Donald Trump’s Big Lie didn’t just incite an insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. It didn’t just spur 147 congressional Republicans to vote to overturn the 2020 presidential election. It also convinced at least 357 Republican lawmakers in the battleground states to take a range of actions aimed at anything from discrediting the 2020 election results to laying the groundwork to overturn the next election, according to a New York Times analysis.
Those 357 legislators are 44% of the Republicans in the state legislatures of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Florida, and Texas—the nine closest states, six of them won by President Joe Biden and three by Trump. There’s a big range. In Nevada, just 4% of Republicans in the state legislature tried to discredit or overturn the election. In Arizona, it’s 81%.
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Nearly one in four of the Republicans in these state legislatures supported “audits” intended to undermine faith in the election, and the same percentage tried to delay the vote count through lawsuits or called on Congress or Mike Pence to refuse to certify the Electoral College results. Pennsylvania is the clear leader in the latter category, while—no surprise—Republicans in the states Trump narrowly won didn’t have these concerns.
The Daily Kos Elections Team talks with Joe Sudbay about the big primaries and all of the redistricting nonsense on The Downballot podcast
Just over one in 10 wanted to send alternate slates of electors to give congressional Republicans something to work with in trying to overturn the election during the certification process. Going a little further, 7% supported “decertification,” the completely unfounded view that they could overturn the election after it had already been fully certified and Biden was president.
The Republicans who wanted to overturn the 2020 election outright weren’t quite majorities in most of these states. But the lies about the 2020 election being rigged or stolen did lead Republican majorities in many states to pass laws trying to rig future elections by making it harder to vote in very carefully targeted ways: 34 new laws restricting voting were passed in 2021 and another 18 so far in 2022.
And Trump is trying to boost the number of Republicans in state legislatures who will go all-in on his lies the next time around: In Michigan, where Republican leaders refused to back a slate of fake electors even after Trump personally pressured them, Trump “has endorsed 10 candidates for state legislative seats — including some who are challenging Republican incumbents—and is seeking to play kingmaker in the already brewing fight over who will be speaker of the House.”
Republicans have long gained outsized power by focusing efforts on state legislatures while Democrats failed to do so. They’ve gained control over redistricting, gerrymandering their own districts, and the U.S. House, and have passed restrictive laws through Republican-controlled legislatures in states that voted, statewide, for Democrats. Now they’re using that advantage to even more sharply restrict who can vote and how and when, and they’re laying the groundwork to go further the next time a Republican loses a presidential election.
This is yet another lesson for Democrats about focusing efforts on the seemingly unsexy downballot races. It’s also a crisis for democracy, and Democrats need to be sounding the alarm now and putting in the effort that’s too often been lacking in the past. If it’s not already too late.
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