Modeling Trump’s Attack on the 2020 Elections and Applying the Model to 2021

In 2020, President of the United States Donald Trump launched an unprecedented electoral manipulation campaign to secure himself a second term in office regardless of what the voters decided. In 2021, the Republican Party has followed in his footsteps. This paper presents a new model to describe Trump’s attack on the 2020 Presidential elections. Thereafter, the model is applied to the actions of the Republican Party in 2021 to analyze whether the party has continued to resort to the same electoral manipulation tactics that Trump used in 2020. The model is primarily based on a database that was constructed by conducting a keyword search in the Washington Post digital archive. The search covered all news reports published in the Washington Post print newspaper from April 1st 2020 to January 20th 2021. New information that has surfaced since then has been taken into consideration when finalizing the model. The search was limited to one print newspaper to keep the amount of research material reasonable, and one large newspaper was considered sufficient because newsrooms have the custom of quoting or following up on each other’s news stories. Electoral manipulation is analyzed in this paper as a sign of autocratization, which is defined as the process during which a democracy becomes less democratic or an autocracy becomes more deeply autocratic. According to this study, Trump used seven different electoral manipulation methods: 1) disinformation, 2) voter suppression, 3) intimidation and violence, 4) intraparty pressure, 5) attacking government institutions, 6) breaking democratic norms and 7) attempted collusion with foreign states. Trump’s strategy combined A) old and familiar election rigging methods (1, 2 and 3), B) methods favored in the recent past by democratically elected leaders with authoritarian tendencies (4 and 5) and C) methods taken from the playbook of foreign election meddling (1 and 7). Trump’s electoral manipulation campaign does not fit neatly into other electoral manipulation models that have been presented in previous research. In 2021, the Republican Party has continued to use at least six out of the seven tactics, as it prepares for the midterms and the 2024 Presidential elections. The party has spread disinformation to gain political advantage and enacted new legislation that makes it easier to manipulate future elections. It has contributed to a culture of violence and intimidation, which may deter democracy-respecting citizens from seeking positions as election officials, leaving room for Big Lie promoters to take their place. All this makes American democracy vulnerable, and the next electoral manipulation attempt may well be successful.