Kamala Harris and Tim Walz have turned the 2024 presidential campaign upside down and galvanized the Democratic Party's base voters, who had become almost resigned to a second term for Donald Trump. Harris now appears to be leading in the polls heading into next week's Democratic National Convention, while Trump — who had orchestrated an entire campaign around attacking the aging President Biden — is visibly flailing and appears determined to sabotage his chances with every public appearance.

But David Daley is here to tell those of you already catering your election-night parties: Don't celebrate quite yet. Daley, the former editor-in-chief of Salon and author of the 2016 bestseller "Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn't Count" has returned with another chilling account of long-term right-wing dirty tricks, this time — as he told me in our recent Salon Talks conversation — with a title we can actually print. If the title of Daley's new book, "Antidemocratic: Inside the Far Right's 50-Year Plot to Control American Elections," suggests that it makes large claims, it definitely does. But it's not a tale of a secret, sinister conspiracy, and the chaotic events of Jan. 6, 2021, are only mentioned in passing.

Donald Trump was not the architect of the long-term antidemocratic strategy Daley outlines in this book, and was probably barely aware of it before he became its accidental beneficiary. The precarious and damaged condition of U.S. democracy — corrupted from top to bottom by corporate money, large-scale gerrymandering, aggressive voter suppression and the far-right conquest of the federal courts — did not happen by accident or result from a series of ad hoc political decisions. As Daley writes, it's "the product of a deliberate, long-term and extraordinarily patient strategy, some of it behind closed doors though much of it in plain sight."

Most of the major landmarks of this history are visible; engaged liberals and progressives largely understand the pernicious effects of the Supreme Court's decisions in the Citizens United and Shelby County cases, which opened the doors, respectively, to unlimited tides of dark money (now defined as free speech) and increasingly imaginative, if nominally colorblind, forms of racial disenfranchisement or vote suppression. But those court cases didn't emerge from nowhere, and it wasn't simply bad luck that they came before a court with an entrenched majority of Republican-appointed, Federalist Society-endorsed justices.

"Antidemocratic" is less the story of the damaging consequences of those decisions (among others) than the story of how and why they happened — and that story has never been told this thoroughly in a single volume. To boil the narrative down to its essentials, Daley demonstrates that leading conservatives of the 1970s, alienated and scandalized by the increasingly liberal tenure of political and legal reasoning in America, eventually realized they had to build an entire alternative system.

Arguing for their cherished culture-war positions on racial, sexual and religious issues piece by piece, before liberal judges or Democratic state legislatures, led only to defeat. What a few impressively farsighted right-wing thinkers conceived and then created — and it took liberals far too long to notice this — was a new intellectual and political apparatus that would produce well-trained, highly capable lawyers and judges devoted to reframing constitutional law around "originalism" and (as they saw it) redeeming the promise of a white-dominated, overtly Christian nation from the dangerous moral drift of cultural relativism and increasing diversity.

Founding fathers of that movement, like future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell and disgruntled ex-liberal lawyer Michael Horowitz, didn't have the word "woke" to rail against. But they were anti-woke before it was cool. Along with many of their ideological followers and fellow travelers, they created our current moment of American crisis, when getting the most votes on Election Day is only part of the story and the pathways to overturning or denying the people's verdict are legion. My former boss joined me recently to talk about some of the hair-raising possibilities raised by his new book.

This transcript has been edited for clarity and length.

“Antidemocratic” is perfectly timed for this contentious election. I have a decent sense of where you fall on the ideological spectrum, and I would assume you agree with the premise that Kamala Harris and Tim Walz have changed the dynamics of this election. But have they changed it enough to address the issues you talk about in this book?

I think that is the $100,000 question as we head into this election season. This is going to be a very tight and very close election. And as we know, the Electoral College is really what matters. In 2020, we're talking about essentially 45,000 votes in three very competitive states that made the difference. Even though Joe Biden won the popular vote by 7 million, it was those 45,000 votes that made the difference. And the kinds of litigation that we saw after 2020 was a clown show. It was Rudy Giuliani in front of Four Seasons Landscaping. It was Cleta Mitchell and a bit of a pile up.

That's not going to be the case this time. I think they're better prepared. I think there's better lawyers working on this. Lara Trump at the RNC has already said that there's about 75 to 90 cases that the RNC is involved in, either as a litigant or filing amicus briefs in about 24 states.

These involve some of the big white-shoe conservative law firms, Consovoy McCarthy and others in D.C. Rudy Giuliani is not involved. So what I worry about is another replay of Bush v. Gore in 2000. If the margin is anywhere near as close as it was in 2000, where we're talking about maybe 550 votes in one state, we are going to see a six-week period, I would imagine, no matter what, between Election Day and the meeting of the Electoral........

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