Trump and the MAGA movement have spent years preparing to contest the 2024 election results

Donald Trump’s plan to challenge a 2024 election loss involves relying on the far-right justices on the Supreme Court all the way down to MAGA sheriffs and local election officials, with a helping hand from Republicans in Congress, state lawmakers, and a firehose of lies and conspiracies being spread on social media.

Donald Trump has been baselessly claiming to be the victim of election fraud since before his name ever officially appeared on a primary ballot. And with Trump marking his third straight Election Day as the Republican nominee for president, his refusal to accept any sort of defeat, ever, has sparked a mass delusion that’s overtaken the Republican Party – that he can only lose by being cheated.

While that delusion is farcical, it could nonetheless play a key role in an election actually being stolen — not from Trump, but from the American public.

Instead of an inflection point that returned the party to participating in a common reality, losing the 2020 election ultimately led to a Republican Party purged of those willing to stand up for the most basic of democratic principles: whoever loses the election concedes and participates in a peaceful transfer of power. 

The Capitol insurrection was just the start, and after four years of quiet preparation, the party and its reactionary allies are prepared to finish the job. 

Here’s how Trump and the MAGA movement could try to overturn the 2024 election, if he loses. 

The Supreme Court could help hand Trump the election

The most direct way for Trump to turn a clear loss into another term in the White House would be through the Supreme Court, a body that has every natural inclination toward siding with him outside of the courtroom: Trump appointed half of the justices that compose its far-right supermajority, while Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife, Ginni, was heavily involved in trying to overturn the 2020 election and inciting the insurrection that followed. 

Justice Samuel Alito and his wife also protested the 2020 election certification, even if they kept their activism to flying cryptic flags and yelling at neighbors. 

The Trump campaign, Republican National Committee, and related parties have been aggressively litigious this election season, pursuing every legal action available to limit who can access a ballot and have their vote counted. 

State courts have tossed many of those suits, and the Supreme Court has largely affirmed lower court decisions to do the same in the waning days of the campaign, but last week, the justices decided to bless Virginia’s illegal purges of alleged noncitizen voters. 

In a Friday memo concerning an RNC challenge in Pennsylvania, Alito expressed a willingness to break precedent in favor of overruling a state Supreme Court on its own election laws, a position co-signed by Thomas and fellow conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch. 

Legal analysts are worried about the implications of that memo and shocked by the Virginia decision, though it was hardly the first time that this Supreme Court has invented new precedents to protect Donald Trump. And in light of the GOP’s filing hundreds of state and federal lawsuits before the election, should Trump fall just short on Tuesday, the high court will likely have ample opportunity to do so again.  

Flooding the zone

Far-right Republicans  are hard at work building public support and institutional inevitability for overturning the election. Using distorted polls and sketchy extrapolations of early voting numbers, they’ve made a Trump victory seem virtually guaranteed barring some kind of mass election fraud, the case for which they’ve been building for years.

At the ground level is a misinformation ecosystem supercharged by X.com, which Elon Musk has turned from an unintentional vessel of misinformation during the past two elections into a clearinghouse for election-related lies and a superspreader of falsified and entirely AI-generated voter fraud slop. 

Though Musk’s changes have rendered the site otherwise borderline unusable, X.com’s “Election Integrity Community” has quickly become a staging ground for deceitful agents of disinformation and echo chamber for the most paranoid Trump supporters. 

On Friday afternoon, the algorithm was serving innuendo and fantasy, bubbling up accounts like Wall Street Apes and its array of ripped TikTok videos of random Trump supporters raging about the latest (and debunked) reports of vote-switching electronic voting machines. There were alerts flagging vague rumors about “a lot of weird stuff going on” alongside anodyne photos of post offices.

The space was flooded with two-for-one allegations that transgender people are using their gender identities to cast multiple votes, as well as footage of hostile receptions for white men in MAGA hats uninterested in following the instructions of Black election workers. 

All of it is grist for the second level of the alternate reality ecosystem. In some cases, niche pundits get to work on misleading statements made by Republican officials on things like voter applications in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. In others, self-proclaimed citizen journalists build outrageous fiction atop the falsehoods regularly produced by MAGA-zealous local officials like a rural Michigan lawman named Dar Leaf. 

The sheriff of Barry County, Leaf went from policing an obscure rural Michigan fiefdom to being a minor celebrity among Trump supporters for his uncanny ability to uncover supposed deep state conspiracies playing out in his sleepy county of 64,000 residents. 

Leaf is one of the leaders of the “constitutional sheriffs” movement, a kind of modern secessionist cult made up of sheriffs who believe that they are endowed by the constitution with absolute power over their jurisdictions and are impervious to the laws governing the rest of the nation.

Leaf has been “investigating” entirely discredited conspiracy theories about voter fraud and rigged election machines since shortly after the 2020 election. The effort included coordinating with the Trump-linked fabulists at True the Vote, illegal seizures of voting hardware, and frequent legal setbacks. Leaf’s “investigation” has bled into a collaboration with far-right militias on courses for Trump diehards, appearances with conspiracy-addled former Gen. Michael Flynn, and incessant claims that Democrats are importing undocumented immigrants to vote in the 2024 election. 

Other “constitutional sheriffs” are equally devoted to returning Trump to office, and together they have prepared supporters — and casual news consumers — for a new round of strong-arm investigations based on innuendo and anger. It will fuel initial resistance to any Harris victory, and likely years of resentment and distrust of even local government.

