The 2024 presidential election has been touted as the “most important” election in U.S. history by both campaigns, as former President Trump works to reclaim the Oval Office and Vice President Harris pitches herself to voters as the next leader of the U.S.
As the high-stakes election comes down to its final weeks, Fox News Digital compiled the top political and legal tactics that critics, most notably on the right, have slammed as efforts by the Democratic Party to undermine democracy in the run-up to the big day on Nov. 5.
Former President Trump and Vice President Harris (Reuters)
Attempts to kick Trump off the ballot
Former President Trump (Michael Ciaglo/Getty Images)
Before the Republican Party officially nominated Trump as its presidential nominee, Democrats in states such as Colorado, California, Illinois and others attempted to remove Trump’s name from primary ballots.
Last year, a group of Colorado voters brought a lawsuit arguing Trump should be deemed ineligible from holding political office under a Civil War-era insurrection clause and that his name should thus be barred from appearing on the 2024 ballot. The group said Trump’s actions on Jan. 6, 2021, when some of his supporters breached the U.S. Capitol, violated a clause in the 14th Amendment that prevents officers of the United States, members of Congress or state legislatures who “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the Constitution from holding political office.
The Colorado case ultimately made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which unanimously sided with Trump that he should remain on the state’s ballot. The ruling affected all states across the nation that worked to remove Trump’s name, requiring them to include him on primary ballots as well.
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The tactic was slammed by Republicans and conservatives as a “constitutional violation,” while even former Obama adviser David Axelrod warned on CNN that removing Trump’s name would be seen as “a subversion” of democracy.
Fox News Digital spoke to Wyoming Secretary of State Chuck Gray when the SCOTUS decision was released, who called the Democrat tactic “lunacy.” Gray had been battling Democrats’ argument that Trump was ineligible to appear on the primary ballots over Jan. 6 for months ahead of the Supreme Court decision.
“I think one of the lessons of this is … the way the radical left despises the American people and our process, and what happens then is lunacy. And that’s what their whole argumentation and what they were trying to do was. It was pure lunacy,” Gray told Fox Digital in March.
“We’re going to continue to monitor the processes across our nation and be vigilant. Any time the people are able to choose for themselves, that’s a win for our republic, and that’s what our elections are about. And I’m going to continue to unapologetically fight for the people of Wyoming and the people across our country to choose who to elect for themselves,” Gray added at the time.
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Overhauling the Supreme Court
The U.S. Supreme Court (Robert Alexander/Getty Images)
The Biden-Harris administration in July rolled out a slate of policies to overhaul the Supreme Court. The proposal includes calls for term limits for Supreme Court justices, an enforceable ethics code for justices and an amendment to the Constitution to overturn the high court’s ruling that former presidents have substantial immunity from prosecution for official acts while in office.
Critics slammed the proposal as an attempt to pack the court, including attorney Mark Paoletta, who worked for the Trump administration. He argued that, including the term limit proposal, Biden and Harris’ plan outlined a system in which the president appoints a new Supreme Court justice “every two years to spend 18 years in active service on the Supreme Court.”
“Even though Joe Biden caved to radicals and recently endorsed court packing, Harris is even further to the left of him on this thoroughly discredited idea,” Paoletta said in a statement to Fox News Digital in August.
Conservative activist Leonard Leo also argued to Fox Digital that the proposal would likely serve as a prelude to court packing if Harris is elected next month.
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“If Kamala Harris is elected president, and if the Senate is in Democrat hands, I think that there is some risk of court packing. I think that there is some risk of continued, scurrilous attacks on the integrity of the court, all based on a disagreement over the outcomes of various decisions that Democrats don’t like,” he said. “And that would really be most unfortunate.”
Democrats have pushed to broaden the court in an effort to switch it from a conservative majority. Biden, however, had previously called court packing a “bonehead idea” in 1983 while serving as a U.S. senator from Delaware, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken called it “anti-democratic” in 2021.
Proposal to eliminate the filibuster
(Celal Gunes/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
Harris called for the end of the filibuster last month in an effort to pass a law restoring abortion access nationwide, which was slammed by lawmakers and conservatives as an attack on democracy.
“Shame on her,” independent Sen. Joe Manchin said at the Capitol last month. “She knows the filibuster is the Holy Grail of democracy. It’s the only thing that keeps us talking and working together. If she gets rid of that, then this would be the house on steroids.”
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The filibuster is a Senate rule that allows a minority to block legislation pending a supermajority vote, so ending it would make it easier to pass laws related to abortion rights.
Harris said late last month she would like to end the filibuster to pass a law protecting access to abortion.
“I think we should eliminate the filibuster for Roe,” Harris said during a WPR interview. “And get us to the point where 51 votes would be what we need to actually put back in law the protections for reproductive freedom and for the ability of every person and every woman to make decisions about their own body and not have their government tell them what to do.”
Democrat-turned-independent Sen. Kyrsten Sinema also panned the proposal, calling it a “terrible, shortsighted idea.”
“To state the supremely obvious, eliminating the filibuster to codify Roe v Wade also enables a future Congress to ban all abortion nationwide,” Sinema, who left the Democratic Party in 2022, wrote on X. “What an absolutely terrible, shortsighted idea.”
