Buying into at least part of Donald Trump’s Big Lie is the Republican mainstream these days, as primary election results increasingly show. Candidate after candidate—including those winning a majority of Republican primaries held so far for governor, attorney general, secretary of state, lieutenant governor, and Congress—has said the 2020 election was rigged or stolen.
“District by district, state by state, voters in places that cast ballots through the end of May have chosen at least 108 candidates for statewide office or Congress who have repeated Trump’s lies,” a Washington Post analysis finds. The number climbs to 149 if you include those who haven’t directly said the 2020 election was stolen but have campaigned on the promise of cracking down on fraud—a buzzword for the “election was stolen” crowd—or making it harder to vote. Those 108 and 149 come out of well under 200 races.
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Some of the election deniers are well-known for that position: gubernatorial nominee Doug Mastriano and Senate nominee Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania, Senate nominee Ted Budd in North Carolina, Senate nominee Herschel Walker in Georgia, and more. Others have mostly flown under the radar to this point. But the big story is not any one Republican nominee who embraces Trump’s lies. It’s the vast number of them—the fact that this is a dominant position in the Republican Party.
There are some exceptions, of course. In Georgia, Trump directly targeted Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger over their refusal to embrace his lies and overturn the state’s election on his behalf. Both won their primaries. They were among 30 incumbents who refused to say the 2020 election was rigged, though two-thirds of those signed on to “election integrity” platforms designed to woo voters who believe that there was significant fraud or theft in 2020 by promising future action to make voting more difficult.
“In contrast, only 22 winning challengers or candidates for open seats refused to embrace the false election narrative or steered clear of ‘election integrity’ rhetoric,” the Post reports. If you’re a Republican incumbent you might be able to hang on without going full Trump, but if you’re looking for a first win, a way to make a name and win a following as a Republican these days, it’s virtually a requirement to insist that Donald Trump was the real winner of 2020 and argue that President Biden’s win should never have been certified.
The Post got these numbers by looking at primaries held through the end of May, and the situation is unlikely to improve from here. Primaries are coming up in Arizona and Wisconsin, both of which are hotbeds of election lies due directly to having been won narrowly by President Joe Biden.
It is past time for everyone, from the media to the occasional voter, to understand that this is the Republican Party: a group building its agenda around the lies of a sore loser, willing to jettison the basics of democracy, overturn elections, and engage in bloody insurrection to keep unearned power.
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