Two states have barred Trump from voting. Will it help or hurt him?
As Washington state’s top election official, Steve Hobbs says he’s concerned about the threat former President Donald J. Trump poses to democracy and fears he could return to power. But he also worries that recent decisions in Maine and Colorado to exclude Trump from the presidential primaries there could backfire, further eroding Americans’ shaky confidence in U.S. elections.
“Removing him from the ballot would appear on its face to be deeply antidemocratic,” said Mr. Hobbs, a Democrat who is in his first term as secretary of state. He then added a critical note: “But so does trying to overthrow your country.”
Mr. Hobbs’s doubts reflect deep divisions and unease among elected officials, democracy experts and voters over how to handle Mr. Trump’s campaign to reclaim the presidency, four years after he went to great lengths in an attempt to overturn the 2020 election. While some, like Mr. Hobbs, think it is best for voters to settle the matter, others say Mr. Trump’s efforts require accountability and should be legally disqualifying.
Challenges to Trump’s candidacy have been filed in at least 32 states, though many of these challenges have received little or no attention, and some have remained on the court docket for months.
The decisions now come amid a collapse in confidence in the American electoral system, said Nate Persily, a professor at Stanford Law School who specializes in voting law and democracy.
“We are walking into new constitutional snow here trying to figure out how to deal with these unprecedented developments,” he said.
Professor Persily and other legal experts said they expected the U.S. Supreme Court would ultimately overturn the decisions in Colorado and Maine to keep Trump on the ballot, perhaps sidestepping the question of whether Trump was involved in an insurrection. Mr Persily is hopeful that whatever ruling the court makes will bring clarity – and soon.
“This is not a political and electoral system that can deal with ambiguity right now,” he said.
Mr. Trump and his supporters have called the disqualifications in Maine and Colorado partisan ploys that robbed voters of their right to choose candidates. They accused Democrats of hypocrisy for trying to keep Mr. Trump off the ballot after he campaigned as champions of democracy during the past two elections.
After the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that Mr. Trump should be removed from the state’s primary ballot, Senator J.D. Vance, Republican of Ohio, said in a statement: “Apparently democracy is when judges tell people they can’t vote for the candidate.” votes leading in the polls? This is shameful. The Supreme Court must hear the case and put an end to this attack on American voters.”
Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey and Trump’s fiercest critic in the Republican primaries, warned that Maine’s decision would turn Mr. Trump into a “martyr.”
But other prominent critics of Mr. Trump — many of them anti-Trump Republicans — said the threat he posed to democracy and his actions surrounding the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol now required extraordinary intervention, regardless of the electoral consequences .
The challenges are based on a Reconstruction Era provision of the 14th Amendment, which bars anyone who has engaged in rebellion or insurrection from holding federal or state office.
J. Michael Luttig, a retired conservative federal appeals court judge, praised the Colorado and Maine decisions as “indisputable” interpretations of the Constitution. Officials in Maine and Colorado who barred Mr. Trump from the vote have written that their decisions came from following the language of the Constitution.
But on a recent sunny Friday afternoon in Los Angeles’ Echo Park neighborhood, Deena Drewis, 37, a copywriter, and Aaron Baggaley, 43, a contractor, both of whom have consistently voted for Democrats, expressed sickening ambivalence about such a message. extraordinary step.
“I’m really just conflicted,” Mr. Baggaley said. ‘It is difficult to imagine that he was not fully involved in the uprising. Everything points to it. But the other half of the country is in a position where they feel like it should be up to the electorate.”
Officials in Democratic-controlled California have shown little appetite to follow Colorado and Maine. Democratic California Secretary of State Shirley Weber announced Thursday that Trump would remain on the ballot, and Governor Gavin Newsom rejected calls from other Democrats to impeach him. “We are beating candidates in elections,” Mr. Newsom said in a speech rack. “Everything else is a political distraction.”
In interviews, voters and experts said it was premature to disqualify Mr. Trump because he had no criminal convictions for insurrection. They worried that red state officials could use this tactic to keep Democratic candidates from future elections, or that the disqualifications could further poison the country’s political divisions and give Trump a new grievance to fight against could pronounce.
“Efforts to disqualify demagogues with deep popular support often backfire,” said Yascha Mounk, a professor and political scientist at Johns Hopkins University who has written about threats to democracies. “The only way to neutralize the danger of authoritarian populists like Donald Trump is to defeat them at the ballot box as decisively as possible and as often as necessary.”
The decisions by Colorado’s highest court and Maine’s secretary of state barring Mr. Trump from the state’s primaries have been put on hold for now and will likely be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.
While most challenges to Trump’s candidacy have been in federal or state courts, Maine’s Constitution required electors seeking to disqualify Mr. Trump to petition the Secretary of State, making the politically volatile and wildly consequential decision was placed in the House. hands of Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, a Democrat.
Her counterparts in other states said they had debated for months about whether they could face a similar decision, and had spoken with other election officials and their legal teams about the thicket of state laws that govern each state’s elections.
In Washington state, Mr. Hobbs said he did not believe he had the power as secretary of state to unilaterally remove Mr. Trump from the ballot. He was relieved, he said, because he didn’t think one person should have the power to decide who is eligible to run for president.
The stakes for the country were enormous, Mr. Hobbs said, because of the damage Mr. Trump had already done to confidence in the country’s elections.
“It’s hard to put the genie back in the bottle,” he says. “This will be a long-term effort to try to rebuild trust among those who have lost it.”
Jena Griswold, Colorado’s Democratic secretary of state, said in an interview this week that she supported the decisions by Ms. Bellows and the Colorado Supreme Court to remove Mr. Trump from the ballot.
Election workers and secretaries of state have increasingly become targets of conspiracy theorists and violent threats since Trump’s refusal to accept his 2020 defeat; Ms. Griswold said she had received 64 death threats since the lawsuit to remove Mr. Trump from the ballot was filed by six Republican and unaffiliated voters in Colorado.
“We all swear to uphold our state Constitution and the United States Constitution,” Ms. Griswold said. “Making these decisions takes courage and bravery.”
Her office announced this week that because Trump’s case had been appealed, his name would appear on primary ballots in Colorado unless the U.S. Supreme Court ruled otherwise or declined to hear his case.
In Arizona, putting Mr. Trump on the ballot was a more straightforward decision, said Adrian Fontes, the Democratic secretary of state. He said state law required him to include any candidate certified in two other states.
He called the blizzard of legal rulings, dissents and conflicting opinions swirling around Trump’s place on the ballot a “slow-rolling citizenship lesson” that demonstrated the country’s democratic resilience.
“I celebrate the idea that it’s complicated,” he said. “We’re having this conversation because that’s what democracy is about.”
Mitch Smith And Michael Wijnen reporting contributed.