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Concerns over immigration crisis, voting
Immigrants line up at a remote U.S. Border Patrol processing center after crossing the U.S.-Mexico border on Dec. 7, 2023, in Lukeville, Ariz. (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)
Illegal immigration via the nation’s southern border grew to crisis levels under the Biden administration, with at least 7 million migrants coming into the nation in the last three and a half years.
Illegal immigrants are not able to vote in federal elections, but conservative lawmakers and pundits have warned that upcoming elections could be affected by the flux of migrants.
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“If you have a small percentage of the millions and billions (sic) of illegals who came over the border in the last four years under border czar Kamala Harris’ policies, they can throw an election, they can throw the majority of the House,” Speaker of the House Mike Johnson said last month.
Republicans in Congress introduced legislation this year, the SAVE Act, that would require proof of citizenship to register to vote. Lawmakers who promoted the legislation cited that it would “preserve our democracy.”
“There’s nothing more sacred and more profound than the right to vote and especially to preserve our self-governing constitutional republic and to preserve our democracy. And the Democrats can keep talking about democracy, but nothing undermines the values of the right of each individual to have their vote cast and allowing non-citizens to vote,” New York Republican Rep. Claudia Tenney, the chair of the House Election Integrity Caucus, told Fox News Digital in July.
Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, told Fox News Digital this year that illegal immigration “distorts the mechanics of democratic government” and may significantly impact states’ representation in the House of Representatives and Electoral College.
Ending the Electoral College
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Harris’ running mate, advocated for the end of the Electoral College during a campaign event this week – a call conservatives have previously panned.
“I think all of us know the Electoral College needs to go,” he said, according to a pool report at the event, Bloomberg reported. “We need a national popular vote, but that’s not the world we live in.”
The campaign subsequently walked Walz’s comment back shortly after.
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“Governor Walz believes that every vote matters in the Electoral College and he is honored to be traveling the country and battleground states working to earn support for the Harris-Walz ticket,” a Harris campaign spokesperson told USA Today. “He was commenting to a crowd of strong supporters about how the campaign is built to win 270 electoral votes. And, he was thanking them for their support that is helping fund those efforts.”
Liberals have increasingly called for the end of the Electoral College, which is the formal process of electing the president and vice president, in favor of the popular vote. The Electoral College consists of a certain number of electors from each state who cast votes for the president and vice president, then whichever candidate receives the most ballots is awarded the electoral votes for that state.
Since 1992, Democrats have won seven of the eight popular votes, including failed 2016 candidate Hillary Clinton and failed 2000 candidate Al Gore, who lost the Electoral College despite winning the popular vote.
Conservatives have slammed efforts and calls to end the Electoral College, including the Heritage Foundation’s Hans Von Spakovsky, who argued that getting rid of the process would not produce a more democratic election.
“The U.S. should maintain the Electoral College, which has successfully elected Presidents throughout this nation’s history in a way that best represents the diverse and various interests of America,” Von Spakovsky wrote in a piece after the 2020 election.
“In an age of perceived political dysfunction, effective policies that are already in place – especially successful policies established by this nation’s Founders, such as the Electoral College – should be preserved.“
In 2012, Trump also panned the electoral system, calling it “a disaster for a democracy.” In 2018, he again voiced support for the idea because a popular vote would be “much easier to win.”
However, more recently, the Trump campaign has since slammed Walz for his comments calling for the abolition of the Electoral College, with spokesperson Karoline Leavitt saying this week that the process is “a critical component of our Constitution.”
Democratic nominee not picked through primary races
Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Harris (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
Harris ascended to the top of the Democrat ticket without facing a primary after President Biden dropped out of the race this past summer as concerns mounted over his mental acuity and age.
Biden endorsed Harris for the Oval Office shortly after dropping out of race via a social media post on X, with the Democratic Party subsequently quickly coalescing around the VP. She won enough delegate support to secure the nomination at the Democratic National Convention in August.
Harris also ran for the White House during the 2020 election season, but dropped out of the race before primary elections kicked off.
Conservatives and liberals alike have slammed the Democratic Party for championing Harris as their candidate despite the VP not earning the position directly from voters.
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“A 24-hour process of talking to party bosses is not democratic, nor is it a process Democrats should be proud of,” left-wing organization Black Lives Matter said in a press release in July.
“We do not live in a dictatorship. Delegates are not oligarchs. Installing Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee and an unknown vice president without any public voting process would make the modern Democratic Party a party of hypocrites,” the group added.
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Ryan Walker, executive director at Heritage Action For America, a conservative political advocacy organization in Washington, D.C., affiliated with the Heritage Foundation, said that votes for Biden in this election cycle were “thrown away.”
“The votes of 14 million Americans who voted for Joe Biden were thrown away as Harris was installed as the Democrats’ nominee for president, a job for which she has never received a single vote,” Walker said when reacting to former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi recently saying that the primary process was “open” and Harris “won it.”
“Saying she won an open primary is a joke,” Walker said.
Fox News Digital’s Julia Johnson, Andrew Mark Miller, Sarah Rumpf-Whitten and Jaime Joseph contributed to this report.