As November’s midterm election approaches, over half of Americans will have an election denier on their ballot. These extremist candidates pose a threat to our democracy, which is why in poll after poll, voters continue to see threats to democracy as one of the top issues heading into the midterms.
Last weekend, End Citizens United // Let America Vote’s President, Tiffany Muller, went on MSNBC to discuss how ECU // LAV is fighting back against election deniers that refused to accept the will of the people in the 2020 election and want to overturn future elections.
The Washington Post: A majority of GOP nominees — 299 in all — deny the 2020 election results
Amy Gardner
10/06/2022
Key Points:
- Candidates who have challenged or refused to accept Joe Biden’s victory — 53 percent of the 569 analyzed by The Post — are running in every region of the country and in nearly every state.
- Although some are running in heavily Democratic areas and are expected to lose, most of the election deniers nominated are likely to win: Of the nearly 300 on the ballot, 173 are running for safely Republican seats. Another 52 will appear on the ballot in tightly contested races.
- The winners of all the races examined by The Post — those for governor, lieutenant governor, secretary of state, attorney general, Senate and House — will hold some measure of power overseeing American elections.
- Many of these candidates echo the false claims of former president Donald Trump — claims that have been thoroughly investigated and dismissed by myriad officials and courts. The insistence on such claims indicate a willingness among election-denying candidates to undermine democratic institutions when it benefits their side.
- The Post’s count – assembled from public statements, actions taken by the candidates, and social media posts – shows how the movement arising from Trump’s plot to overturn the 2020 election is stronger two years later. GOP primary voters have empowered them.
- “Election denialism is a form of corruption,” said Ruth Ben-Ghiat, the author of “Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present” and a historian at New York University. “The party has now institutionalized this form of lying, this form of rejection of results. So it’s institutionalized illegal activity. These politicians are essentially conspiring to make party dogma the idea that it’s possible to reject certified results.”
- In the longer term, Jacobs said, the country’s democratic foundations are at risk. “It is a disease that is spreading through our political process, and its implications are very profound,” Jacobs said.
- Among the 299 are GOP candidates vying to take over from Republicans who, despite overall support for Trump, have refrained from embracing his false narrative of fraud.
- For instance, Eric Schmitt, the Missouri attorney general on the ballot for U.S. Senate this fall, was one of 18 Republican attorneys general and 126 House members who signed on to a lawsuit seeking to overturn the popular vote in Pennsylvania.
- Anna Paulina Luna, the GOP nominee in Florida’s 13th Congressional District, spread unfounded accusations on social media that Dominion Voting Systems equipment rigged the 2020 outcome and expressed support for decertifying Arizona’s result even after a partisan post-election audit found that Biden had indeed won the state.
- Some of the election deniers are themselves in line to oversee elections. Diego Morales, the nominee for Indiana secretary of state, declared on Facebook in 2021: “If we count every legal vote, President Trump won this election.” In Indiana, the secretary of state certifies results.
- The November elections drawing near raises the chances that some of the candidates who don’t win, are likely to question their defeats. A dozen Republican candidates in competitive races for governor and Senate queried last month by The Post declined to say whether they would accept the results of their contests.
- Election deniers have targeted offices in each of those Arizona, Georgia, and Michigan — as well as in other battleground states, including Wisconsin, Nevada and Pennsylvania — potentially giving Republicans a platform from which to challenge a popular vote they do not agree with in 2024.
- Among 419 Republican nominees for the U.S. House, 236, or 56 percent, are election deniers. There are already scores of election deniers in the House; 139 of them voted against the electoral college count after the violence of Jan. 6, 2021, had finally abated. Currently, 38 election deniers running are not incumbents, but are running in Republican or competitive House Districts.
- Among the Republican nominees for Arizona’s nine House seats, all but one are election deniers, according to The Post’s analysis. Just two states — Rhode Island and North Dakota — did not nominate an election denier for any of the offices The Post examined.
- Indeed, several election-denying candidates who avidly parroted some of Trump’s unfounded accusations as they sought the former president’s endorsement during their primary races have begun walking back those positions as they focus on trying to win in November.
###