No need to vote, Trump says while signaling a dark ’24 strategy

Donald Trump wants to be elected president in 2024 — and he’s planning to use tactics from 1924 to do it, including racist targeting and intimidation.

On Monday, the former president shared an image on his struggling social media platform that was captioned, “Start arresting the poll workers and watch how fast they tell you who told them to cheat.” The image appears to depict two Black women wearing Biden/Harris face masks and may call to mind the two Black poll workers in Georgia — Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss — targeted by Trump and his allies with racist lies after the 2020 election.

At a New Hampshire rally Monday night, Trump told attendees that they should worry more about watching other voters than casting their own ballots. 

“You gotta get out there and you gotta watch those voters,” Trump said before adding: “You don’t have to vote; don’t worry about voting. The voting — we got plenty of votes.”

It was an odd thing to say in New Hampshire, of all places, where recent polling has shown Trump trailing President Joe Biden. But, disturbingly, the remark wasn’t completely detached from conservatives’ actions in the past — or their plans for the future.

Trump has made such calls before. As Ari Berman wrote for The Nation back in 2016, Trump tried to recruit throngs of poll watchers to stop what he claimed was election rigging by Hillary Clinton. And his call was answered by neo-Nazis and other racist extremists. Berman wrote:

Donald Trump is working his supporters into a frenzy by claiming the election is rigged and recruiting poll watchers to “Stop Crooked Hillary From Rigging This Election!” His white-nationalist allies, including neo-Nazis and Klan members, say they’re planning to deploy thousands of poll watchers to urban areas. And Trump adviser Roger Stone is sending volunteers to nine Democratic cities with large minority populations, like Cleveland and Las Vegas.

America has a history of mobs of poll watchers being used for racist intimidation.

In author Michael Newton’s treatise on the history of the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi, for example, he writes of Klansmen in the early 1900s who served as poll watchers to “make the negroes vote ‘right.’” (You can learn more on the history of poll watcher intimidation — and Trump’s role in that history — here.)

In 1982, a consent decree restricted the Republican National Committee’s ability to use poll watchers after the RNC used an armed group of off-duty officers to intimidate Black and Hispanic voters in New Jersey. But a federal judge allowed the consent decree to end in 2018.

Ever since, Republicans have ramped up their poll-watching efforts, arguably fueling vigilantism in the process. In last year’s midterms, for example, there were reports of armed people watching ballot drop boxes in the Phoenix area, raising concerns — including from the Department of Justice — that they were engaging in voter intimidation. RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel told CNN at the time: “Nobody should be intimidating or breaking the law — nobody should. But poll watching is not intimidating.”

It sure seems like the RNC is eager to take advantage of the legal gray area between the two. This month, the RNC announced plans to hire thousands of poll watchers for 2024, with McDaniel saying it was in order to “hold Democrats accountable for bad laws that make voting less secure.”

The move suggests the organization plans to usher resources in furtherance of Trump’s conspiratorial claims about election fraud and help him fuel distrust toward poll workers — particularly, Black ones. 

Sounds like the RNC is running the 2020 playbook all over again. But let’s be clear: It’s the 1920 playbook, too.