Trumpist focus on election lies costs the right
Just like that, the audit of 2020 presidential election results from Maricopa County, Arizona, came and went without succeeding in its purpose of proving election fraud in order to overturn the results.
But instead of relenting, former President Donald Trump told supporters at a rally in Georgia that the audit proved he won and that President Joe Biden lost “in Arizona based on the forensic audit,” according to Newsweek.
Except the audit proved no such thing; in fact, it showed Trump losing Arizona by an even bigger margin than previously reported. Continuing to claim widespread voter fraud when no such evidence exists is bad morally, but strategically as well.
Outrageous claims repel moderate voters and Republicans will have a tough time winning future elections if they’re busy trying to undo prior elections.
Sadly, this isn’t an isolated incident, and Trump continues to make life harder for Republicans across the country. It appears that the party’s main organizing principle at this point is the repeatedly disproven idea that Trump won the 2020 election due to a widespread conspiracy.
At the recent California Republican Party convention, speakers highlighted how claims of voter fraud and alleged problems associated with voting by mail actually depressed California Republican turnout in the 2020 presidential election and the recent gubernatorial recall.
“In the 2020 election cycle there was presidential leadership saying, ‘Don’t trust the mail,’” Orange County Republican Party Chair Fred Whitaker said, according to The San Diego Union-Tribune. “We don’t have any evidence of systemic fraud. We used to do a great job getting our voters out to vote using the absentee ballot method, and we dropped it two years ago, to our detriment.”
Telling voters that elections are rigged does not inspire confidence and leads to many sitting out elections, because why bother?
This fealty to unfounded conspiracy theories helped sink the Republican majority in the Senate in 2021, as not one but two Republican senators in Georgia were unseated in relatively safe elections. At the time, the prevailing theme in Trump World was that he had won the election, but because of allegedly hacked voting machines tied to Venezuela, he lost.
But Trump doesn’t need to baselessly claim widespread voter fraud to help elect Democrats. In 2017, Democrat Doug Jones was elected to an Alabama Senate seat over Trump’s endorsed candidate, scandalriddled Roy Moore. Electing a Democrat statewide in Alabama is nearly impossible, but Trumpism found a way.
Now it seems Trump might be thinking about settling old scores against Republicans who voted to impeach him, which would likely affect Republicans’ chances of taking back the House.
Politico CA reported Trump as having said: “I would almost have the Democrat win than those people, like in California you have a candidate who is really much more of a Democrat than a Republican.”
Trump was likely referring to California Republican Congressman David Valadao, one of the most vulnerable members of Congress (from the Central Valley), who voted to impeach Trump for instigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. Valadao has already drawn a challenge from the right, but with Republicans having a 16-point disadvantage in voter registration in the district, a Trump-type candidate is all but certain to lose in a general election.
Trump’s self-serving strategy of denying his loss at all costs might make him feel better, but all it’s done is lead to GOP defeats.
As long as the American right seeks victory by pandering to falsehoods rather than telling the truth, such defeats are well-deserved.