Dem
52
Ties
3
GOP
45
Late Thursday, the Trump administration uncorked its latest desperate attempt to "win" the midterms, filing a lawsuit, United States v. State of Alaska, preemptively seeking to delay certification of results in the U.S. Senate race there.
We'll get to the claim in a moment, but first note the headline of this item. We did not write "DoJ Files Suit," we wrote "Trump Files Suit." That is because Donald Trump bragged yesterday that he ordered the DoJ to take this action. That, of course, is not how it is supposed to work. The DoJ is supposed to operate independently of the president. It's just that this president is wildly corrupt and cares nothing for the norms of governance.
The lawsuit is focused on the fact that there are two Dan Sullivans running for that Senate seat. It asserts that this represents fraud, and says (sorta, see below) that if Democrat Mary Peltola wins, the federal government wants to be given time to conduct an investigation to see if votes meant for one Dan Sullivan went to the other Dan Sullivan.
Let us now run down some of the problems with this cause of action:
In short, it's a hacky lawsuit. In fact, if you want to be technical (and guess what, judges usually are), the lawsuit does not actually ask for any action to be taken. That's why we wrote "sorta" above. Whatever nitwit knocked this thing out made an error in the relief section of the document, in which the plaintiff lays out what they want done. Here's the request:
Defendants from certifying any result that may be impacted by voter confusion, as defined above, pending an investigation to determine whether votes cast for Daniel J. Sullivan were meant to be cast for Senator Sullivan and any further procedures or relief this Court deems necessary and appropriate to determine what the result would have been absent Daniel J. Sullivan's inclusion on the ballot.
What they plainly want is an injunction keeping the defendants from certifying the result. But they neglected to add those first four words, "an injunction keeping the." Pretty amateurish.
So, what is the game here? We can think of four potential audiences for this suit, and for these shenanigans in general. The first is federal judges, who are undoubtedly going to be asked to weigh in on all sorts of silly filings like this one during the month of November. And we are confident that judges across the land, whether appointed by a Republican or a Democrat, are largely not going to be impressed.
Yes, the administration might get lucky once or twice, and get a three-judge panel that just happens to have a Neomi Rao and a Justin R. Walker, but that will be an anomaly that won't survive appeal. The problem for Team Trump is that judges know what spurious legal claims look like. They also know when a whole bunch of them are being filed at once, which makes them less favorably inclined toward any one of them. Recall that Trump and his lawyers managed to prevail in just one of the 60+ claims they made after the 2020 election (and even that one win was just a procedural ruling). They've already been putting up a similar batting average in their efforts to sway the 2026 election; for example, they are a nice, round, 0-for-26 on efforts to force states to give up their voter rolls.
A second audience is the people who will run the elections this cycle—the election administrators and the poll workers. They are ostensibly being put on notice that the Trump administration is watching, and is locked and loaded, with legal briefs at the ready. We are unpersuaded the efforts at intimidation will work, however. After all, everyone already knows that Trump and AG Todd Blanche might sue over anything and everything, without much rhyme or reason to it, so it's not especially useful to try to anticipate what they might do. It's like trying to anticipate what number will come up on the roulette wheel next—it's a fool's errand. More importantly, the folks who agree to run elections, either because it's their vocation or it's their avocation, tend to be a very civic-minded bunch. They are the type to become more determined, rather than less, in response to efforts at intimidation.
The third audience is the general public. Clearly, Trump, Blanche and others are trying to salt the earth, and to lay the groundwork for claims that the election was bogus, and that the (expected) Democratic victories are a mirage. Our reasonably well-informed guess is that the general public will not be impressed. In part, because the general public are not politics junkies like the readers of this blog, and are not going to know about a lot of these things (like, say, the lawsuit in Alaska). And for those who do, there has to be a "boy who cried wolf" effect kicking in. Trump has been whining about phony election results for 7 years now. That is the better part of a decade. At a certain point, it's just not going to land (if it ever did).
And that leaves us with the fourth audience: Trump himself and, by extension, MAGA. Trump personalizes everything, and he has certainly personalized these elections. Actually, this is the somewhat rare case when he's absolutely right to do so—midterms substantially ARE a referendum on the sitting president. And if and when the Democrats do well the Tuesday after next, he is going to be deeply upset. We already know that he has a built-in defense mechanism, when he thinks/knows he's going to take it in the teeth, of pre-sowing the seeds of doubt. He did it in 2016, 2018, 2020 and 2024, despite the fact that he actually prevailed in two of those four elections. Of course he's going to do it again. And of course people like Blanche, who look for every opportunity to get in good with the boss, are going to enable that.
And that brings us to two final, very important, points. The first is that there is very clear evidence of a broad conspiracy, at the highest levels, to swing the election through underhanded means. Unlike other alleged conspirators—say, the Trilateral Commission, or the Illuminati, or the Bilderbergers—the Trump administration isn't even trying to hide it. But one should not assume this speaks to some sort of skilled effort to derail or overturn the election results on November 3. We've said it before, and we'll say it again, but these people are largely idiots, and their ham-fisted efforts have already failed countless times. There's no reason to expect that to change; they didn't suddenly start taking smart pills or something like that.
And while Trump and his minions might dream of somehow stealing an election, it is doubtful they actually expect to succeed. They are stupid, we realize, but they're not THAT stupid. It is entirely plausible that their main, and more achievable, goal is to give Trump, MAGA, Fox, Newsmax, OAN, etc. talking points for the months of November, December and beyond, as they work through the grief of losing the election. They're starting with denial already, and will move on to anger, bargaining, and depression, eventually. Probably never acceptance, though.
The final point, meanwhile, is this: Whatever the Trumpinati are up to, their ambitions are best frustrated by a robust turnout and beyond-all-doubt results. As the old election administrator's prayer goes: "Lord, I don't care who wins, but please let it be a landslide." So, get out there and vote. Vote early if you can to avoid long lines on Election Day. (Z)