DETROIT – You might say we live in the Era of the Politically Bizarre — and what happened in New Mexico last month was further confirmation. Police and prosecutors say Solomon Pena, a failed candidate for the New Mexico legislature, hired four people to shoot up the homes of various legislators and county commissioners.
They were Democrats; he is a Republican, and he is now in jail awaiting trial on a long list of felony counts. Pena was, in fact, a convicted felon to begin with — he served seven years in prison for burglary — and a devotee of many weird conspiracy theories, some involving feminism and solar power.
He is also a fervent supporter of Donald Trump – and a little-noticed development that may be the most troubling of all, he not only endorsed Trump’s false claim that the last presidential election had been stolen, Pena claimed his race was stolen too.
That alone should have been enough to cast doubt on his sanity. Despite spending significantly on his campaign, Pena lost by nearly three to one, 5,679 votes to 2,033, a humiliating defeat. After the election, he proudly posted a picture of himself with a Trump flag and a MAGA sweatshirt, bragging that he had never conceded and adding “Now researching my options,” which evidently included shooting members of the other political party.
Pena is, of course, an extreme case. But there is a scary new rise of violence in American politics, violence mostly, but not exclusively, by those on the right. But there is something else that may be related: The abandonment of the art of losing gracefully.
For more than a century, it has been an unwritten rule that when the result of any election, especially a presidential election, was clear, the loser congratulated the winner. The 1896 race between Ohio’s William McKinley and Democrat William Jennings Bryan was hard-fought, ideologically bitter, and relatively close.
But when most of the returns were in, Bryan sent a telegram to McKinley that said. “I hasten to extend my congratulations. We have submitted the issue to the American people, and their will is law.”
After that, every loser conceded to every winner. When Thomas Dewey lost to Harry Truman in the biggest upset in American political history in 1948, he conceded gallantly the next morning, and later joked wryly with reporters that it felt like he had gotten dressed for his wedding, and then woke up to find himself in a coffin.
Richard Nixon was urged to contest the results in 1960, after he lost what was then the closest election in modern history, amid reports of Democratic vote-stealing shenanigans in Illinois and Texas.
But Nixon, seldom seen as a paragon of political virtue, refused, and promptly conceded. “I could think of no worse example for nations abroad than the United States wrangling over the results of our presidential election, and even suggesting that the presidency itself could be stolen by thievery at the ballot box.”
If that happened in America, Nixon said he feared, “there would be open-season for shooting at the validity of free elections throughout the world,” a prophecy that, 60 years later, seems eerily to be coming to pass, as witness January 6, 2021 in Washington, and then the eerily similar attack last month on Brazil’s congress by supporters of the defeated incumbent president there.
Even twenty years ago, such a thing would have been seen as impossible. There’s never been a presidential election in any of our lifetimes as close and as disputed as the 2000 contest, in which, after court battles and recounts, George W. Bush won Florida, and thereby the election, by a mere 537 votes out of six million cast.
However, then-Vice President Al Gore clearly won the popular vote, and when he took back his original concession when the results narrowed, Republicans sneered, printing signs calling the Democratic ticket of Gore and Senator Joe Lieberman “Sore Loserman.”
When the election was finally decided by the U.S. Supreme Court, Gore immediately made a graceful televised concession, and said “and this time, I’m not calling him back.”
Legally, concession speeches have no validity, and once in a while candidates have conceded defeat before the final returns were in, and later discovered to their surprise that they won after all. That was the case in Ohio in 1974, when Jim Rhodes conceded to incumbent Gov. John Gilligan, only to wake up to find that all the returns were in and he was 11,000 votes ahead.
And while Trump was the first modern presidential candidate not to concede, Democrat Geoffey Fieger refused to admit defeat to John Engler in the Michigan governor’s race in 1998, despite losing by 700,000 votes.
“Why should I concede to that fat nincompoop?” he said.
Nevertheless, conceding defeat, like good sportsmanship itself, is important to a healthy democracy. That’s what Australian political scientist Paul Corcoran, an expert on U.S. presidential elections, believes. During the 2020 election battle he told a public radio interviewer that our campaigns are like Shakespearian dramas; “there needs to be a formal recognition” that the race is over.
That’s mainly so the defeated candidate’s supporters will accept defeat. When losing candidates don’t graciously throw in the towel, you risk something like what happened on January 6. For those who care about democracy, having that once in a lifetime was enough.
Footnote: Trump supporters sometimes claim that Hillary Clinton never conceded defeat to their man in 2016. Nothing could be further from the truth. In the wee hours of the next morning, she made a very graceful concession speech, saying “Our constitutional democracy enshrines the peaceful transfer of power. We don’t just respect that. We cherish it.”
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(A version of this column appeared in the Toledo Blade)
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