Project 2025 partner blog: “If Kamala Harris does win, it will, as of today, be because of a stolen election”
The Claremont Institute's Brian Kennedy: “Americans can be a very rough lot of people when they want to be. You can rig one election before their eyes, but can you rig two?”
Written by Madeline Peltz
Published
A Project 2025 partner blog published an op-ed titled “What if Harris Gets Away with It?” claiming Vice President Kamala Harris could win the 2024 election only if it is “stolen,” which would turn the United States into “an ungovernable country” that might involve “political disintegration."
In The American Mind, published by Project 2025 partner the Claremont Institute, Claremont senior fellow and board member Brian Kennedy claimed, “Over the past two decades we have been living through a slow-motion Communist revolution,” and the “corruption of our election system” has been “the most devastating."
He continued:
So, if Kamala Harris does win, it will, as of today, be because of a stolen election. Under these circumstances, America will become an ungovernable country. Large groups of Americans will believe their vote no longer counts. We have the experience this summer of Venezuela, where it was clear the opposition party won—so said the Biden Administration—only to have the Maduro regime keep hold of power by affirming the fraudulent results and gutting it out publicly against domestic and world opinion. One imagines the Harris campaign learned a lesson from that.
Kennedy then imagined a violent civil war scenario that might follow:
Americans can be a very rough lot of people when they want to be. You can rig one election before their eyes, but can you rig two? And can you rig the second one so openly and brazenly, and expect that the American people will not push back? How they push back is another matter, but it would serve the interest of America’s enemies to face a nation even more deeply divided than ours already is. Violence is not an option. But a political disintegration of Red America from Blue America is not impossible.
He recommended potential preventative measures to guard against a Harris win, including a “whistleblower program that offers a multi-million dollar reward for real evidence of” election fraud, “either through counterfeit mail-in ballots, fraudulent election day ballots, overseas ballots, or cyberattacks against our electronic voting system.”
He also suggested:
A second tactic could be to create a “Decision Desk 2024” on X both in Spaces and on the “America” video platform. It cannot be left to the legacy broadcast media to announce the winner of the election as if they have some divine authority. The mainstream media, from Fox News to MSNBC, ABC, NBC, and CBS, have devolved into pure propaganda arms of the American Deep State. As such, they have disqualified themselves.
Elon Musk can build a team of respected journalists and analysts to perform their own calculations and judgments about who won the election. He and his platform have a greater reach both nationally and internationally than the “mainstream” media. Imagine Elon Musk with Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and the like examining the results. Not only would they be better trusted, but the democratization of the results by all the users of X would serve the American people better as well.
“Finally,” he wrote, “Americans must prepare themselves and their families for what could be great societal dislocation,” without offering specific recommendations about what that might mean.
A recent Media Matters analysis found significant ties between authors, contributors, and partner organizations involved in Project 2025 and the ongoing right-wing efforts to disenfranchise voters and sow confusion about the 2024 election.
Media Matters’ Matt Gertz wrote about this strategy recently:
By way of preparing my own audience: It is possible none of this will ultimately matter. With numerous swing states polling within the margin of error, and the chance of a systemic poll error in play, Trump could very well win legitimately in November.
But if the election returns show that Harris has triumphed, Trump has a backup plan ready to go: He can attempt to subvert the election, as he did in 2020.
While elements of that plan could be different, the broad strokes of declaring victory, presenting himself as the victim of election fraud, filing pretextual lawsuits, and ultimately leaning on Republican officials at the local, state, and federal levels to hand him the presidency remain unchanged.
This strategy rests on Trump being able to convince the Republican base that he won the election. In 2020, he had the support of a vast right-wing media ecosystem that, with few exceptions, had already prepped its audience to disbelieve the results of the election if Trump won. The result was a violent assault on the U.S. Capitol that threatened American democracy.
Since then, the right has purged media figures and Republican politicians who had stood in the way of the plot. And now, in 2024, the same players are again laying the groundwork for a Trumpian subversion effort.