.
That is, even if that’s who Republicans want to nominate as their candidate for president or who the American people want to vote for in 2024. These voters simply think it’s okay for the government to intervene and remove their political opponents from the ballot, disenfranchising millions of Americans and making it so only state-approved candidates can run.
The context is important, which is the belief that states, under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Section 3 can, without any trial or conviction, simply declare a candidate to be an insurrectionist. It’s “self-executing,” don’t you know?
In the meantime, very few of those in the political class appear to be considering how very dangerous both the push to control who appears on the ballot and now its seeming popularity is to the very cohesion of the Union.
We are in deep trouble, and only the Supreme Court, which is set to hear this case in February, can save us at this time—and even then, allowing Trump onto the ballot is only a stopgap, a band-aid for what ails us.
For years, we have been treated with commentary by establishment institutions and their mouthpieces about how the Republican primary was revealed in 2016 to be “vulnerable” to a populist like Trump to run and win. This was a problem that needed to be solved, because Trump wasn’t supposed to win in 2016.
This is the same thinking that led to the counterintelligence investigation of Trump in 2016 for opposing U.S. intervention in Ukraine on the campaign trail. That ipso facto made Trump a Russian agent, and so the campaign was put under a top-secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) dragnet.
To be fair, that’s how apparently how government surveillance and witch hunts have always operated off of association fallacies. It’s dressed up as an entirely sophisticated process with warrants, oaths, affirmations but it’s just a façade state-run paranoia.
Candidates aren’t allowed to oppose U.S. foreign policy, didn’t you know? They are not allowed to propose alternatives to current policy, or else the state will intervene. They’ll show you!
These are not the actions of a free country. Instead, they are the actions of a country so corrupted, only a very small majority believe that we should even have a free and fair election in 2024 where we the people get to choose both who should run and then who should win.
Shame on all those who have stoked these fires and condoned these actions for years, all in a vain attempt to stop one person from serving as president who, no matter how unorthodox, had every right to do so — and the American people had every right to select.
The danger this time around is that whichever side loses has a powerful incentive not to accept the outcome after two consecutive elections, 2016 and 2020, replete with challenges from both parties and successful campaigns to delegitimize their outcomes. No one is innocent.
To make this stick, Trump’s removal would require unanimity among Democrats and a majority of independents. They have neither for this question, which makes their campaign platform “Vote for us! We’re tyrants and will suppress the opposition party (again)!” They don’t have it — yet. But they are very close.
That should be frightening, but apparently, knowledge of our mutual freedoms and the conditions and institutions for protecting them are so alien, so forgotten that we are oblivious to the dark abyss that is directly ahead of us.
All that said, the number of Democrats and Independents willing to remove their political opponents from the ballot should be highly alarming. Only a narrow majority support a free and fair election. We’re on the brink and only cooler heads can help to see us through this if the Constitution and Union are going back out the other end.
Robert Romano is the Vice President of Public Policy at Americans for Limited Government Foundation.
