Closing out a frenetic, final campaign sprint the weekend before Election Day, President Donald Trump laid the groundwork to reject potential GOP losses by pre-positioning election conspiracy theories in key states.
In one stark example, the president fused naked racism with election conspiracies in an escalating attack on Somali-Americans targeting Ohio, a state that is crucial to Republican hopes to retain control of the U.S. Senate, in grotesque language that suggested their very participation in the democratic process is an affront to election integrity.
“There’s tremendous groups of Somalians going into Ohio, and they’re trying to play with the elections,” Trump said during a rally in Dubuque, Iowa on Sunday. “And they’re starting to form their communities there. We don’t want them. They’re all over Ohio now. And what they’ve done to Minnesota makes it almost — hundreds of thousands of them, and they vote exactly the way they’re told to vote.”
Columbus, Ohio's state capital, has the second largest Somali population in the country.
Ohio’s Senate race is considered more competitive than that of Minnesota, which hosts the country’s largest Somali population, and where polling favors the Democratic candidate. Minnesota is home to Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Democrat who has sustained repeated attacks from Trump, and who saw federal agents raid her home three weeks ago.
Conceding that his attacks against Omar were unlikely to hurt her electoral chances in her heavily Democratic district, Trump baselessly asserted that “the people that vote [for] her shouldn’t be here,” while charging that Somali Americans have “totally destroyed” Minnesota.
“I hope our candidate does well, but they’re totally crooked, with their vote counting,” Trump said.
“Minnesota’s so corrupt,” Trump continued. Then, mentioning a state where Sen. Susan Collins, a Republican, is fighting to hold on to her seat, the president added, without elaboration: “Maine is very corrupt.”
The barrage of election fraud claims, tailored to states where close races jeopardize Republicans’ control of the Senate and House, doesn’t surprise democracy advocates, who have been fighting the administration’s efforts to interfere in the election for the better part of a year.
“If you had asked me to predict six months ago what would be happening right before the midterm elections, I would say the president is going to go to a bunch of states and make up a bunch of lies about fraud to carry out election interference,” Anna Dorman, a lawyer with Protect Democracy, told Raw Story. “We always knew he was going to do that. He’s going to claim that there’s fraud as a basis to disrupt the process.”
Trump’s drumbeat of election denialism on Sunday also included a swipe at Michigan, a must-win state in the GOP’s effort to hold on to the Senate. Referencing Haley Stevens, a Democratic candidate who lost her primary to the eventual nominee Abdul El-Sayed before stunning observers with her endorsement of Republican Mike Rogers, Trump said, “A lot of people think she won.”
Trump mocked the Michigan election system by claiming, “It took like three or four days for them to, ahem, tabulate the votes,” making air quotes and eliciting laughter from his supporters. Almost all the ballots were counted in the early-morning hours after the primary election day, when the Associated Press declared El-Sayed the winner.
Trump similarly assailed California, suggesting it could take three months to count the votes there.
“California, forget about it,” he said, while invoking the June primary, in which Spencer Pratt, a Republican was in second place early in the vote count only to be overtaken by Democrat Nithya Raman in the Los Angeles mayor’s race. “You know, the kid was running — he won,” Trump falsely claimed. “And now the woman he beat is going to be the next — the whole thing is corrupt.”
The irony of Trump’s attacks on California elections is that the time taken to ensure that the results are accurate is being turned against the state, Dorman said.
“Taking the time to do the process carefully is seen as evidence there’s something wrong,” she said. “It’s a massive state with a huge variation between small counties with rural areas and counties like LA that have larger populations than some states. It’s a voter-friendly state. They give voters a long time to return their ballots. They give people a while to correct mistakes.”
Trump’s attacks on California’s election system come amidst federal criminal investigations led by the Department of Justice on election officials for refusing to segregate ballots based on questionable lists of supposed noncitizens voters.
The investigations and hostile phone calls from people angry that local election officials are standing up to the Trump administration have taken a toll.
Four poll workers failed to show up for work last Thursday in rural San Benito County, with a population of about 64,000, according to a declaration filed by County Clerk-Recorder Francisco Diaz, who said he believes “additional stress and anxiety could have contributed to these absences, which materially impacts our ability to serve voters.”
Stuart Holmes, the chief election officer for Washington state, said this election cycle is “the most stressful and anxiety-filled” he’s experienced in more than 20 years of working in elections.
“These threats and interference from this administration have diverted untold attention and resources away from our core duties of administering a fair, accurate, and accessible election, and has created an environment of fear and intimidation,” he said.