The Republican Playbook of Electoral Manipulation

Since Donald Trump attempted to abuse his powers as President to manipulate the 2020 presidential elections, many experts have voiced concern over the future of American democracy. More specifically, many have warned that the Republican party is preparing to resort to undemocratic means to secure a victory in the 2024 presidential elections. The United States has several well-documented issues with electoral integrity; in their 2019-2021 report, The Electoral Integrity Project ranked the country lower on their electoral integrity index than any other liberal democracy. Drawing on information gathered from newspaper articles and reports by nongovernmental organizations, analyzed using a novel framework, this paper focuses on electoral manipulation by the Republican party in 2021 and 2022. It answers the following questions: 1) Did the Republican Party resort to the same electoral manipulation tactics in 2021-2022 than Trump did in 2020?, 2) What did the Republican Playbook of Electoral Manipulation look like in this time period? and 3) Did the Republican Party undertake acts of electoral manipulation in 2021-2022 that could pose a risk to the integrity of the 2024 elections? By further developing the author’s framework for analyzing electoral manipulation and applying it in a timely case study, the research provides new information about the nature of electoral integrity defects and emerging challenges to elections in different stages of the electoral cycle. This paper finds that the Republican party has been engaging in acts of electoral manipulation akin to those of Trump in 2020. The present-day Republican playbook of electoral manipulation consists of seven tactics: 1. Breaking democratic norms, 2. Disinformation, 3. Gerrymandering, 4. Voter suppression, 5. Intraparty pressure, 6. Intimidation and violence, and 7. Attacking state and government institutions. With the exclusion of gerrymandering, which does not apply to Presidential elections, these same tactics were also part of Trump’s 2020 playbook. It is also notable that the present-day Republican playbook contains all the tactics utilized by Trump in connection with the 2020 elections except for collusion with one ore more foreign states. While some of the tactics in the playbook have been a common feature of American politics for decades or even centuries and some of them are used by Democrats and Republicans alike, the power of the playbook lies in how the combination of tactics creates a whole that is larger than the sum of its parts. The paper finds that several of the acts of electoral manipulation undertaken by the Republican party in 2021-2022, such as spreading disinformation that undermines confidence in American elections, inserting election deniers into election administration and passing laws that make attacking institutions easier, pose a risk to the integrity of the 2024 elections.