GOP works to get out the vote after calling elections rigged
ATLANTA — Republican David Perdue has made election fraud the centerpiece of his run for Georgia governor. But if he hopes to win in this year’s midterm elections, his supporters will have to use the same democratic system he says they shouldn’t trust.
The only way to win a rigged election, he says, is to turn out in such high numbers that the Democrats can’t get away with cheating.
“If we get out the vote, if everybody votes, we will win,” Perdue told his audience at a campaign speech last month.
Across the nation, Republicans who have embraced discredited conspiracy theories about the 2020 election are attempting a similar high-wire act: campaigning for votes by preaching skepticism about elections.
For GOP contenders, it’s a tricky calculus. If they continue spreading former President Donald Trump’s lies that the election was stolen, they risk undermining faith in democracy and having their supporters stay at home. But those who reject Trump’s false claims face the wrath of the former president and his supporters, who wield sizable influence in many GOP primaries.
The tactic of campaigning on a distrust of democracy can confuse voters on whether their vote matters or not. Joe Kent, a Republican running for Congress in Washington, said voters sometimes ask him why they should bother voting at all, if elections are rigged. Kent said he believes Trump won and has said he would work to overturn President Joe Biden’s win if elected, even though there is no legal mechanism for doing so.
“I don’t have a perfect answer for you,” is what Kent said he tells voters who say they no longer trust voting. “I wish there was a remedy. If you buy into ‘It’s all rigged’ and ‘I’m not going to vote,’ we are 100% going to lose.”
In the 18 months since Biden defeated Trump, other issues have bubbled up to compete for the attention of candidates and voters: inflation, the bloody exit from Afghanistan, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and debates over vaccines and masks in schools.
Trump’s false statements about the election, meanwhile, have been roundly disproved — by courts, law enforcement, elected election officials from both parties, and independent investigations.
“We need to move on to solving problems for citizens,” said Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler, the Republican from southwest Washington state facing a primary challenge this year from Kent. Beutler has said she supported Trump’s right to bring legal challenges, but there’s no evidence of widespread voter fraud.
Beutler is one of 10 House Republicans who supported Trump’s second impeachment. She also voted to certify Biden’s election victory, making her a major target for Trump and his supporters.
The former president began spreading doubts about the 2020 election years before the first votes were even cast, saying he would only accept the results if he was the victor. He’s spent the last year and a half repeating those same claims, despite an absence of evidence. Now, he’s using his power within the GOP to punish candidates for being insufficiently loyal.
When Rep. Mo Brooks of Alabama, a stalwart Trump backer, told a crowd of Trump supporters that it was time to move on from 2020, he was jeered. Trump ended up pulling his endorsement of Brooks in Alabama’s Senate race.