2024 isn't going to end well

Elise Stefanik confirms it.

(Elise Stefanik)

The following exchange happened between “Meet the Press” moderator Kristen Welker and New York Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik on Sunday:

Welker: You mentioned Pennsylvania. Would you vote to certify, and will you vote to certify the results of the 2024 election, no matter what they show?

Stefanik: Well, I voted not to certify the State of Pennsylvania because, as we saw in Pennsylvania and other states across the country, that there was unconstitutional acts circumventing the state legislature and unilaterally changing election law.

Welker: What about 2024, Congresswoman?

Stefanik: We will see if this is a legal and valid election. What we’re seeing so far is that Democrats are so desperate they’re trying to remove President Trump from the ballot. That is a suppression of the American people. And the Supreme Court is taking that case up in February. That should be a 9-0, to allow President Trump to appear on the ballot, because that’s the American people’s decision to make this November.

Let’s start with a few facts, shall we?

Pennsylvania passed an election reform package — including, most importantly, allowing no-excuse absentee balloting — in 2019. (This means that you can vote absentee without any specific reason.)

There has never been any evidence of wrongdoing as it relates to the actual results in Pennsylvania — where Joe Biden won by roughly 80,000 votes out of almost 7 million cast.

Despite both of those facts, Stefanik was one of nearly 150 Congressional Republicans who voted to object to the 2020 election results in Pennsylvania. In explaining her vote, she wrote:

Tens of millions of Americans are rightly concerned that the 2020 election featured unprecedented voting irregularities, unconstitutional overreach by unelected state officials and judges ignoring state election laws, and a fundamental lack of ballot integrity and security.

Again, no. Worth noting here: The changes in Pennsylvania election law passed through a Republican-controlled House, with 138 GOPers voting for it!

But, Stefanik isn’t about to let those facts get in the way of how she views not just the last presidential election but the next one.

Because she, like former president Donald Trump, is already laying the groundwork to object to the next election — if their side loses.

Look at how Stefanik replied to Welker’s question about whether she would vote to certify the 2024 election: “We will see if this is a legal and valid election.”

That leaves her a WHOLE lot of wiggle room doesn’t it? Because the 2020 election was, by all accounts, “legal and valid” and yet Stefanik voted to object to it.

This bodes nothing good for where we are headed this year. Trump has already spent months insisting that his four indictments (and 91 criminal counts) are evidence of a weaponized Justice Department trying to meddle in the election.

Here’s Trump last night on Truth Social:

As I have noted before in this space (many times), Trump is incapable of saying he ever lost anything. When he came up short in the Iowa caucuses in 2016, he claimed, without evidence, that Ted Cruz had cheated. When he lost the 2016 popular vote, he claimed, without evidence, that “millions” of people had voted illegally. And, well, we all know what happened when Trump lost the 2020 election.

I hate to say it but quotes like the one from Stefanik over the weekend leave me more convinced than ever that the aftermath of a Trump loss in 2024 could be even worse than what we saw in 2020.

Four years ago, there were still a decent-sized chunk of Republicans in Congress who were willing to stand up to Trump and say that, no, the election was not stolen from him.

Will that same coalition exist in late 2024? The entirety of the House Republican leadership — including Stefanik — has already endorsed Trump’s presidential bid. The new Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, was the author of the amicus brief to the Supreme Court arguing that the 2020 results in swing states should be tossed out.

Does ANY of that — or ANYTHING you’ve seen from Congressional Republicans in the three years since January 6 — make you believe that the party has grown the backbone to stand up to Trump when — not if — he claims he was robbed of the 2024 election?

Yeah, me neither. The options for 2024 then as I see them:

1. Trump wins — and implements his authoritarian-friendly policy agenda

2. Biden wins but Trump and Republicans refuse to accept the results, claim fraud and seek to create chaos in the post-election period — again straining democracy as they did in 2020.

Not great! Happy New Year!