As election-deniers become more involved in local politics, they are bringing with them the propaganda and conspiracies of national politics.
By Francis Wilkinson, Bloomberg
As the elderly woman hesitated at the top of the auditorium steps, a college student in a blue suit and pink tie materialized, lending his arm and guiding her to a seat. The woman’s slightly less hobbled friend beamed at the display of youthful gallantry. It was not the only Norman Rockwell moment I observed at a debate earlier this month in Gettysburg, Pa., that great rampart of American republicanism.
Three candidates for the Pennsylvania House of Representatives — an incumbent Republican, a Democratic challenger and a libertarian outsider — responded to questions posed by a local worthy. The politicians were mostly polite. The crowd of about 200, largely older and overwhelmingly White, was mostly respectful. The evening seemed to provide a respite from the tortured politics of 2022.
Until the poison was released. About midway through the hourlong debate, after local taxes and infrastructure and education received their two cents, the moderator posed the question that doubles as an open wound: “Do you think the 2020 election was free and fair?”
Representative Dan Moul, who has been in office since 2007, gave an answer perfectly designed to undermine democratic faith. “Who’s ever going to know?” he replied.
Describing former President Donald Trump’s crowd of 30,000 at a 2020 rally in nearby Lancaster, Moul said it seemed improbable that such a popular figure could have lost the election. (Almost 7 million votes were cast in Pennsylvania in 2020; Joe Biden received about 80,000 more than Trump.)
Moul also reported having seen “government footage from cameras mounted on government buildings with people walking up to drop boxes at 3, 4 o’clock in the morning with handfuls of ballots and shoving them in.”
After the debate, I asked Moul where I could obtain the government footage he had described. He said he didn’t have access to it. He directed me instead to watch a thoroughly debunked conspiracy movie produced by a professional propagandist.
Trump-inspired election denial is, of course, part of the national landscape. Moul’s claims echo not only Trump but the commonwealth’s top Republican leaders, including gubernatorial nominee Doug Mastriano, a White Christian nationalist who was at the US Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Like the contours of the Gettysburg debate, with its customary format and folkways, the shape of local politics in 2022 is eminently familiar: Meetings are convened. Petitions are presented. Campaigns are waged. Votes are taken. It might be easy to convince yourself that nothing has gone awry.
But the content of local government has grown ugly and dangerous. In small towns and counties across Pennsylvania, the pernicious shockwaves of 2020 are not a distant phenomenon. Local officials, many of them Republicans trying to do an honest job, are increasingly squeezed between the lies of Republican elites and relentless attacks from local activists who treat the lies as to-do lists.
The resulting pressure, directed at local targets with no easy means of escape, is immense. “These people just contrived one thing after another,” Gary Eichelberger, a Republican commissioner in Cumberland County, told me when I first spoke to him not long after the Jan. 6 attack.
Cumberland is in the south-central part of the state’s geographic “T” (basically all the area outside metro Philadelphia and Pittsburgh). Pennsylvania Republicans have dominated the T for generations. It has proved to be fertile ground for conspiracy theorists. “They started rumors that there were bags of ballots coming in, phony ballots that were coming in, and they had people observing our building and circling our building,” Eichelberger said. “They were chasing our mailman.” “They started rumors that there were bags of ballots coming in… They were chasing our mailman.”
The delusions proved too profitable to abandon. “They’re just going to keep coming back and coming back,” Eichelberger told me last month. “At least for the ringleaders, it does not appear that they’re really seeking facts and answers. They’re trying to keep this ball rolling.”
MAGA activists, spurred by a state group called Audit the Vote PA — whose “audit” is riddled with errors, according to one investigative report — are “pressure-testing these folks to see how far they can push them,” said Kyle Miller of Protect Democracy, a nonprofit group founded after the 2016 election.
Elected officials who prove uncooperative face accusations of corruption and the prospect of MAGA challenges for local offices, with control of local election infrastructure included in the spoils. In the meantime, MAGA activists spread rumors and demand actions to confirm voter fraud that no credible investigators can detect. They overwhelm local governments with information requests about suspicious ballots, phantom voters and compromised election machinery.
Forrest Lehman, election director of Lycoming County, said he has spent hundreds of hours responding to conspiracy-fueled demands for information. By his calculation, Pennsylvania has lost some 600 years of collective election administration experience in the past couple years, with election directors or deputy directors resigning in more than half of Pennsylvania’s 67 counties.
In Luzerne County, where Trump beat Joe Biden 57% to 42% in 2020, the county election director left in August. He had lasted eight months in the job, which is two months longer than his predecessor made it.
Threats of violence are common. “I’ve become more of a recluse,” Melanie Ostrander, the election director of Washington County, south of Pittsburgh, told me. “You kind of worry when you go out.”
Small-town government is under siege. And until elections produce the kind of results that MAGA activists approve of, it will likely remain so. Audit the Vote PA is training poll watchers to supervise Pennsylvania election sites. Mastriano has proposed requiring every Pennsylvania voter to re-register, a move that would make it easier to exclude those inclined to vote incorrectly. If elected governor, he has promised to appoint a secretary of state who will manage elections from a reliably MAGA perspective. Republicans in the Pennsylvania General Assembly are ginning up a constitutional amendment to tighten restrictions on voting.
Of course, if Mastriano or Trump-endorsed Senate candidate Mehmet Oz lose their elections in November — Mastriano has trailed consistently in polls while Oz appears to be in a tight race — the result will be further proof that the system is corrupt and needs to be overthrown. Rolling Stone reports that “Trump and other Republicans are already preparing to wage a legal and activist crusade against the ‘election integrity’ of Democratic strongholds,” including Philadelphia. Public officials who refuse to join the MAGA chorus will be subject to renewed attacks.
In testimony last year before the US Senate, former Philadelphia City Commissioner Al Schmidt, a Republican, described the symbiosis between elites and activists as a “vicious cycle” in which elected officials lie to their constituents and the deceived constituents then demand action “to fix something that never happened to begin with. Then elected officials use those demands as an excuse to do something.”
Pennsylvania was once a bastion of Republican moderates such as governors Dick Thornburgh and Tom Ridge. But the party belongs to the likes of Trump and Mastriano now. The consequences of that transformation threaten to warp the party, the commonwealth and the nation for years to come.