Late on election night four years ago, Donald Trump saw the so-called “red mirage” and pounced. His vote count was still ahead of Joe Biden in several swing states. Around 2.30am he appeared before White House cameras to declare victory. Any ballots counted after then would be fraudulent, Trump said.
His aim was to exploit the fact that far more Democrats than Republicans had voted by mail, which meant the “blue shift” would take time to show up. It was another three days before Pennsylvania completed its tally and Biden was declared the winner.
So began Trump’s “stolen election” crusade that erupted two months and more than 60 failed lawsuits later in the January 6 storming of Capitol Hill. The crusade is still going. Trump’s 2024 campaign is based explicitly on the claim that he was cheated of the presidency four years ago. Should we brace ourselves for another contested election — or worse?
History does not repeat itself, as Mark Twain quipped; but it often rhymes. According to constitutional lawyers, this election is likely to yield one of two “day after” crises. The first possibility, if Kamala Harris is pronounced winner, would trigger a legal and information war to stop her victory from being certified. Only an improbable Harris victory of at least five of the seven swing states might pre-empt that.
The other scenario, in the event of a Trump victory, would begin on January 21, the day after he was sworn in. Constitutional experts are far more worried about what Trump 2.0 would do with his renewed grip on power than on his ability to overturn a Harris win.
“If Harris wins even by a small margin, there is very unlikely to be a repeat of January 6,” says Rosa Brooks of Georgetown Law Center. “This time Trump will not be president, the certification process is much stronger and Biden won’t tolerate violence.”
Yet there would still be real danger in a narrow Harris win. In contrast to Biden’s 2020 victory, which had been telegraphed in poll averages for months, Trump and Harris are within decimal points of each other in most critical states. Biden took 6mn more votes than Trump and won the electoral college by a margin of 306-232. Even so, it still took nine days for the Arizona result to be declared and 16 days in Georgia. And Biden’s clean victory did nothing to stop Republican election denialism from taking hold.