Almost every state’s primaries this year have brought more evidence that there’s no meaningful distinction to be drawn between Donald Trump and the Republican Party. One candidate after another has become the Republican nominee for key state and federal offices after denying the legitimacy of the 2020 election, participating in efforts to overturn it, pledging to overturn future elections, or any combination of the above.
“In the 41 states that have held nominating contests this year, more than half the GOP winners so far—about 250 candidates in 469 contests—have embraced Trump’s false claims about his defeat two years ago,” The Washington Post reports, based on an analysis of primaries for offices with some authority over elections. But it gets worse when you look at the battleground states: “In Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, at least 54 winners out of 87 contests—more than 62 percent of nominees—have embraced the former president’s false claims.”
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The offices the Post included in its analysis include governor, lieutenant governor, secretary of state, attorney general, and U.S. House and Senate.
In Arizona and Michigan, the Republican nominees for both governor and secretary of state—the key state-level roles in election administration and certification—have questioned the results of the 2020 election. In Pennsylvania, the Republican gubernatorial nominee has done so.
But to say they’ve questioned the results doesn’t cover it. Kari Lake, the Arizona nominee for governor, said in January, “Anybody who was involved in that corrupt, shady, shoddy election of 2020—lock them up!”
Doug Mastriano, the Pennsylvania nominee for governor, actively tried to block Pennsylvania from certifying President Joe Biden’s 2020 win, and crossed a police line on January 6, 2021. He said in May that, if elected governor, “I get to appoint the secretary of state, who’s delegated from me the power to make the corrections to elections, the voting logs, and everything. I could decertify every machine in the state with the stroke of a pen via the secretary of state.”
These are not people who just happen to question the results of a specific election. They are candidates defined by their refusal to accept the will of the voters in a pivotal presidential election, candidates who are running to make sure that they’re in a position to overturn the next close election (or the next not-so-close one) that doesn’t go their way.
Trump and his followers proved on Jan. 6 how dangerously close they came to overturning our democracy. Help cancel Republican voter suppression with the power of your pen by clicking here and signing up to volunteer with Vote Forward, writing personalized letters to targeted voters urging them to exercise their right to vote this year.
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