An article published this week in the leftist New Republic claims Republicans regularly cheat to win elections. But the article’s examples of alleged “cheating” aren’t evidence at all —and the only real example of cheating the article provides involves a Democrat.
On October 21, New Republic editor Michael Tomasky published “Republicans Are Cheating. Again. But Now It’s Worse Than Ever.” Tomasky, a longtime left-wing columnist, claims that “the factual record” shows Republicans “cheat” to win elections, and have done so in “most elections in recent American history.”
Tomasky then promises to substantiate this claim with evidence. What follows is a series of absurd examples.
He begins by pointing to a text message allegedly sent to young voters in Wisconsin, warning them that it’s illegal to vote in a state where you’re not eligible to vote. CNN first reported that story, and it is unknown how many people actually got the text message. A left-wing voting group is demanding an investigation, and the New Republic deems this cheating by the GOP, even though the text is clearly trying to prevent cheating. The New Republic and CNN insist the text is meant to scare young voters into not voting, a grim assessment of the intelligence of young voters.
Tomasky then starts playing the hits, repeating the frequently-debunked claim that Russia is trying to skew the election in favor of former President Donald Trump. Earlier claims about Russian disinformation have been proven false, including the 2016 Russia collusion hoax and the claim that the Hunter Biden laptop was a Russian disinformation operation.
But the article downplays Iran’s efforts to tip the election in favor of Vice President Kamala Harris, even though an Iranian spy ring infiltrated the Biden administration and someone with a high-level security clearance leaked Israel war plan documents to Iran. Nevertheless, The New Republic insists “Iranian meddling is a molehill compared to the vast mountain range of Russian meddling.”
The article also knocks Elon Musk for handing out checks to voters who sign a petition, though they admit it doesn’t “appear to be illegal.”
Tomasky then gets into the alleged historical examples of Republicans cheating, beginning with the year the author was born: 1960. Of course, that year John F. Kennedy won the presidency, and Tomasky has to admit that “there was probably some Democratic cheating going on in Cook County, but it didn’t matter” because JFK would have won anyway. Just a few lines later, it says that Watergate was still the bad kind of cheating, even though Nixon would have won “in a huge landslide” regardless.
Speaking of Nixon, Tomasky notes that his campaign cheated when it signaled to Vietnam it would get a better deal if he beat Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968. Johnson called it “treason,” but former President Barack Obama must have thought it was a good idea, since he told then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in 2012 that he would have “more flexibility” after the election. Tomasky doesn’t mention John Kerry speaking to a former Iranian Foreign Minister during the Trump administration to undermine Trump’s Iran policy, so he must not have thought that was “cheating,” either.
Tomasky accuses former President Ronald Reagan of cheating in 1980. His evidence? A Democrat-turned-Republican who hoped for a cabinet position allegedly told Iran not to release the hostages until after the election, because Reagan would win and give them a better deal.
The examples only get weaker as Tomasky gets closer to the present. George H. W. Bush’s “Willie Horton” ad amounts to cheating, even if it wasn’t “consequential outright cheating.” Bush’s son obviously cheated in 2000, Tomasky says, even though it was former Vice President Al Gore who refused to accept defeat and set the table for the Supreme Court to rule that Bush won the election.
And while Tomasky smears Republicans for “the swift-boating of John Kerry” in 2004, he makes no mention of the outrageous smear campaigns mounted against Mitt Romney in 2012, including allegations that he gave a woman cancer and would put black people “back in chains” — the latter of which was, of course, made by then-Vice President Joe Biden.
After 2004, Tomasky abandons citations altogether, simply stating as fact that Obama won without cheating, Trump cheated, and Biden didn’t. He conveniently leaves out the changes to mail-in voting made in 2020 and Democrats literally switching out Biden for Harris after Biden’s poll numbers dropped.
