The importance of prosecuting the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrectionists and keeping track of the degree to which Republicans reject President Biden’s 2020 victory ultimately has less to do with the last election and more with the future of the republic, notably in November and in 2024.
For the past two years, the GOP has been enlisting candidates who profess to believe former president Donald Trump’s false claim that he was cheated out of a second term and giving those partisan believers new powers over future election results.
Republicans increasingly play down the Capitol riot, in which Trump supporters violently interrupted the certification of Biden’s victory. Most House Republicans recently voted against legislation to make it harder for Congress to overthrow a presidential election.
No reporter has tracked these trends more painstakingly than my colleague Amy Gardner, who was also the journalist who revealed how Trump unsuccessfully pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to overturn Biden’s victory in the Peach State.
Amy’s latest is every bit as unsettling as her previous entries: “A majority of GOP nominees for House, Senate and statewide offices to be decided next month — 299 in all — have either questioned or outright denied the results of the 2020 election.”
That includes “every region of the country and in nearly every state. Republican voters in four states nominated election deniers in all federal and statewide races The Post examined,” Amy reported.
(Sidebar: “Election denier” feels awfully stuck in the past. We need a better term for people maneuvering to potentially scuttle the next election. “Anti-democrats” falls short for a couple of reasons. Maybe “anti-republicans?” This is above The Daily 202’s pay grade.)
That’s in addition to governors, lieutenant governors, secretaries of state, attorneys general and Senators, who could also play significant roles in the outcome.
(Sidebar: Remember that weird boomlet of speculation Republicans might make Trump the House Speaker, given that the Constitution doesn’t require the post to be filled with a member of Congress? Given the potential election-denier majority, Trump might not even need to take the job to have enormous sway over his party’s legislative and oversight agenda. That, in turn, will make keeping track of his Mar-a-Lago supplicants and lobbyists an important job.)
Remember: There’s just no evidence of widespread voter fraud. Some isolated examples (among which Republicans are amply represented), to be sure, but not on a scale that would tip the results of a presidential election. Trump’s Justice Department investigated allegations and came up empty. Given how eagerly Attorney General Bill Barr spread baseless suspicions of voter fraud, that’s pretty notable.
Amy reached out to a few experts to get their diagnosis. It wasn’t pretty.
“Scholars said the predominance of election deniers in the GOP bears alarming similarities to authoritarian movements in other countries, which often begin with efforts to delegitimize elections. Many of those promoting the stolen-election narrative, they said, know that it is false and are using it to gain power.”
“‘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.’”
But only if they lose, of course. Which is why this is about the future.
For the past two years, the GOP has been enlisting candidates who profess to believe former president Donald Trump’s false claim that he was cheated out of a second term and giving those partisan believers new powers over future election results.
Republicans increasingly play down the Capitol riot, in which Trump supporters violently interrupted the certification of Biden’s victory. Most House Republicans recently voted against legislation to make it harder for Congress to overthrow a presidential election.
No reporter has tracked these trends more painstakingly than my colleague Amy Gardner, who was also the journalist who revealed how Trump unsuccessfully pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to overturn Biden’s victory in the Peach State.
Amy’s latest is every bit as unsettling as her previous entries: “A majority of GOP nominees for House, Senate and statewide offices to be decided next month — 299 in all — have either questioned or outright denied the results of the 2020 election.”
That includes “every region of the country and in nearly every state. Republican voters in four states nominated election deniers in all federal and statewide races The Post examined,” Amy reported.
- “Of the roughly 300 GOP candidates on the ballot, 174 are vying for safely Republican seats, while another 51 are in neck-and-neck races.”
- Election deniers are especially prevalent in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — not coincidentally the six battleground states in which Trump contested his defeat. That has ramifications for 2024.
- Of the 419 Republican House nominees, 235 (56%) are election deniers. Of them 148 are in safe GOP districts, another 28 in tight races, according to the Cook Political Report. (Congress is Ground Zero for certifying or contesting a presidential result.)
(Sidebar: “Election denier” feels awfully stuck in the past. We need a better term for people maneuvering to potentially scuttle the next election. “Anti-democrats” falls short for a couple of reasons. Maybe “anti-republicans?” This is above The Daily 202’s pay grade.)
Worries grow
If, as political forecasters of both parties predict, Republicans recapture the House next month, election deniers will determine who the next Speaker is. That person would serve as acting president if Congress has not certified a winner by Jan. 20.That’s in addition to governors, lieutenant governors, secretaries of state, attorneys general and Senators, who could also play significant roles in the outcome.
(Sidebar: Remember that weird boomlet of speculation Republicans might make Trump the House Speaker, given that the Constitution doesn’t require the post to be filled with a member of Congress? Given the potential election-denier majority, Trump might not even need to take the job to have enormous sway over his party’s legislative and oversight agenda. That, in turn, will make keeping track of his Mar-a-Lago supplicants and lobbyists an important job.)
Remember: There’s just no evidence of widespread voter fraud. Some isolated examples (among which Republicans are amply represented), to be sure, but not on a scale that would tip the results of a presidential election. Trump’s Justice Department investigated allegations and came up empty. Given how eagerly Attorney General Bill Barr spread baseless suspicions of voter fraud, that’s pretty notable.
Amy reached out to a few experts to get their diagnosis. It wasn’t pretty.
“Scholars said the predominance of election deniers in the GOP bears alarming similarities to authoritarian movements in other countries, which often begin with efforts to delegitimize elections. Many of those promoting the stolen-election narrative, they said, know that it is false and are using it to gain power.”
“‘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.’”
But only if they lose, of course. Which is why this is about the future.
