Why booting Trump from the ballot puts ‘democracy defenders’ on the defensive

The Colorado Supreme Court may have tossed former President Donald Trump off the 2024 ballot, but his critics find themselves on the defensive, too.

Defenders of democracy appear awfully quick to limit the voters’ choices in order to secure their preferred outcomes.

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When they aren’t filing lawsuits to remove the overwhelming Republican front-runner, who is also leading President Joe Biden in the national RealClearPolitics polling average, from state ballots, they are working to undercut third-party options.

Their top target is the centrist outfit No Labels, but left-wing alternatives such as Jill Stein and Cornel West also receive their scorn.

This is despite the fact that polls have repeatedly shown most voters want more choices than Biden and Trump. They would prefer different major party nominees but don’t at present seem likely to get them.

So why shouldn’t these voters get a third choice? Or multiple choices?

That’s because the self-styled defenders of democratic norms fear that the outcome will be Trump’s election.

Never mind that political scientists are still arguing more than 30 years later about whether Ross Perot helped Bill Clinton defeat George H.W. Bush in 1992.

These outcomes are hard to predict — and are also not the point of the democratic process, which holds that voters should choose.

The counterargument is that Trump, based on his behavior following the 2020 election all the way up to the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, is such a unique threat to democracy and the rule of law that unusual legal maneuvers need to be deployed to prevent his return to power.

Democracy means something more significant than “one person, one vote, one time.” Some resistance and Never Trump figures claim to believe the former president would not leave office at the conclusion of his second term.

In the Colorado case specifically, Trump’s tormentors argue he is an insurrectionist and therefore disqualified from holding future office under the 14th Amendment.

The Supreme Court is likely to rule on the legal merits of this case. But there are a few problems with this argument as a basic political matter.

First, the efforts to use unconventional means to block Trump from the presidency far predated Jan. 6.

Ahead of the 2016 Republican National Convention, Never Trump figures plotted ways to deny the candidate who had won the plurality of votes nomination through rules that had never previously been used in this manner during the modern primary process. Whomever they would have installed as the Republican nominee would have received fewer primary votes than Trump or no votes at all.

Then, when Trump defeated Hillary Clinton later that year, resistance activists entertained various schemes to use faithless electors to keep him out of the White House. What the so-called Hamilton electors were attempting to do was without precedent, at least at that scale, and required members of the Electoral College to override the popular vote in their respective states. (Electors had never previously cast their ballots on the basis of the national popular vote, and most versions of these plans would not have resulted in the national popular vote winner becoming president but rather someone who had received fewer votes than Trump or no votes at all.)

Fortunately, these resistance hail Marys fell incomplete as mainstream Democrats largely ignored the play call. But it is not not a great leap from these constitutionally dubious election-altering proposals to John Eastman’s.

Democrats also spent massively in the midterm elections to boost Republicans who had amplified Trump’s 2020 election claims or defended his conduct on Jan. 6. They did so on the theory that many of these candidates would be easier for them to beat in a general election.

Even though this often proved true, this Democratic strategy is a poor fit for the argument that Trump and his most radical supporters constitute a grave threat to democracy.

Democrats have even promoted Trump himself when they thought it politically advantageous. Biden has said he would be “very fortunate” to run against Trump next year and more recently hinted he might not be seeking a second term if his predecessor wasn’t also doing so.

The 2016 Clinton campaign also initially wanted to elevate Trump and other “Pied Piper” candidates they believed would be a more favorable general election matchup.

Trump’s actions following the last presidential election were indefensible, especially on Jan. 6.

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But Trump’s most passionate detractors keep making it easier for his supporters to defend them.

To millions of GOP primary voters, the establishment’s concern over democracy looks selective at best and the norms are expected to apply to Republicans alone.