The Bigot’s Wager

Mike Rogers, above, will face Abdul El-Sayed in Tuesday's Michigan Senate election.Dominic Gwinn/Zuma Get your news from a source that’s not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily. Over the summer and into the fall, several figures in the MAGA-aligned election denial movement started promoting a novel claim. Before the midterms, they suggested, proof would emerge that the Chinese Communist Party has tried to rig past elections. Armed with this evidence, they claimed, Donald Trump would have no choice but to declare a national emergency, giving him extreme control over elections, including the power to ban mail ballots and even voting machines. “Donald Trump can take control of the elections,” conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi declared during a September livestream on Rumble, the far-right streaming platform. Needless to say, none of that has happened. So far, MAGA’s attempts to limit voting have been “complete failures,” as one expert recently told my colleague Samantha Michaels. Having failed at that task, the MAGA movement has no choice but to actually attempt to appeal to voters. The tactic they’re trying, above all, is prejudice, including xenophobia, anti-gay slurs, fomenting hysteria about trans children, and making efforts to deport a sitting Congresswoman. “What the movement is left with is the gutter racism.” While it is still possible that in-person voter suppression will occur—for instance, by sending ICE to the polls to intimidate voters—election denial and suppression efforts have not panned out as Trump and his allies hoped. The SAVE Act failed to advance in the Senate. Attempts by the feds to seize sensitive voter data have been blocked 27 times nationwide. The elections are taking place as scheduled, and mail-in ballots are still in use. But in an election dominated by voters’ concerns over affordability, Trump and his allies are instead gambling on what we could call “the bigot’s wager:” that hatred might succeed in the place of actual policy positions. Homophobia has dominated the Texas Senate race, where Republicans, including Vice President JD Vance, have baselessly suggested that Democrat James Talarico is gay or some kind of non-specific pervert. (Trump’s allies also promoted a ridiculous rumor that Talarico had been confined to a mental hospital, a claim that instantly fell apart.) Republicans have also poured at least $180 million into anti-trans ads this election cycle, focusing especially on the supposed dangers of trans girls playing sports with other girls. An ad against Congressman Don Davis (D-NC) accuses him of “fighting for they/them, not us;” just in case the meaning wasn’t perfectly clear, Davis’ image was shown alongside one of a drag queen in a pink ball gown. Anti-Muslim bias has also pervaded races across the country. Texas Railroad Commission candidate Bo French has enacted an intensely Islamophobic campaign, when he’s not calling for America to be more like the failed, white-dominated state of Rhodesia. Trump has called Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed a “jihadist,” saying “we’re going to have to get a special metal detector” for him if he takes office, while Vance accused El-Sayed of pushing “anti-white racial hate.” Congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s home was raided in October as part of a racist quest to strip her of her citizenship and kick her out of the country. To some observers, all of this bigotry carries a stench of desperation. The election denial and suppression movements are “very disorganized right now,” says John Knefe, a senior writer at Media Matters, a nonprofit that tracks far-right disinformation and extremist statements. “They’re just playing their greatest hits,” says Knefel, who focuses on the election denial movement and immigration. “They don’t have something new that’s energizing them.” Instead, he adds, “what the movement is left with is the gutter racism that’s always constitutive of the MAGA movement and Trump… That’s the center of gravity right now more than a specific policy.” Examples of that particularly vile school of politics are cropping up everywhere. Appearing at a rally last week for El-Sayed’s opponent Mike Rogers, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made a breathtakingly racist set of statements, falsely claiming that “Arabs,” as he put it, “don’t produce science, they don’t win the ⁠Nobel prize, they don’t win the Fields prize, they don’t win the Wolf prize, they don’t produce literature.” “There is basically no affirmative set of policy options that right-wing media is putting forward right now,” Knefel says, drawing a contrast with earlier attempts by former Trump advisor Steve Bannon to claim that mass deportation would lower housing costs. Such “scapegoating” was “demonizing and racist,” Knefel explains, but “now it’s almost like that racism is not really even tied to anything at all other than just open bigotry,” he explains. “There’s not really even a way that right wing media figures are like trying to translate that bigotry into a right-wing populist message. It’s just these inchoate expressions of rage.” For Knefel, the last-ditch racism “is more or less a sign of the movement’s weakness, both in terms of the election denial side and on the side of trying to turn the entire country against Muslims and immigrants,” he says. “On both sides of that ledger, the MAGA movement is flailing and disorganized.”