No, Mike Johnson and the GOP Aren’t Plotting to Steal the 2024 Election

The intra-party Republican food fight in which House conservatives deposed Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and then took three weeks before finally settling on Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.) as his replacement was a dismal spectacle that made the GOP appear dysfunctional and unable to govern. But as soon as Johnson began to settle into the speaker’s office, Democrats doubled down on the idea that his rise epitomized all that was awful about a Republican Party that seemed to be in thrall to former president Donald Trump and his most fervent followers.

Democrats are right to portray the new House speaker as being very conservative. Johnson, a fervent evangelical Christian, is against just about everything that the liberal corporate media holds sacred, from abortion to climate change extremism. Some of those stands are less popular than others. Johnson is, unlike most in the GOP, interested in relitigating the question of gay marriage. But most of his positions, including on gender extremism and Ukraine, are far more popular among voters than inside-the-Beltway liberal pundits would like to admit.

So, if Democrats are going to try to use Johnson as a political piñata, they will need something more than his willingness to think and act like his constituents in Louisiana’s Fourth Congressional District.

Their answer has been a familiar formula since 2020. They think they can help win back control of the House by labeling Johnson an “insurrectionist” and “election denier.” They made some headway smearing Republicans as enemies of democracy in last year’s midterms. But their attempt to get a head start on recycling that theme for 2024 with claims that, as House speaker, Johnson will help steal the next election for Donald Trump, is all wrong. Johnson and the GOP aren’t plotting to hijack the next presidential election. They’re planning on winning it.

From the moment the dust settled on the disgraceful events of January 6, 2021, Democrats have consistently tried to conflate all Republican critiques of the 2020 election with the mob that broke into the Capitol that day. The House’s partisan investigation of the riot treated everyone who asked questions about the results (after an election when the pandemic caused states to throw traditional voter integrity safeguards to the winds) as an insurrectionist.

Johnson was one of numerous Republicans who thought COVID-era changes should have brought greater scrutiny from the courts and consequently voted not to certify the election results. Democrats labeled him an “election denier.” Johnson’s argument was that some state officials had violated the Constitution by relaxing restrictions on mail-in voting or early voting due to the COVID-19 pandemic without consulting state legislatures.

By January 2021, with the outcome of the litigation already decided, Trump and his followers should have ceased their protests for the good of the country. But Johnson’s position was the result of a genuine belief that the process had been unfairly tainted, not an attempted coup d’état—a phrase better applied to the post-2016 election machinations by Democrats that produced the Russia collusion hoax.

The most recent presidential election also saw social media and internet companies collude with the Democrats to censor news about Biden family corruption. The role that billionaire funders of voting outreach programs played in the outcome—a “shadow campaign” to ensure Joe Biden’s election—also influences the way even non-Trump loyalists on the Right think about 2020. Even those Republicans who concede that Biden got more votes still believe much that happened was unfair even if there is no definitive proof that the election was stolen.

Since 2021, Democrats have been preparing to revisit their insurrection narrative by predicting that Republican efforts to tighten voter integrity laws—such as the laws passed by Georgia that Biden falsely labeled “Jim Crow in the 21st century”—previewed another attempt to steal an election. As Americans cope with Biden-induced inflation and chaos abroad, all the Democrats want to discuss are conspiracy theories about Trump trying to steal an election.

But the notion that Johnson would hijack the next Electoral College count in order to elect Trump is pure projection. After all, Democrats have been doing everything they can to hobble Trump’s efforts to return to the White House with a lawfare campaign, indicting the former president on a raft of spurious charges. The same goes for their efforts to throw him off the ballot in some states.

Yet polls show these underhanded attacks on the former president have only solidified his standing with Republicans, giving him what appears to be an insurmountable lead for the GOP nomination as well as leads in head-to-head matchups with Biden and even in a four-way race with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Cornel West. Unless Democrats succeed in preventing Trump from running—a despicable tactic that does more to undermine faith in the integrity of the process than anything Trump has ever done—Republicans like Johnson believe they are going to win next year. The purpose of slinging mud at the new speaker now may be more about preparing the way for Democratic election denial after November 2024 than genuine worries about a GOP coup.

We should expect to hear more about such conspiracy theories in the next year. It is easier for Democrats to rage about past injuries and to imagine a plot about stealing the next election than to cope with the realization that the unthinkable—a Trump victory—may be in the cards for 2024.

Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS.org and a senior contributor to the Federalist. Follow him: @jonathans_tobin.

The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.