There is a way to stop Donald Trump — if only Democrats would give it a chance | Opinion

Think Donald Trump has a lock on the Republican nomination?

Not so fast. If Democrats across the country were to temporarily leave their party en masse and vote Republican in their state primaries, they would have a decent shot at denying No. 45 the opportunity to become No. 47.

That’s the idea behind PrimaryPivot, a nonprofit that’s lobbying undeclared voters and Democrats to vote in the Republican primary next year for the sole purpose of stopping Trump and — at the risk of sounding melodramatic — saving our democracy.

Serious political strategists don’t give it much of a chance. They say the campaign doesn’t have enough visibility. It’s underfunded. Voters don’t want to go to the trouble of changing their registration, only to have to change it back again.

Still, PrimaryPivot has been gaining traction — there have been mentions in major publications like Newsweek and USA Today — though it’s still largely an underground movement.

And it’s not without pitfalls.

For one, party switchers — or crossvoters, as they’re sometimes called — would need to agree on an alternate candidate, since splitting the vote among the remaining GOP hopefuls could still leave Trump on top.

Many Dems would likely prefer Chris Christie, who has been outspoken in his condemnation of Trump. But if the goal is to defeat Trump in the primary, the better choice would be former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley, who is having a moment and comes across as the most presidential of the GOP candidates.

But Haley poses a problem, at least for Democrats. If she were to knock out Trump in the primary, she could then go on to defeat Biden. Several polls show her even with or ahead of Biden. One — the Marquette Law School poll — has her leading him by 10 points.

Party-switching a bust in New Hampshire?

All this is extremely hypothetical, because so far Democrats do not seem super inclined to change their political allegiance.

At least, that was the case in New Hampshire. According to Politico, two pro-Christie groups — a PAC and a nonprofit — ran a campaign urging Democrats to reregister Republican so they could vote for Christie rather than Trump.

There was no big surge in defections to the GOP, and the deadline to switch parties has passed.

“I think for those 200, maybe, people, that do that (switch from Democrat to Republican), you know, good luck to them. They got punked,” New Hampshire Democratic Party chair Ray Buckley told USA Today.

PrimaryPivot is more optimistic. Robert Schwartz, co-founder of the organization, said 3,500 Democrats reregistered as undeclared in New Hampshire, which means they can request a Republican ballot when they go to the polls. PrimaryPivot continues to reach out to longstanding undeclared voters.

The organization is working in other states as well — next up are Virginia, Massachusetts and Georgia. The group is sticking with smaller states where it’s easier for a limited number of voters to influence the outcome. It has no plans to target California, though it is trying to spread its message as far as possible.

“We would strongly encourage Democrats in California to consider where their votes will have the best impact,” Schwartz said.

It’s been done before — with success

Some Democrats see registering Republican — Republican! — as a form of treason. Yet the idea of voting strategically by switching party allegiance isn’t as out-of-the-ordinary as some make it out to be.

In 2014, Black Democrats who voted Republican in the primary are credited with saving GOP Sen. Thad Cochran’s Senate seat when he faced a challenge from a deeply conservative Tea Party candidate.

“By participating in the election that was very likely to determine the next senator from Mississippi, these voters helped ensure that their senator was the ‘least bad’ option. Our reaction? More, please,” political analysts Jonathan Robinson and Sean Trende wrote in The Atlantic.

There is a history of “cross donating” as well.

Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn and a strong Biden supporter, recently donated $250,000 to Haley even though “she has a bunch of different policies that I disagree with,” he told Barron’s, a financial news site.

But he also sees her as as an upholder of democracy and the rule of law.

“... Look, I will support her because I’m fundamentally, first and foremost, an American, a believer in our system,” he said in a Barron’s video.

Path to dictatorship ‘gets shorter every day’

Hoffman has plenty of company; there is no shortage of pundits warning of the threats that Trump poses to democracy.

“Let’s stop the wishful thinking and face the stark reality: There is a clear path to dictatorship in the United States, and it is getting shorter every day,” Robert Kagan recently wrote in The Washington Post.

He followed up with a column on how to stop a Trump dictatorship that urged anti-Trump Republicans to get behind Nikki Haley — but wasn’t willing to inch a little farther out on that limb by suggesting that undeclared voters and Democrats also support her in the primary.

Granted, some liberal commentators believe this whole dictatorship-is-invevitable thing is overblown. It’s not that they don’t fear Trump. They just aren’t convinced he can beat Biden.

They claim we shouldn’t worry because Democrats have held their own in the past two elections. Plus, the polls are probably wrong. In other words, they are pinning their hopes on the collective incompetence of pollsters.

Undermining the ‘sanctity’ of the primary process

While party-switching is perfectly legal in almost every state, there have even been efforts to ban — or at least limit — crossover voting.

Tennessee requires polling places to post signs telling voters it is a crime to vote “in a party’s primary without being a bona fide member or affiliated with that political party, or to declare allegiance to that party without the intent to affiliate with that party,” according to Newsweek.

In Wyoming, any voter wanting to switch parties must do so at least 96 days before the election — a change that was made after Democrats cross-voted in 2022 in an unsuccessful attempt to keep Republican Liz Cheney in the House of Representatives.

Wyoming’s secretary of state pressed for the change; he described cross-voting as “a process which has undermined the sanctity of Wyoming’s primary process.”

Yet those who engage in cross-voting or party-switching or whatever term you want to use see it as a sort of sacred duty to put the good of their country above their political party.

PrimaryPivot’s Facebook account puts it this way: “We are here in NH respectfully asking you to vote against former President Trump. We wouldn’t be here if we didn’t believe you can save our democracy.”