The Big Lie at the Heart of Republican Electoral Strategy

Senate Republicans appear increasingly determined to force the Democrats to conduct a “talking filibuster” as the only way they can delay or derail the Republicans’ SAVE Act, which requires aspiring voters to produce birth certificates or passports when registering to vote, as well as official photo IDs when they arrive at the polls. As in days of yore and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Democrats will have to hold the floor without pause, talking round the clock, to keep that weed-out-possible-Democratic-voters bill from coming up for a simple-majority vote.

For which reason, I herewith suggest a theme for the Democrats’ talks: that the Republicans’ case for the bill is a Big Lie so blatantly false it’s worthy of Joseph Goebbels. Indeed, with each passing day, Goebbels’s ghost emerges more clearly as the Republicans’ master strategist for the 2026 midterm elections.

More from Harold Meyerson

The Lie So Big that it does Goebbels proud is that the voter restrictions mandated by the SAVE Act are necessary to deter noncitizen voting. President Trump, of course, has repeatedly blamed noncitizen voting for Democrats’ electoral “victories”; it is one of the things he cites as he lies that he actually won the 2020 presidential contest.

But the existence of noncitizen voting isn’t merely the lie that underpins other Trump lies; it’s the lie that the entire Republican Party has invoked and repeated for decades, back to the days when Trump was just a casino owner filing for bankruptcy. Shortly after the Republicans on the Supreme Court awarded the presidency to George W. Bush in 2000, his political consigliere Karl Rove, doubtless upset at how narrow Bush’s margins had been, complained that if stricter laws were not enacted, “elections will not be about the true expression of the people in electing their government; it will be a question of who can stuff it the best and most.” Rove directed Bush’s attorney general, John Ashcroft, to go after cases of voter fraud, such as noncitizen voting.

Ashcroft did, but couldn’t find very much. From 2002 to 2005, the mighty Department of Justice convicted all of 24 individuals for voting when they shouldn’t have, 14 of them noncitizens who mistakenly believed they could vote. Not a single case of organized voting from those ineligible to vote was turned up.

After the Republicans got clobbered in the 2006 midterm elections, Rove turned up the heat again. Bush’s new attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, fired seven chief federal prosecutors—all of them Bush appointees—who’d tried but failed to find evidence of fraud or noncitizen voting in their districts. This blatant politicization of the federal justice system redounded against the administration, compelling both Gonzales and Rove to resign. (That was, of course, B.T.—Before Trump—when norms of judicial impartiality, democracy, and empiricism still carried some weight.)

The ensuing scandal prodded think tanks and universities to study what clearly was the myth of widespread voter fraud and noncitizen voting. The most authoritative work was that of political scientist Lorraine Minnite. In her 2010 book The Myth of Voter Fraud, she wrote that authorities found just one (1) case of voter impersonation in the United States from the years 2000 to 2005: a New Hampshire teenager who voted as his father. She also documented that in 2005, despite their diligent efforts to satisfy Rove, federal prosecutors charged many more people with violating migratory bird laws than with committing voter fraud.

Shortly after he won the 2016 election, Trump resurrected the Big Lie, blaming the narrowness of his victory margin on the alleged fact that “millions of people voted illegally.” During Trump’s first term as president, however, his Department of Justice failed to find millions, thousands, or even hundreds of those illegal voters.

Yet despite the dearth of evidence that any organized voter fraud is occurring, or that noncitizens are voting at all, congressional Republicans are united yet again in arguing that they must erect hurdles to voting to deter the nonexistent plague of noncitizen voting and voter fraud. Once again, prodded this time by Rove’s even more malignant successor, Stephen Miller, Justice Department attorneys are searching for all those noncitizen voters, and once again, they can’t find any.

Whether Republicans get their SAVE bill enacted or not, Trump would clearly like to deploy ICE and the Border Patrol at polling places come Election Day. Noncitizens will be huddling inside their homes, of course, but since ICE and the Border Patrol have shown themselves willing and able to arrest (and now and then murder) American citizens, their presence will really be intended to deter nonwhite citizens from showing up to vote.

That seems to be the sum total of Republican electoral strategy for 2026. They’re not appealing to the electorate on the basis of their record: Neither the tariffs, the economy, the cost of living, the reductions in health coverage, nor the militarization of cities and towns hold the key to voters’ hearts. Rather, their strategy is to reduce what they fear is heightened Democratic turnout by invoking their decades-old Big Lie.

Following mass demonstrations by dissatisfied workers in 1953, East German playwright Bertolt Brecht wrote a poem in which he noted that despite the workers’ desire to dissolve the current government and elect a new one, it would be

Simpler for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another.

That seems to be the Republicans’ electoral strategy for 2026.

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