Election 2024: What’s the Worst That Can Happen?

When Adam Ellwanger called me in May and asked me to play the part of the “Mainstream Media” in an intellectual exercise to explore just what could go wrong in the pivotal election of 2024, I had my doubts.

Preparing to simulate Election 2024 and its coverage

After all, my experience for the past 40 years has been working at a small community newspaper in Kalispell, Montana. I may have dreamed of working at the New York Times back in the era of Ronald Reagan, but at some point I came to the realization that the kind of straightforward journalism I practiced would be a career dead-end at a paper like The Times or The Washington Post, where a leftist political agenda was a key part of the journalist’s toolkit.

I told Adam that, but he quickly convinced me that my observations of the mainstream media for 40-plus years provided the perfect perch by which I could aid his project by mimicking the kind of reporting that could be expected to drive the narrative for the next six months in the 2024 election.

Ellwanger and I had met through a shared appreciation of our conservative columns, mine for RealClearPolitics and his for The American Conservative and other journals. He was living in internal exile as a professor of rhetoric at the University of Houston, surrounded by ideological enemies but still able to fire salvos at the radical left because he was armored with tenure.

Now he was co-director of the Transition Integrity Project 2024 along with Mike Howell, the executive director of the Oversight Project at The Heritage Foundation, and Chuck DeVore, chief national initiatives officer for the Texas Public Policy Foundation.

A new take on the Transition Integrity Project of 2020

The new Transition Integrity Project is based on a similar effort prior to the 2020 election run by Democrats and Never Trump Republicans that concluded “with a high degree of likelihood that November’s elections will be marked by a chaotic legal and political landscape.” The 2020 report also declared that “President Trump is likely to contest the result by both legal and extra-legal means, in an attempt to hold on to power.”

Essentially, what the old report did was set the stage for Democrats and the media to dismiss any Trump challenges to the integrity of the election as predictable and false. Unfortunately, President Trump didn’t do his own strategic planning for “the worst that could happen,” and so he and his team were caught flat-footed when Democrats changed election rules in ways that were clearly illegal.

TIP 2020 rife with wild exaggeration

Republicans were not prepared to fight these changes prior to the election, and had impossible legal deadlines to meet after the election. Certainly, if Trump had been able to foresee the possibility of a mob of MAGA supporters attacking the Capitol on Jan. 6, he would have made damn sure those 10,000 National Guard troops he had authorized were deployed and ready to restore calm. No one had his political prospects damaged more by the events of Jan. 6 than Donald Trump. If there had been no riot, he could have had his supporters in Congress make the case that the election was illegitimate. They probably would have lost, but Trump would not have been impeached or later indicted for insurrection.

Ultimately, the Transition Integrity Project’s predictions wildly exaggerated the tactics of Trump and his team in contesting the election. Trump did not pardon himself or others involved in challenging the Biden victory. Trump did not “take the money and run” as the Democratic strategists “universally believed” would happen. Trump did not “initiate a foreign crisis … to change the media narrative,” and he did not destroy evidence, all of which was predicted by the report.

The TIP for Election 2024 is now available

One of the few determinations of TIP 2020 that ought to be given great weight is its conclusion that “an incumbent running for re-election can use the powers of the presidency to great advantage.” Indeed, that is the starting point of TIP 2024, because if Democrats were so capable of controlling the narrative in the 2020 election, how much more could they accomplish with Joe Biden in the White House instead of in his basement?

So I signed up for what was essentially a week of “war games” to consider all possible scenarios for how this year’s presidential race could unfold from the conventions up to the Jan. 20 inauguration. My job was to monitor the actions and words of the other participants, and report on them with the left-wing bias we all find so charming in the mainstream media. The report, which is available on The Heritage Foundation website, describes the project thusly:

A bipartisan group of about 60 well-known individuals with experience in politics, government, law, national security, media, and academia participated in role-playing scenarios which placed the election within the larger context of pressing issues that America faces at home and abroad: inflation, mass illegal immigration, Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine, China’s increasingly bellicose actions in the seas around Taiwan and the Philippines, Iranian aggression toward US interests, and more.

Some of the scenarios would seem totally outrageous were it not for the fact that we have just lived through the Night of the Long Knives when a slew of powerful Democrats came for Biden after his weak debate performance. Unpredictable? Not if you are war-gaming every possible wild card that might realistically be played by those with a vested interest in the outcome of the election.

Two Election 2024 war games

TIP 2024 set forth two separate war games with different participants who were free to imagine how power on the national and international stages could be wielded to influence the outcome of the election.

In Exercise One, there were distinct threats to election integrity posed by Mexican interference and Hamas-related protests in urban areas. The latter may have emboldened a group of Hamas terrorists who took hostage a major Jewish celebrity. Within the administration, the FBI was unleashed to perform civil-rights investigations in battleground states and to intimidate local election officials.

In Exercise Two, it was China that played a major international role by provocative actions against Taiwan. There was also overt election interference by Pennsylvania’s governor in the form of official actions that likely suppressed Republican voter turnout, and that was followed by the arrest of Donald Trump by Attorney General Merrick Garland two days after the election on charges that looked suspiciously like a retread of the charges already brought by Special Counsel Jack Smith.

As all of that, and much more, was playing out, I was putting on my Mainstream Media “party hat” and working overtime to spin every occurrence into one more reason that Donald Trump was an existential threat to democracy.

Example headlines

The mock headlines speak for themselves:

• “FBI Warns Pennsylvania of Threats Against Election Officials” (New York Times)
• “Did Russians Just Unleash an April Surprise in October?” (NBC News)
• “Probe to Unmask Far-Right Extremists Pushing MAGA Narrative Within Chicago PD” (Chicago Tribune)
• “Nuclear Detonation Near Tehran Puts World at Risk of WWIII; Israel to Blame?” (New York Times)
• “Facing Court Losses, DOJ Signals Refusal to Recognize Trump as President-Elect” (Washington Post)
• “In Opposition to Other Platforms, X Provides ‘Safe Space’ for Disinformation” (Los Angeles Times)
• “Fox News Falls for Hoax Claiming Trump to Be Arrested” (CNN)
• “Trump Arrested by DOJ After Apparent Election Victory; High Court Will Have Final Say” (Miami Herald)
• “GOP May Install Trump as President Thanks to Congressional Victory” (Washington Post)

I wish these fictional stories seemed far-fetched, but they don’t – not remotely. And of course, none of them would have been top of mind were it not for the Transition Integrity Project 2024 taking the lead and asking, “What’s the worst that can happen?”

Pay attention!

The report concludes with 20 “key lessons and recommendations … that may be useful to government officials, campaign staff, citizens, and more” about how to cope with a contested election like we saw in 2020. Whether those lessons will be heeded remains to be seen.

Certainly, the mainstream media will be unlikely to report fairly on a report that has The Heritage Foundation as a sponsor. Although the 2020 TIP document was widely reported by the news media as a valuable contribution to understanding the threats to democracy that the nation faced, the rollout of this new report, using the same techniques and criteria, will probably be dismissed as right-wing propaganda.

After all, that’s the job of the mainstream media, isn’t it?

This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.