Josh Hawley called Kamala Harris’ nomination ‘rigged.’ Is he undermining the election?

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Sen. Josh Hawley was clear about his word choice. He said “rigged.”

“‘They’re rigging their own elections’ I believe is my exact phrase,” Hawley, a Missouri Republican, told The Star a few days after President Joe Biden ended his presidential campaign and the Democratic Party quickly aligned behind Vice President Kamala Harris.

“And they are. They’re totally rigging it.”

Harris accepted the Democratic nomination for President in Chicago last week, capping off an unlikely ascension that appears to have injected enthusiasm into a Democratic Party that, for much of the past year, had appeared listless.

But as Democrats spent the past month learning what “brat summer” means and donating to Harris, Republicans like Hawley have sought to cast doubt on the new nominee.

Elections experts have repeatedly stressed the Democrats were legally allowed to switch their nominee before the convention. It hasn’t stopped Republicans from using words like “rigged” to describe Harris’s nomination.

A common refrain has even begun to spread among former President Donald Trump’s supporters – that Harris won the Democratic nomination without a single vote.

“It appears to be an attempt to transform what was admittedly an unusual situation, with a presumptive nominee stepping aside, into something nefarious,” said Daniel Weiner, an elections expert at the Brennan Center for Justice. “When, in fact, the entire process from start to finish has been completely lawful.”

In an era of stark partisan division, it has become increasingly common for politicians to use language questioning the legitimacy of the democratic process when an election doesn’t go their way, Weiner said.

Some of those claims catch hold. As of September 2023, 63% of Republicans said they believed the 2020 presidential election was stolen, according to polling by the Public Religion Research Institute, a nonprofit that surveys politics, religion and culture.

Hawley was among the Republicans who questioned the validity of the election in 2020 – and the first Senator to say he would object to the results. Now, as both Democrats and Republicans gear up for legal battles following Election Day, Hawley is once again gravitating toward language that elections experts say undermines faith in democracy.

“These are claims based on a fundamental lie, and that’s why that’s problematic,” said David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research. “And they are specifically designed to sow doubt about an election that they may believe their candidate is going to lose.”

Hawley’s argument

At the Capitol last month, Hawley said he didn’t believe using the word “rigged” gives ammunition to voters, particularly Republicans, who are concerned about the security of U.S. elections and question the integrity of the democratic process.

“This isn’t a security issue, this is a changing the rules in the middle of a game issue,” Hawley said. “But I’m not a Democrat, I’m not a Democrat voter. If they want to do that, it’s up to them.”

Hawley said he was making an argument about the Democratic establishment, saying elite donors were determining the results instead of voters in an echo of the populist political message he often employs on the campaign trail.

Democratic lawmakers – and donors – did effectively push Biden out of the presidential campaign in late July, as his poll numbers cratered among an electorate that believed the 81-year-old was too old to serve as president for another four years.

Biden’s decision to step down came while he was still the “presumptive” nominee of the Democratic Party.

When states vote in party primaries ahead of the nominating conventions, they’re electing delegates, not the candidate themselves. The candidate doesn’t become the nominee until the delegates from each state cast their votes, awarding the candidate the nomination of their political party.

When Biden dropped out of the race, the delegates chosen to attend the convention were free to vote for any candidate they wanted. But those same delegates – everyday people who are involved with Democratic politics – quickly aligned behind Harris.

“The Democratic Party chose its candidate,” Weiner said. “I don’t expect the Republican Party to like it any more than I expect the Democratic Party to like the Republican candidate that was chosen.”

Sen. Eric Schmitt, a Missouri Republican who has become a surrogate for Trump, has attempted to put the focus on Democratic voters, not Republicans. Since Harris became the nominee, Schmitt has suggested that the Democratic Party ignored its voters.

“I think it’s disingenuous to dismiss what actually happened in the last year and a half, which is, he ran, he won in a primary, but now won’t be the nominee,” Schmitt told The Star.

Schmitt, who signed onto a lawsuit asking the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election as Missouri Attorney General, has often chafed at arguments that Trump has attempted to undermine democracy in his refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election. In an interview with CNN this week, Schmitt accused the Democrats of “installing” Harris as nominee.

But polling seems to indicate that Democratic voters don’t mind the switch from Biden to Harris. Where Biden appeared to be losing to Trump, Harris appears to be leading. The New York Times/Siena poll found a 7 percentage point swing in Harris’ favor across the battleground states most likely to decide the election, marking a significant shift from when Biden was the nominee.

“There’s no evidence that large numbers of Democratic primary voters even feel disenfranchised,” Weiner said. “The only people complaining about it are their opponents.”

A larger campaign

Hawley and Schmitt’s rhetoric around Harris’ nomination comes as both Republicans and Democrats appear to be preparing for legal battles following the November election.

Trump and the Republican National Committee introduced an “election integrity program” in April to monitor against any “violation or fraud.” Harris’ campaign has also built out a large legal team that includes Democratic election lawyer Marc Elias and Bob Bauer, an attorney who worked for both Biden and former President Barack Obama.

The focus on litigation both before and after the election marks the current reality in politics. Increasingly, candidates are unwilling to concede their elections and are willing to embark on bare knuckle legal battles in order to change the result.

Trump’s campaign launched more than 60 legal challenges in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election, despite no evidence of widespread voter fraud. The courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, soundly rejected the challenges of his campaign and supporters.

Congress also attempted to make it more difficult to undermine the results of a presidential election, passing the Electoral Count Reform Act around two years after Trump pressured former Vice President Mike Pence to block the certification of the 2020 presidential election.

The law now says the vice president has only a ceremonial role in the certification of the election, eliminating the Trump campaign’s argument that Pence could have stopped the vote.

The law also raised the threshold for when lawmakers can challenge the results of a state’s vote. Instead of requiring just one representative and one senator to object before heading to a vote, the new law requires 20% of Congress to object.

“Our elections today are by every objective measurement – in blue and red states, run by Democrats and Republicans, hundreds of thousands of election officials – more secure, transparent and verified than ever before,” Becker said.