I don’t buy polls that say race between Trump, Biden is neck-and-neck | Opinion

Utah’s Republican Sen. Mitt Romney announced last month that he will not be seeking re-election for another term in office, basically because he’s fed up. The "why" is not much of a mystery.

Romney, whose father George Romney was once governor of Michigan, was one of the very few Republicans willing to oppose Trump publicly. He was the only Republican who voted to convict on Trump’s first impeachment, and one of 10 who voted to convict for the second impeachment. Following the Jan. 6 insurrection, when Romney became one of those Republicans targeted by the mob for his unwillingness to fall in line, the Detroit native (he was born at DMC Harper University Hospital in 1947) was forced to shell out $5,000 a day for private security to protect his family.

At roughly the same time, Georgia poll worker Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss, for example, who were falsely accused by Trump’s personal pitbull Rudy Giuliani of tampering with ballots in favor of President Joe Biden during the 2020 election, experienced the kind of racist threats that make what Romney had to endure look like sandbox bullying. No $5,000 per day security for them, however.

Nevertheless, it’s all part of the same twisted circus led by Trump that has caused Special Counsel Jack Smith, who has also received threats, to request a legal muzzle for the defendant, who is actively making threats of his own as well as encouraging his base to rise up and raise hell on his behalf. Specifically, Smith has requested that Judge Tanya Chutkan (also the subject of threats made by the same MAGA crowd) issue a “narrowly tailored” gag order to shut the man up. The purpose is to protect the sanctity of the judicial process ― including the safety of potential jurors and the jury selection process ― from an obviously dangerous and deranged individual who has far more power to wreak havoc on a massive scale than your average defendant.

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Which is why a gag order has virtually no power to stop what’s coming in 2024, if not sooner. It was a worthy effort, but this particular threat escaped Pandora’s box long ago with a specific directive: raise havoc. And it has been working.

I doubt we’ll see another insurrection like what happened in 2021. But when a ridiculously wealthy white man who happens to be a member of the U.S. Senate is forced to spend $5,000 per day to protect his family from the realization of lethal threats and intimidation spewed by the white followers of a white nationalist cult leader incensed that this wealthy individual would not bow down and kiss the hairpiece, that should give you an idea of the reckoning that is on America's horizon.

Because it isn’t often that you see a wealthy white Republican conservative male targeted by an angry white mob.

It gets even more interesting when that same angry white mob has come after two Black female poll workers (Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss), a Black female judge (Tanya Chutkan), a Black female District Attorney (Fani Willis), a Black male District Attorney (Alvin Bragg) and a Black female State Attorney General (Letitia James).

And all of them were targeted for the same reason; standing up for democracy and facing down a clear and present danger to the same.

The fact that the threats are becoming more random and less organized makes them more dangerous, not less. Which takes me back to the potential problem this poses for the 2024 elections.

I keep seeing polls that say the race between Trump and President Joe Biden is neck-and-neck, and that this is evidence of how divided the country is. I’ll buy the fact that the country is divided, but it has been divided for a long, long, lonnnnng time. We didn’t just get that way.

I do not buy the polls showing President Biden running neck-and-neck with a twice-impeached, quadruply indicted man who has been declared a rapist by a civil court judge. America may be divided, but we’re not bat-guano crazy either. Not the majority of us. So I’m sorry, I just don’t buy it.

What we should be paying attention to isn’t another politically manufactured horse race designed to keep viewers breathless and panting. We should be focused on is the threat of a corrupted electoral process led by a desperately violent mob pulling the strings of a willing and pliable body of elected officials ready and willing to pervert the outcome of the most important and consequential election in modern American history.

Because that warped crew has had four years to figure out how to get it right this time around, and intimidation has played a large role. Already, hundreds of election workers across the country have decided against fulfilling those roles ever again after the harassment they endured during the 2020 election. Who knows how many more have been scared away from even trying it for the first time?

This is the type of fear that leads good people to believe nothing can be done, which leads to paralysis, which is what the forces of havoc are counting on. Because it’s all they have.

Keith A. Owens is a local writer and co-founder of Detroit Stories Quarterly and the We Are Speaking Substack newsletter and podcast. Contact the Free Press opinion page: freep.com/letters

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Election deniers will only be more dangerous in 2024. We can stop them