Congressional Republicans intending to challenge election results will face a barrage of aggressive ads from a new left-leaning political coalition that aims to spend a war chest north of $10 million in the coming weeks.
In anticipation of a right-wing effort to meddle with election certification should Vice President Kamala Harris win Tuesday, major Democratic groups like the Center for American Progress and Indivisible, among others, are preparing a counterattack that could come into play in the 62-day gray zone between Election Day and Jan. 6 of next year.
The plan: An operation called the “House Accountability War Room,” which will blitz TV commercials and social media content directed specifically at any member of Congress whom Democrats perceive as trying to relitigate the election like they did in 2020.
The group isn’t disclosing the source of the funds. Spokesperson Cole Leiter said, “Funding for the war room’s paid campaign will come from supporters who are united behind a common focus on ensuring that the 2024 election is certified.”
Democrats were caught by surprise four years ago, when outgoing President Donald Trump launched dozens of legal challenges in states across the country, convinced Republicans in seven states to submit signed lists of fake electors meant to replace the legitimate ones and pressured state election officials to erase his loss at the polls. But this time, left-leaning groups are preparing for a fight.
The “war room” isn’t a literal one in a single physical location, the way some of Trump’s closest associates met at the Willard Hotel in Washington last time around to devise an interruption in the certification of Electoral College votes to prevent President Joe Biden from assuming office. Instead, this effort will be spread across the country to match what they consider a nationwide threat that is best addressed locally.
The group wouldn’t share any drafts of images or videos it plans to dole out if Republicans do engage in the kind of bitter postelection fight that’s expected, noting that it doesn’t plan to spend the money unless necessary — and even then, it will craft ads that directly respond to election-denying members of Congress.
On Thursday, the group released its first memo, titled “Why it is Better to be Accurate than Fast,” countering Trump’s claim that votes should only be counted on Election Day — essentially calling to throw out millions of legally submitted mail-in ballots. Earlier this month, Rolling Stone reported that Trump’s campaign is planning to declare that this year’s election was “rigged” if he is losing to Harris and will demand that state officials “stop the count.”
The initial memo shows how the Democratic group will be reminding the public how Republicans tried to pass several elections-related measures: the SAVE Act that they say was meant to “perpetuate false claims that noncitizens are voting in our elections en masse” and the Uniform State ACE Act, which intended to cut off federal funding in locales where nonprofits help voters mail in their ballots and also tried to impose nationwide voter ID when requesting that option.
“None of these bills ever had the hope of becoming law or would actually improve the integrity of our elections. But by introducing them in this Congress, Republican legislators have set up possible ‘proof points’ that they were working toward ‘solutions’ for the problems they may claim cost them the election,” the memo states.
The memo also points out how local GOP groups have already attempted legal challenges that keep getting batted down by judges. In Pennsylvania, a federal judge dismissed a Republican lawsuit on Tuesday that tried to tighten the rules for verifying ballots coming in from voters overseas — including those from U.S. military service members. Earlier this month, a state judge in Georgia dismissed a Republican lawsuit that sought to highlight vulnerabilities in voting computer systems and concluded that the secretary of state there had indeed complied with the law when his office certified machines as “safe.”
The overall picture is that Republicans have been gearing up for a fight, and the counterattack is prepped and ready to go.
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Jose Pagliery is a reporter at NOTUS.