🚨midterm elections: why do americans support election denialism?
the 2022 midterm elections’ big winner: election denialism
Democrats may have won big by defying the odds and keeping control of the Senate while holding off what was supposed to be an easy Republican takeover of the House. However, the real winner during the 2022 election midterms was election denialism (Republicans who believe President Biden did not fairly win the 2020 election).
Most media outlets would be convincing you that election denialism became a proven losing-issue for Republicans during these midterms. The New York Times paraded the headline that election denialists strongly underperformed the GOP’s expectations. Time Magazine published the headline “Election deniers were among the biggest losers in the 2022 midterms.”
I disagree.
The cause of New York Times and Time Magazine’s celebration is that election deniers lost key races, such as Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania’s Governor race or Don Bolduc in New Hampshire’s U.S. Senate race. In addition, six of the seven election deniers running for a Secretary of State position, where they would earn the power to oversee election administration, lost.
However, 199 of the Republicans who ran for office last Tuesday have fully denied the 2020 election outcome, meaning that 60% of U.S. districts had an election denier as one of their two options. 173 of the election deniers have won their elections thus far. For context, the number of people that ran on denying the outcome of a previous presidential election and won in 2020 was a resounding total of zero. In 2018, 2016, and so forth, the number is again zero. Electing election denialists is an unprecedented recent phenomena.
In regard to the Secretary of State elections, where the only issue a candidate can run on is election integrity, the election denier who lost only did so with thin margins. In Arizona, GOP candidate and election-denier Mark Finchem lost by only 100,000 votes, while earning 1.1 million. In Nevada, Jim Marchant ran on the promise to decertify the 2020 elections; he lost by 20,000 votes, only a 2.2% margin.
The point here is that celebrating election-denier losses during these midterm elections is discrediting a very important fact: election denialism is an extremely significant and well-supported issue in the Republican party.
Losses in key races is not a rebuke of election denialism - it only means that independent and swing voters did not favor the Republican party this election. There could be a variety of reasons for this: voters could attribute the recent decrease in inflation and gas prices (which was polled to be the highest priority issues for voters) to the White House, while abortion became more important for liberal-leaning voters this election.
Democrats celebrating election denialism losses is premature. The Republican party isn’t going to change its playbook: this is the same party that removed Republican-royalty Rep. Liz Cheney from their party’s third-highest ranking position in the U.S. House for criticizing President Trump after Jan 6th. She later lost her GOP primary election to Harriet Hageman, who can only be differentiated from Cheney in that Hageman believes 2020 was a rigged election. Hageman will be joining the U.S. Congress as a newly-minted member in January.
Unlike 2020, there will be far more sitting Governors, U.S. Senators, and U.S. Representatives who will not support a peaceful transfer of power if their presidential nominee were to lose the 2024 race.
Follow the breadcrumbs and it is not difficult to see where we are heading: last year some U.S. Senators had already refused to certify the 2020 election, then followed the January 6th U.S. Capitol attack, and now the 2022 midterm elections.
why do Americans support election denialism?
Firstly, I am strongly hesitant in taking a stance on highly partisan issues (after all, this newsletter is called fifty50). So for the sake of fairness, I have included here and here the best articles I could find that summarize the main arguments in favor of the 2020 presidential election being stolen. And here and here are the reports proving the claims in those articles to be false. To better understand this crucial partisan issue, I highly recommend you give all the articles a read. I have not been able to find any credible evidence that the election was stolen from President Trump.
Secondly, Democrats do not have a perfect track record with election denialism. In 2016, Democrat lawmakers raised objections to certifying the 2016 election for President Trump. In 2018, Stacey Abrams refused to concede the Georgia Governor’s race. More recently, President Biden questioned if the 2022 midterm elections would be “legit” if his voting reform policies don’t pass through Congress. They never did.
This is not to say there is an equivalency between election denialism claims made by Democrats and Republicans by any means, the latter have made election denialism a forefront policy for their national party and threats to decertify the 2020 election are a serious threat to the function of American democracy.
It is easy to point to misinformation among activist groups in the Republican party as a cause for election denialism. But the truth is that social media companies de-platforming President Trump and removing all unsubstantiated claims of 2020 election fraud from their websites has done virtually nothing to stop the spread of election denialism.
The real question is why don’t the majority of Americans who don’t believe the election was stolen care more? Consistently, economic issues rank as higher priority than protecting democracy. Yes, inflation is an important issue, but there is very little politicians can do to resolve the matter. However, allowing election deniers to come within 2% margins of winning Secretary of State positions, which would give them the power to decertify elections they don’t support, can seriously erode the integrity of our elections. Protecting democracy is a political issue that Americans can tangibly have an impact on.
As a country, we should know better than to tolerate unfounded claims of election denialism at any level. The midterm elections were a blaring alarm that we don’t care enough.
On Fareed Zakaria GPS, comedian Bill Maher offers the best argument on why protecting democracy isn’t an important issue for many: “We stopped teaching history and stopped teaching civics a long time ago. This is just too abstract. We just didn’t prepare people when they were young to understand what democracy is.”
It’s true. American students consistently score very poorly on civics and U.S. History, with only 25% of high school seniors showing proficiency. Most American adults cannot name the three branches of government, with a quarter not able to name a single branch, and 26% not able to name even one right protected by the First Amendment. It is very easy to take rights from people that they don’t know they have.
Through decades of treating civics and history as low-importance subjects to the more savvy STEM subjects, we have inadequately prepared our voters to protect their rights. By not taking this seriously, we have allowed over a hundred election deniers to take office during these midterm elections.
You can vote yourself out of a democracy; history has proven this time and time again. Next election, we could actually do it.
food for thought,
shreyas sinha
P.S. listen to Everything’s (NOT) Okay’s recent podcast here: