Given the conspiracist far right’s increasingly tight grip on the Republican Party, it is easy to perceive the GOP as wholly compromised. But in fact, principled Republican officials were essential to defending democracy from President Donald Trump’s attempted coup in 2020. They might be just as critical in 2024.
To be clear, these are not political moderates, but conservative Republican stalwarts who wanted Mr. Trump to win. Their principled resistance to Mr. Trump’s corrupt efforts prevented a constitutional crisis that could have unleashed far more widespread violence than the nation saw on Jan. 6 — and, perhaps, decimated its democratic system.
Unfortunately, it is far from clear how many such officials are left in the GOP — or will be after this year’s midterm elections. Tuesday’s hearing revealed text messages suggesting that Wisconsin Republican Sen. Ron Johnson’s office tried to pass false slates of electors to Vice President Mike Pence on Jan. 6, which offered new evidence of how far a ludicrous effort to overturn a valid presidential election proceeded. The Texas Republican Party formally declared at its convention over the weekend that Mr. Biden “was not legitimately elected.” Republicans have embraced election deniers as their preferred candidates to oversee elections in swing states Colorado, Michigan and Nevada. Lower-level GOP election officials who held the line in Michigan in 2020 have been removed. Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), who has refused to stay silent as Mr. Trump’s lies have pervaded her party, has been all but formally booted from the House GOP caucus.
The existential challenge facing Republicans — and, by extension, a nation under threat from the radicalization of one of its two major political parties — is no longer one of standing together on conservative ideological principles. Increasingly, it is whether they must inhabit an alternate reality based on dangerous lies about the country and its political system. Too many of those who have refused to go along with those delusions have been replaced or are under political assault. Some have even found themselves and their families facing physical danger. Whether 2024 is a democratic disaster might depend on how many are left after this year’s midterm elections.
