What could happen here, part 2a

 Donald Trump is generally regarded as the favorite to get the 2024 Republican nomination.  This is unusual--the last time someone who lost a general election for president was taken seriously as a candidate for re-nomination was Hubert Humphrey in the 1970s.  Why is Trump different?  The obvious answer is that he has a large and passionate following among Republican voters.  A survey by Marist College in early December 2020 found that 66% of Republicans said they wanted him to run again in 2024 (24% were opposed).   But that seems less impressive when you compare it with a survey from mid-December 2000 (just after the Supreme Court decision giving the election to George W Bush), in which 79% of Democrats said that they thought Al Gore should run again in 2004.  In August 2001, 71% of Democrats said that they wanted Gore to run again.  So maybe the obvious answer is wrong--perhaps it's normal for a defeated candidate who runs a competitive race to retain strong support from ordinary voters.*  

What usually happens is that leading politicians from the losing party start pushing the last candidate to the sidelines--talking about how we need to learn the lessons from defeat and look to the future.   Journalists join in, and pretty soon the defeated candidate is written off (and usually condemned as a stiff  who never should have been nominated in the first place).    With Trump, things were different-- hardly any leading Republicans ventured the kind of criticism that is usually made of a losing candidate--that he had blown an election that he should have won--even though there was a strong case for it.  Only a few explicitly supported his claims of fraud, but many said or implied that there were some real questions about the election.  Why did they do that, even when they had good reasons to try to get him out of the way?  I said in a previous post that the complexity of the election system meant that you could make technical objections without having to take a stand on the issue of voter fraud.  In a later post, I proposed that the Constitution had a role--that people could say, and probably even believe, that they were defending the Constitution rather when they made technical objections.  But I don't think that post was very clear, so I will try again in this post. 

The starting point is American attitudes towards the US Consitution.   Charles Krauthammer spoke of "reverence" for the Constitution, while Gunnar Myrdal said there was "a nearly fetishistic cult of the Constitution."  You could say that these characterizations just reflect approval versus disapproval of the same outlook.  But I think there's a real distinction, which can be illustrated by a Supreme Court decision from 2015.  In a referendum, the voters of Arizona had voted to have an independent committee to draw the districts for its seats in the House of Representatives.  The Arizona legislature objected on the grounds that it violated this part of the Constitution:  "the Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations..."  The Supreme Court rejected this by 5-4.  The majority said that "Legislature" could be interpreted to include the voters as a whole; the minority said that it could only mean the people who were elected to meet in the state capitol.  The minority opinion. written by John Roberts, said that people might be concerned about the fairness of having state legislatures handle redistricting, but that if they wanted to change that system, they had to go through Congress.  But there was an additional minority opinion by Clarence Thomas joined by Antonin Scalia.  This commented on the measure that had been approved by the voters:  "The ballot initiative in this case, unlike those that the Court has previously treated so dismissively, was unusually democracy-reducing. It did not ask the people to approve a particular redistricting plan through direct democracy, but instead to take districting away from the people’s representatives and give it to an unelected committee, thereby reducing democratic control over the process in the future. The Court’s characterization of this as direct democracy at its best is rather like praising a plebiscite in a 'banana republic' that installs a strongman as President for Life."   This is an example of  "fetishism"--not only did Thomas feel compelled to defend the traditional system, but his defense didn't contain any evidence or reasoning--it was just an expression of outrage that someone would want a system different from the one he saw as prescribed by the Constitution.  

This was the same passage that many Republicans relied on in questioning the 2020 election.  Their objection was that changes in voting rules in response to the Covid pandemic had been made by "unelected committees" (election officials) or state courts, rather than by the state legislatures.   That meant that they been enacted in violation of the Constitution--and because they had been enacted in violation of the Constitution, you could assume that they were bad in substance.    That is, the "nearly fetishistic cult of the Constitution" was what made technical objections count so heavily with Republican politicians and voters, even after they had been rejected by the courts. 

*I say "perhaps" because there's only one example--I looked for similar questions in other years, but didn't find any--but I think it's a strong example, since Gore clearly didn't have a passionate following.

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]