As you doubtless recall, many of us regarded last week’s midterm election with existential dread. The path from there to the end of American democracy seemed all too easy to chart, what with election deniers campaigning for offices that would have put them in charge of voting and ballot counting in battleground states.
If you give the fox control of the hen house, you ought not expect eggs for breakfast in the morning. Similarly, if you give Donald Trump loyalists control of future elections, you ought not expect future elections. Not in any meaningful sense, at least. Yet there we were, last week, in danger of doing exactly that.
But the people said No.
Mind you, they sent more than 150 election deniers to Congress, which is its own separate and troubling development. But as for giving direct power over elections to people who don’t believe in elections, voters in key states repeatedly refused. They said No to Doug Mastriano, who sought to be governor of Pennsylvania. They said no to Kari Lake, who ran for the same office in Arizona. They said no to election deniers who sought to be secretaries of state in Minnesota, Michigan, Nevada and Arizona, among others.