How do you win an election? To the degree that elections are a lot like — some of us anarchists would say an actual form of — war, it’s worth consulting military figures on the subject.

Few military figures come off quite so quotable as Confederate cavalry general (and Ku Klux Klan founder) Nathan Bedford Forrest, who said of winning battles, “I always make it a rule to get there first with the most men.”

That, of course, also constitutes the conventional rule for winning elections: Get there first (by motivating mail and “early” voters as well as election day voters) with the most votes.

One variant: “I just took the short cut and got there first with the most men.”

In every election we hear accusations of various “short cuts,” such as registering unqualified persons to vote, combing the graveyards for names with still-registered voters in the caskets and casting ballots in their names, etc.

Sometimes the stories are true, sometimes they aren’t. They’re usually, but not always, attributed to the Democratic Party.

Republicans usually, but not always, get more credit for trying to suppress the Democrat vote than for trying to get out the Republican vote.

As this year’s midterm elections approach, that tactic looks a lot like another Nathan Bedford Forrest aphorism. It pops up in different forms, but I’ll use the one associated with the Battle of Day’s Gap, fought in May  1863. Forrest’s instruction to his troops:

“Whenever you see anything blue, shoot at it, and do all you can to keep up the scare.”

Earlier this year, Republicans started talking up the notion of stationing Immigration and Customs Enforcement gang members … er, “officers” — outside polling places to intimidate would-be voters.

When asked about that possibility in an October 1 interview with Time, Trump said he “doesn’t rule anything out or in” and mentioned the Insurrection Act. Voting in areas with lots of Democrats, you say, may just constitute insurrection.

Then the little “October Surprise” operations stepped up.

The US Department of Justice charged 21 individuals with illegal — specifically, non-citizen — voting in California.  The biggest takeaway from that SHOULD be that after years of asserting huge numbers of non-citizen votes, DOJ only thought it could make the charge stick against one one-millionth of California’s registered voters.

The Department of Homeland Security raided the home of US Representative Ilhan Omar (D-MN) in an “immigration fraud” investigation, even though it’s literally impossible for her to have lied on her immigration and citizenship paperwork (her father, claiming her as a minor dependent, filled out and signed that paperwork).

Back to the US Department of Justice:  On October 23, it filed suit in Alaska to preemptively overturn that state’s US Senate election … but only if incumbent Daniel S. Sullivan loses. It seems there’s an invisible, previously unnoticed clause in the US Constitution forbidding candidates with similar names (like independent Daniel J. Sullivan) to challenge Republican incumbents.

Any of these several “one weird trick” moves, taken in isolation, might come off as a frivolous waste of the public’s time and the government’s stolen money.

Taken together, though, they constitute a strategy: Whenever you see anything blue — be it a Democratic-leaning state electorate or polling place, a Democratic congresswoman who’s an easy target for dog-whistle attack, or an independent candidate whose votes might bring a Republican candidate up short of victor — shoot at it, and do all you can to keep up the scare.

I guess if I was a Republican strategist looking at current poll numbers, I might suggest desperation plays like these myself.

I hope the effect of those tactics is less to influence the specific outcomes than to wake Americans up to the nature of politics itself. It really IS just another form of war.

And, as with most kinds of war, this kind inevitably despoils the public and rewards the belligerents. The politicians aren’t your friends. They’re soldiers in an evil, unworthy cause.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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