Bannon’s Precinct Strategy

For your weekend reading or listening (I won’t say pleasure): Vox’s Sean Illing has this interview with Jennifer Senior, who recently wrote an in-depth feature on Steve Bannon for the Atlantic. Here’s an especially interesting excerpt from the interview with Senior:

What [Bannon] is doing is providing the most radical set of talking points for the Republican Party. He is a font of disinformation. And he’s got a very active audience that will go out and use this disinformation.

And most important: He’s very committed to the precinct strategy. He is getting people precinct by precinct to become election monitors, to become parts of school boards so that they can control the curriculum. If you become a precinct captain, eventually you can have a great deal of power within elections. And you can be quite consequential.

Democrats would do well to take note of this strategy.

We all would do well to take note of this strategy. We are seeing lots of dedicated public servants, including Republicans, Democrats, and people not aligned with either party, leave their jobs as election officials — or seriously thinking about doing so — driven by persistent false claims that the last presidential election was stolen. Harassment and threats have become a fact of life for many people responsible for running elections. While some are sticking it out, others are quite understandably deciding that it’s not worth it. And who’s going to replace them? That’s a question that’s received some public attention, but not nearly as much as it deserves.

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