ALREADY BEGUN: The post-election court fights to block Trump from taking office

Vice Presidential nominee Tim Walz recently set off a firestorm by saying the Electoral College "needs to go" and that the national popular vote should determine the next president.

"Democrats have now made it a tradition to object to electors, certain slates of electors, and they have every single time a Republican president has won in the last quarter century," House Speaker Mike Johnson told the New York Post on Monday. "They have objected for often ridiculous reasons, and I expect that many of them would object when Trump wins, for no other reason than they just don't like him."

Yet Democratic lawmakers and the media are already laying the groundwork to make it seem like the former Republican president is the only candidate who might fight the election results.

A long and slanted article in Politico recently laid out all the various scenarios Trump might take to overturn the election if he loses.

But Democrats' plans were reduced to a single parenthetical sentence: "(If Trump wins, no one expects a comparable effort by Democrats to subvert the election)."

This despite the fact that some Democrats tried in 2017 to block Trump's election over Hillary Clinton and have already publicly speculated about what would happen if Trump wins in 2024.

"We would have to, in any election… make sure that all the rules have been followed," U.S. Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., said.

And U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson, chair of the Jan. 6 committee, said he expected Democrats would challenge a Trump win in court.

U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., told Axios that if Trump "won a free, fair and honest election, then we would obviously accept it" – pointedly refusing to say what would happen if he believed the results were not fair and honest.

Raskin added that he "definitely" didn't assume Trump would use fair and honest tactics to win.

"(Trump) is doing whatever he can to try to interfere with the process, whether we're talking about manipulating electoral college counts in Nebraska or manipulating the vote count in Georgia or imposing other kinds of impediments," he said.

U.S. Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., likewise publicly mused about Democrats' options should Trump win in the Electoral college.

"We have to see how it all happens," McGovern told Axios, adding "My expectation is that we would (certify it)."

Despite trying to paint Trump and Republicans as election deniers, Democrats have done the same thing for years in cases where Republicans have won. Remember the "Not my president" bumper stickers from eight years ago and from when George W. Bush won?

In fact, the last time Democrats didn't try to challenge the election was when former Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis lost in a landslide in 1988.

The scenarios to block Trump from taking back the White House include going to court to try and argue that Trump's felony conviction bars him from becoming president.

Some Democrats for years have fought to change the rules of the Electoral College to keep Trump from wrapping up a victory.

This is because Democrats know that Kamala Harris is likely to win the popular vote but not get the required votes in the Electoral College.

Harris herself has never been asked if she would accept a Trump win, despite Trump and top Republicans being asked the same question numerous times.

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Joe Battenfeld
Boston Herald/(TNS)

Joe Battenfeld is a veteran Boston Herald political columnist and multimedia reporter.