Great Lakes states deliver election deniers a stiff rebuke
‘It doesn’t mean that denial’s gone away’
Voters rejected election deniers across the country last week. But they did so with particular verve along the Great Lakes.
In Minnesota, the Democratic secretary of state defeated by a 10-point margin a Republican challenger who baselessly called the 2020 election rigged and pushed for restricting early voting. In Wisconsin, voters handed Gov. Tony Evers (D) a second term, declining to reward a candidate backed by former president Donald Trump who left open the possibility of trying to reverse the last presidential election. In Pennsylvania, Attorney General Josh Shapiro (D) crushed Republican Doug Mastriano, who had highlighted his willingness to decertify voting machines if he won the governorship.
But perhaps the biggest statement on democracy came in Michigan, where voters by large margins rebuffed a slate of Republican election deniers running for governor, attorney general and secretary of state. They also embraced an amendment to the state constitution that expands voting rights and makes it
much more difficult for officials to subvert the will of voters. In the process, they flipped the legislature with the help of new legislative maps drawn by a nonpartisan commission, giving Democrats complete control of state government for the first time in 40 years.
All of that led Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson (D) to make a bold prediction, one that might have seemed far-fetched before the vote: “Democracy ultimately will emerge from this time period stronger than ever before - more robust, healthier, with more people engaged and believing in it than perhaps they did back in 2018 or 2019.”
In other battlegrounds across the country, voters rebuffed election deniers, but in many cases not as resoundingly as they did in the states bordering the Great Lakes. Katie Hobbs (D) beat election denier Kari Lake (R) by a slim margin in the Arizona race for governor and, in Nevada, Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D) barely withstood a challenge from election denier Adam Laxalt (R).
Denialism is one of several issues expected to play prominently next month in Georgia’s runoff race between Sen. Raphael G. Warnock (D) and Republican Herschel Walker, who has embraced Trump’s lies about the 2020 election.
Jeff Timmer, a former executive director of the Michigan Republican Party who now works for the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, said Democrats performed exceptionally well in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin because they have honed their appeal to voters in a set of states that went for Trump in 2016, only to return in 2020 to their pattern of voting Democratic in presidential elections.
Evers, Shapiro and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) showed they come from “the governing, pragmatic wing of the party,” he said.
“They weren’t seen as kind of fire-breathing ideologues by any means,” Timmer said. “I think that those three campaigns are by and large the template for national Dems to look at how to win purple states.”
A more mixed picture emerged in the Great Lakes state of Ohio. J.D. Vance (R), who falsely claimed the 2020 election was stolen, won his bid for Senate. But three other election deniers running in competitive House districts in Ohio lost.
The relatively smooth election process and the repudiation of election deniers was heartening to many election officials who had watched the systems they run undermined by Trump’s push to overturn the 2020 presidential vote.
“It doesn’t mean that denial’s gone away,” said Chris Thomas, Michigan’s former elections director. “But we can maybe grab some of those people that are tightly tethered to the Trump operation and independents to get a breather and say, ‘Yeah, okay, this system worked.’”
Michigan’s adoption of the state constitutional amendment on voting rights comes four years after voters by a wide margin adopted a measure establishing no-excuse absentee voting and allowing people to register to vote at the polls.
The amendment on voting rights was overshadowed by one guaranteeing abortion rights that voters overwhelmingly approved. Another amendment approved by voters last week modified how term limits work in the state.
The new voting rights amendment, approved with 60 percent of the vote, is far-reaching. It establishes nine days of early voting, expands the use of ballot drop boxes and ensures voters who don’t have photo IDs with them can cast ballots by signing affidavits affirming they are who they say they are.
“The voters want a secure and accessible election,” said Christina Schlitt, co-president of the League of Women Voters of Michigan. “And we heard loud and clear from Michigan voters . . . that all parties were rejecting attacks on democracy and elections.”
The same message was delivered in Pennsylvania, said Sharif Street, the chairman of the Pennsylvania Democratic Party and a state senator. There, Democrats won the races for governor and U.S. senator and are on the cusp of taking control of the lower chamber of the legislature for the first time since 2010.
“There was no red wave. There was not even a red sprinkle,” Street said. “We’re clearly still a very purple state in terms of the attitudes of the electorate. But I think Democrats offer pragmatic solutions and Doug Mastriano offered divisive rhetoric.”
In Michigan, state lawmakers and election clerks will now turn to implementing the new amendment expanding voting access. One of the biggest changes will involve shifting to a new form of early voting.