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I think in the eyes of a lot of the public there’s no plausible charitable reading of “they removed a major candidate (who pretty much has the nomination at this point) from the ballot in absence of a conviction for a crime.” This is a red line for any country that wants to claim the mantle of “real democracy” — that candidates even the ones the elite disagree with — have the right to run in a free and fair election. I don’t see how anyone who planned to vote GOP in any form is going to be okay with losing the election where their nominee Isn’t on the ballot.
So what’s being created here is a scenario in which the only result that the public can be sure that there was no interference in is “Trump wins.” If Trump loses, the GOP and MAGAs are not going to simply say “maybe next time,” because the reason they think the6 lost is the denial of their right to a fair and free election. It’s going to make the aftermath of 2020 look very tame. At least in 2020 we were holding a fair election where everyone who was running was on the ballot, the laws were mostly followed, and while there’s plausible theories of fraud, it wasn’t overt. I expect that there might well be attacks on state governments and election officials, possibly riots or other forms of violence because that’s generally what happens when people belief that their government has betrayed democracy.
Trump has only been barred from the Republican Primary ballot in CO. Absent a new ruling in a new court case, he will still be on the General Election ballot in CO, and people there are welcome to vote for him.
If the finding of fact used to bar Trump from the primary is that Trump participated in an insurrection to a degree that makes him ineligible to run in a primary, what logic overturns that for the general election? How can the same facts mean you can’t run for the nomination, but that running for the actual office is okay? If he’s unable to run for the nomination he must also be ineligible for the general.
AFAIK they made a ruling on the primary ballot, and that's it. That logic might also apply to the general ballot, but they'd have to make a separate ruling for that to actually happen, and they could just not.
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One obvious line of attack would be for Republicans to take a straight party-line vote to impeach (as if a ham sandwich, which prosecutors can famously charge with anything) any and all accessible current office holders who might run on the other side under (Trumped up, one might say) charges of "insurrection" against the Constitution and demand that states remove them from ballots too.
But I don't think that is a good idea, nor are they currently well-enough aligned together to actually pull it off, probably for the better.
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There won't be much in the way of riots because the US Government has demonstrated it has the tools to successfully crush and then punish rioters. Turns out all the riots that weren't crushed and where the rioters didn't see serious consequences were because the government, for reasons of its own, wanted those riots to have more effect. The GOP and MAGAs will suck up the loss because they have choice but to do so or be imprisoned without fanfare.
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