Republicans from former President Donald Trump on down have been careful about their answers when asked if they’ll accept the results of this year’s presidential election. Trump has repeatedly said he’d do so only “if everything’s honest.” It’s a transparent hedge when placed against his continued false claims of election rigging. But now a group of conservative nerds has already pre-emptively declared that the 2024 election results will be illegitimate.
Despite being one myself, I use the term “nerds” here in the pejorative. It’s the only proper way to describe the people who gathered at the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank behind Project 2025, to “war game” the upcoming election. The so-called simulation they ran wasn’t designed to help understand weak points in our election infrastructure, however, but to lay a foundation to justify tossing out any results that don’t put Trump back in the White House.
The so-called simulation they ran wasn’t designed to help understand weak points in our election infrastructure
“As things stand right now, there’s a zero percent chance of a free and fair election,” Mike Howell, the executive director of Heritage’s Oversight Project, told The Washington Post. “I’m formally accusing the Biden administration of creating the conditions that most reasonable policymakers and officials cannot in good conscience certify an election.” That’s a bold statement to make, and it isn’t even credibly backed up by the group’s own findings, especially given the biases baked into its exercise.
I’ll pause here to say that I’m not an expert in this field. There are many legitimate war game designers out there, several of whom I’ve had the pleasure of interacting with, including Rex Brynen, a political science professor at McGill University, and Ellie Bartels, who works at RAND. But I did participate in my share of Model United Nations conferences between high school and the years after undergrad (if anybody is checking my nerd bona fides).
The Heritage initiative, called the “2024 Transition Integrity Project,” is a pale imitation of a simulation of the same name conducted by a bipartisan group of experts ahead of the 2020 election. The latter was based on what’s called a “Matrix Game” design, where groups representing different stakeholders are given a starting point, declare what they would do in response, then make arguments for why such an action would or wouldn’t work. Success is determined through the strength of those supporting arguments and dice rolls (to introduce an element of chance, like in a Dungeons & Dragons session).
The 2024 version, by contrast, involved a much looser system, where “players” reacted to a series of “real world” updates crafted by the team running the project, who then incorporated those reactions into their plot. Having read through summaries of both versions, the Heritage version had way too many stakeholders, leading it to sound more like a zany Model U.N. exploit instead of a sober look at what could happen this fall.
Beyond the Biden administration and the Republican National Committee, it featured conservative participants representing China, Mexican drug cartels and “Black Lives Matter/Antifa/Pro-Hamas” groups. As the Post noted with a straight face in its coverage, the simulation at one point has pro-Hamas terrorists kidnapping Barbra Streisand as an event that could affect the election’s outcome. Now, I’m not saying that Babs being taken hostage wouldn’t be a crisis of monumental proportions — but I am saying it’s hard to see what useful election insights can be gleaned from that gratuitous plot point.
Moreover, Heritage’s 2024 simulation begins with an assumption — Democrats cheated by gaming the system in 2020 — then works backward from there. This leads its administrators to write in their report that they came to a similar conclusion as the 2020 TIP’s work: “The incumbent is always the greatest threat to a peaceful and effective transfer of power,” the conservative game-runners wrote. This is noted without irony or any mention whatsoever of Trump’s own well-documented attempts to prevent just that after the 2020 election.
Heritage’s 2024 simulation begins with an assumption — Democrats cheated by gaming the system in 2020 — then works backward from there
During one of the two 2024 sessions, this premise culminated in the Biden administration proxies pulling a bizarro-world scenario as one of their last major actions: Rather than admit a narrow defeat, “[Attorney General] Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice arrested Donald Trump on November 7 at Mar-a-Lago, charging him with mishandling classified documents and with insurrection due to the events of January 6, 2021.” Specifically, the Garland stand-in opted to arrest Trump and charge him with treason, a stunt that feels about as far outside of Garland’s M.O. as you can get.
Heritage’s coup-hungry cosplay also stands in stark contrast to the 2020 version, in which both sides of the simulation attempted to swing the narrative after an inconclusive Election Day result. But unlike Team Trump, which the facilitators wrote “was consistently more ruthless [and] more willing to ignore existing democratic norms,” the group representing Team Biden in the 2020 exercises “generally felt constrained by a commitment to norms and a desire to tamp down violence and reduce instability.”
Much like Trump himself, the 2024 TIP’s biggest blind spot — and its biggest tell — is that everyone involved couldn’t help but believe both sides to be equally willing to shatter norms to remain in power. In doing so, the starting assumption became one in which Biden pulls a Democrat-coded version of the power grab that Trump attempted after losing in 2020. That warped logic is then used to justify whatever attempts to delegitimize a potential Biden win that Trump and the RNC’s “Election Integrity Project” cook up.
That effort is already underway, as Republicans gear up to challenge a Trump loss in court in a more organized version of the 2020 legal efforts. It’s entirely likely that the Heritage-backed report will be included as evidence in some of the briefs that are eventually filed. It’s incumbent on any court that receives such a lawsuit to understand that rather than a serious academic work, the Heritage Foundation has produced a very self-aggrandizing piece of unhinged fan fiction.