Top Republican leaders fan the flames

Local figures like Leaf have served as a key link between organized extremists outside of government, activists who have infiltrated the lower levels of government, and the powerful elected officials who have quietly adopted their agenda. Despite being in Michigan, Leaf got conservative election skeptics talking recently by announcing that he’d referred his quixotic investigation into the 2020 election to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who has become one of the foremost pursuers of thinly sourced and entirely unfounded allegations of voter fraud.

After spending the past few years trying to separate transgender children from their parents, Paxton this year has focused on abusing his power to keep people of color from voting wherever possible. In August, he announced a baseless investigation into the nation’s oldest Latino civil rights group and ordered raids on the homes of some of its elderly volunteers, under the pretense that they were part of a White House scheme to fatten up the voter rolls.

“​​There’s a reason Joe Biden brought people here illegally,” Paxton told a radio host earlier that month. “I’m convinced that that’s how they’re going to do it this time, they’re going to use the illegal vote. Why were they brought in, why did he bring in 14 million people? He brought them here to vote.” 

Other Republican lawmakers are avoiding the bombastic claims, but still using the myth of the undocumented voter in last-minute lawsuits and press conferences. In late October, Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate ordered election workers to challenge the ballots of thousands of voters based on old and incomplete data. The timing was suspect, and now Pate is being sued by four naturalized citizens having their votes challenged.

Many conservative influencers, Musk in particular, have been cheering these developments and amplifying every legal maneuver, fanning the flames of concern about a problem that exists almost entirely in their own rhetoric. Eight states will vote on ballot initiatives that explicitly ban noncitizens from voting on Tuesday — something that is already illegal — which will goose GOP turnout while casting doubt on states without those explicit laws.

GOP shifts from Trump ‘is losing it’ to trying to overturn elections for him

All of this was made possible by Trump’s decade-long campaign against immigrants, which is now the main focal point of a Republican Party that used to be far more tolerant and welcoming in its rhetoric. The former president’s grip on the Republican Party and the danger he poses to American democracy can both be neatly charted by how the GOP hierarchy has reacted to the various iterations of what eventually became the Big Lie and its subsequent offshoots. 

When Trump accused Sen. Ted Cruz of stealing the Iowa Caucus in 2016, the Texas senator mocked him as unhinged: “I wake up every day and laugh at the latest thing Donald has tweeted because he’s losing it,” Cruz told reporters in New Hampshire. That fall, as Trump repeatedly claimed that the general election would be rigged in favor of Hillary Clinton, then-Speaker Paul Ryan expressed full confidence in the election system, while then-Indiana Gov. Mike Pence pledged that the campaign would accept the election results.

Four years later, Trump sowed Republican paranoia about mail-in and early voting, then used that expansion of democracy — all sanctioned by the conservative Supreme Court — as fuel for his attempts to overturn the election. Cruz had long since caved and voted to block the certification of the Electoral College, but there were just enough Republicans at the state and federal level in 2020 with the backbone to withstand Trump’s cajoling and the violent mob that he inspired.

While the effort to actually overturn the 2020 election became a tragicomic sideshow, overseen by fringe true believers and grifters like the Cyber Ninja “forensic recount” specialists in Arizona, the GOP acquiescence continued. Republicans in charge of key swing states recognized that Trump’s campaign of public deception and bludgeoning of democratic norms allowed them to rewire election law to their advantage. 

Georgia, Texas, North Carolina and 11 other GOP-controlled states passed restrictive new election administration and voter eligibility laws after the 2020 election, making it harder for Democratic-leaning communities to access the ballot. In some places, the laws also empowered conservatives to take control of local and state election boards. There are now over 100 Big Lie proponents serving on election boards across eight swing states, giving them outsized power to refuse to certify vote counts and make antidemocratic last minute decisions. 

We’re already seeing extreme attempts to muck up the vote count process and institute broad disenfranchisement. The worst case thus far is playing out in Georgia, where a new GOP majority on the state Board of Elections imposed a laundry list of disastrous new rules during scarcely attended, last-minute public meetings. Those rules included a mandate for hand counting paper ballots, a process that is highly susceptible to error and foul pay, and permission for local elections officials to refuse to certify their jurisdiction’s votes based on gut feeling.

The Republicans on the board never gave their colleagues a heads up before introducing those rules, which each lent themselves to the kind of tampering that many in Georgia attempted to commit in the aftermath of the 2020 election. In late October, the new rules were temporarily overturned by the courts, but there’s little reason to expect that the right-wing members will stand idly by while the votes are being counted — their initial efforts got a big thank you from Trump during a recent speech in Georgia, so they know he is watching.

In a close election, little-noticed decisions by partisan officials are already making a big impact — the one dropbox per county rule in Ohio has led to enormous voting lines in urban areas — and will continue to do so as people head to the polls and ballots are counted. 

The right’s systemic takeover of these offices has created countless soft spots in American democracy, making it possible for Trump and his allies to warp access to the ballot and then sow distrust in election results, obstruct the vote counting and certification process, and challenge any potential defeat.

Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election failed. If and when he tries to contest the results in 2024, he is likely to fail again. After all, the overwhelming majority of election administrators, poll workers, and elected officials are committed to the democratic process. 

But  the threat of what’s effectively a coup will linger absent a Republican Party that is once again willing to participate in the foundational premise of democracy — the peaceful transfer of power — and a concerted legislative effort to fortify voting rights and our elections.