Joseph Sabino Mistick: America’s civil religion

Think what you will about Richard M. Nixon, but the guy showed how to lose an election with grace in 1960. The Republican presidential nominee lost to Democrat John F. Kennedy in a squeaker, and charges soon surfaced that Kennedy won because of vote rigging in Illinois and Texas.

The Republican Party went on the offensive, looking for the few thousand votes that would put Nixon on top — 4,480 votes in Illinois and 25,000 in Texas. But Nixon publicly stepped back, telling an aide who urged him to challenge the results, “It’d tear the country to pieces. You can’t do that.”

In 2000, Democrat Al Gore won the popular vote by 500,000 votes, but it all came down to Florida’s 25 electoral votes. Gore conceded once on election night, but the margin shrank, triggering a mandatory recount. That lasted for 36 days and resulted in a U.S. Supreme Court decision that essentially gave the victory to Bush by a one-vote margin in the Electoral College.

In his concession speech, Gore said, “I know that many of my supporters are disappointed. I am too. But our disappointment must be overcome by our love of country.”

Both Nixon and Gore were sitting vice presidents when they lost the race for president. And both presided over the counting of electoral votes, each with a humorous touch and each getting a standing ovation from the assembled lawmakers of both parties. It’s different now.

As columnist Dana Milbank wrote in The Washington Post last week, Donald Trump leads with charges of cheating. “For Trump, it’s binary: Heads I win, tails you cheated — except against Hillary Clinton, when he alleged massive fraud even in victory.”

And grooming the voters to resist a possible defeat at the polls is catching on, as we saw from the recent Larry Elder campaign to remove and replace California Gov. Gavin Newsom. Days before the vote, in what Newsom called an “extension of the Big Lie,” Elder’s campaign site posted blank affidavits to make it easy for his supporters to “Report Election Fraud in CA.”

Like Trump, Elder repeatedly refused to say if he would accept the election results if he lost. And he said he had preemptively prepared a lawsuit that he could file after the election. In the end, his drubbing was overwhelming, but the cries of cheating continued.

Fortunately, our great silent civic majority knows better. They believe in our institutions and traditions, including the peaceful transfer of power after national elections. As sociologist Robert Bellah described it, Americans belong to a civil religion that honors our core beliefs and recognizes the Declaration of Independence and Constitution as sacred civil texts.

We saw that among the hundreds of thousands of poll workers in the 2020 election. With a record voter turnout, our fellow Americans who run our elections, from the local polling place officers to secretaries of state, did their jobs faithfully and competently — all of them, Republicans and Democrats.

There was a fair count, and the results withstood every court challenge. Even when the dogs of resentment and incivility were turned on election officials and poll workers, they did not budge. They carefully counted and accurately reported the votes, come what may. And they saved this democracy.