Election deniers march toward power in key 2024 battlegrounds
GOP nominees who dispute the 2020 results could be positioned to play a critical role in the next presidential election
by Amy Gardner
First came Kristina Karamo, a community college instructor from Detroit who claimed without evidence that she witnessed fraud as a 2020 election observer — and who in April became her party’s pick for secretary of state, Michigan’s top election official, after repeatedly touting those claims.
Next was Doug Mastriano, the firebrand state lawmaker from Pennsylvania who urged his colleagues to throw out Joe Biden’s 2020 victory. In May, Mastriano secured the GOP nomination for governor, a position with the power to certify the state’s slate of presidential electors.
Finally, this month, Arizona Republicans nominated Kari Lake for governor and Mark Finchem for secretary of state. Both are outspoken election deniers who have pledged that they would not have certified Biden’s victory in their state.
The winners fit a pattern: Across the battleground states that decided the 2020 vote, candidates who deny the legitimacy of that election have claimed nearly two-thirds of GOP nominations for state and federal offices with authority over elections, according to a Washington Post analysis.
Had those candidates held power in 2020, they would have had the electoral clout to try something that the current officeholders refused: overturning the vote and denying Biden the presidency.
“We would have won,” Finchem told supporters in an email. “Plain and simple.”
Whether they could have succeeded in practice is a matter of vigorous debate among scholars, who cite the potential for court challenges and other means of upholding the results.
But the experts agree on one thing: A close presidential contest that comes down to the outcome in states where officials are willing to try to thwart the popular will could throw the country into chaos. It would potentially delay the result, undermine confidence in the democratic system and sow the seeds of civil strife on a scale even greater than what the nation saw on Jan. 6, 2021.
“It could easily lead to a situation where a significant portion of the electorate in those states will never believe the election was legitimate even if the courts step in and ensure that the lawfully elected winner is in fact certified as the winner,” said Richard Pildes, a constitutional law professor at New York University. Such a situation would be “destabilizing,” Pildes added, because the legitimacy of democracy ultimately depends on its citizens believing that elections are fair.
The predilection among Republican primary voters toward candidates who deny the result of the last election extends well beyond Michigan, Pennsylvania and Arizona — three states that together accounted for 47 electoral votes in 2020, more than enough to flip the last election to Donald Trump.
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, according to a Post analysis of every race for federal and statewide office with power over elections.
The proportion of election-denying nominees is even higher in the six critical battlegrounds that ultimately decided the 2020 presidential contest, where Trump most fiercely contested the results. 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.
The count covers offices with direct supervision over election certification, such as secretaries of state, as well as the U.S. House and Senate, which have the power to finalize — or contest — the electoral college count every four years. Lieutenant governors and attorneys general are also included, with each playing a role in shaping election law, investigating alleged fraud or filing lawsuits to influence electoral outcomes.
Among the six battlegrounds, only Arizona, Michigan and Pennsylvania have nominated statewide candidates who would have direct power over the certification process and who worked to overturn the 2020 result or have said they would not have certified it.
Candidates identified by The Post as election deniers have questioned President Biden’s victory, opposed the counting of Biden’s electoral college votes, expressed support for a partisan post-election ballot review, signed onto a lawsuit seeking to overturn the 2020 result, or attended or expressed support for the ‘Stop the Steal’ rally on Jan. 6, 2021.
Many of this year’s primaries have coincided with a series of dramatic hearings in which the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack has laid out intimate details of Trump’s plot to overturn the 2020 result, his role instigating the violence and the knowledge among many of his allies that Biden had won.
Even against that backdrop, Republican voters have continued to choose candidates who have echoed the former president’s false rhetoric about a rigged election and, in some cases, shown a willingness to subvert the result of a free and fair vote if given the chance.