As President-elect Donald Trump busily assembles his new administration, Democrat super-lawyer Marc Elias is quietly trying to reverse a key Republican win in a U.S. Senate race.
Although The Associated Press has already declared Pennsylvania Republican Dave McCormick the victory over Democrat incumbent Bob Casey, there are still tens of thousands of outstanding “provisional” ballots that can be put to mischievous use.
In the latest episode of the Drill Down podcast, Peter Schweizer tells how Elias, whom Schweizer has called “a master of the political dark arts,” is trying to trigger a recount in Pennsylvania in a longshot effort to keep the Senate seat in Democratic hands. The ballots in question, 87,000 provisional votes, are ones that have some question of validity. McCormick has a 40,000-vote margin, and of the provisional ballots, only 30,000 or so come from Casey strongholds.
“That’s one of the reasons why the Associated Press has called it,” Schweizer says. “But what Marc Elias is trying to do is judge shopping and he’s trying to figure out a way to trigger a mandatory recount.”
Schweizer recalls, “this is exactly what he did in the Minnesota Senate race” – a tight 2008 Senate race that was apparently won by Republican Norm Coleman, but eventually was awarded to Democrat Al Franken after Marc Elias went to work. “He got a judge to allow over a thousand ballots that had previously been discarded because they had some associated with felons. That’s why a lot of people think that Al Franken shouldn’t have been seated in the Senate in the first place because of illegal votes. And [Elias] is on the job in Pennsylvania.”
Drill Down co-host Eric Eggers asks about Trump carrying Pennsylvania, which both his and Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaigns contested thoroughly and where both spent a lot of time and money. “I think he had a great message that resonated with people… the messaging and the focus on the issues really mattered. The fears that Kamala Harris was trying to raise with people about Donald Trump ended up for most voters to be an abstraction, a fiction,” Schweizer says.
But Elias’s maneuvers can work both ways — and Eggers has done the research. He notes that Trump’s key win in Pennsylvania was partly owing to the efforts of Elon Musk, who himself learned a trick or two from Marc Elias. “Here’s a guy that can catch a dang rocket with chopsticks, he can figure out how to get people to the ballot box in a really big way,” Eggers notes. “Musk was out there doing stuff.
“But the whole reason why they” – Musk’s team – “were allowed to do this, why they were allowed to essentially coordinate this America PAC with the Trump campaign, is because of Marc Elias. That’s what’s interesting about this. Credit to Ken Vogel of the New York Times who pointed this out. If you go to Marc Elias’s website, he brags in March of this year that Texas Majority PAC, a PAC Elias set up to use paid canvassers to get out the vote” in 2018.
Musk essentially re-used Elias’s playbook and did the same thing.
Schweizer agrees. “Certainly, that get-out-the-vote effort made a huge difference in Pennsylvania. The criticism of Marc Elias is he’s so aggressive and, at times, reckless. His efforts create rulings or precedents that other people can later use to beat him. And that’s kind of what happened here.”
That’s a pattern that will repeat again. In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom had set up a California focused PAC of his own that he is now reconstituting as a national, anti-Trump committee, Schweizer notes.
Speaking of California, more than a week after the election, half a dozen races for the U.S. House of Representatives were still not finally decided in the Golden State. If the current standing of all those races holds, Republicans would control the House very narrowly with a three-seat majority, which is one fewer than their current margin.
“One of the reasons why in states like California, all these ballot races seem to be extended is because California has among the more liberal ballot integrity laws in the nation. Ballot harvesting is legal,” Schweizer says. “Gavin Newsom signed into law something that prohibits any community in California from requiring voter ID.”
Schweizer notes that the 13th Congressional District had only counted 61.6 percent of its votes, a full week after the election. Several other uncalled races in the state aren’t much better. California 21st District only reports counting 66 percent, and a few other races are barely into the 70 percent range. This, in the state known as the “Tech Capital of the Planet.”
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