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Archive photo · 3 August 2022Election Deniers Lose Governor, Attorney General, Secretary of State Races in US Midterms
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This article is an automated aggregation of coverage from news outlets. Our editorials offer in-depth analysis curated by the NewsCord team.
Republican election-denier candidates for governor in Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin lost. Midterms punished election-denier rhetoric; Democrats achieved broad gains and resilience of the process.
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Midterms Punish Denialism
Candidates who questioned the integrity of the electoral process in the United States, including those described by States United Action as “electoral deniers,” performed poorly in the midterm elections held on Tuesday (3) and will lose representation in public offices in 2027 compared with their 2026 representation. States United Action said that of 30 contests defined for governor, attorney general, and secretary of state up to Thursday (5), 21 (70%) ended in defeats for contenders who had questioned the ballot results. States United Action also said that of the six representatives from this group who ran, five (83%) were defeated, and it counted 162 representatives from this group in the current legislature.
“crash against ‘blue tsunami’” after Democrats swept the US midterm elections, and the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public said election denialism was “not a core narrative used to explain the sweeping victories by Democrats once they became apparent.” David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, argued that fraud claims persisted even when preferred candidates lost by large margins, saying, “I don’t know necessarily that margin of victory makes much difference to those who have profited off of the economy of grift around election conspiracies for quite some time.”
Concessions, Few Court Moves
The Sentinel Colorado reported that after President Donald Trump said he would accept the results of his party’s midterm rout, many loyalists followed suit even though they were “always a hair trigger away from branding a losing election rigged.” There was “little conspiracy theorists could use to offset the massive Democratic victories,” and there was “no day-after wave of court actions challenging the outcome.”
Rogan O’Handley, who posts conservative political commentary online as DC_Draino, wrote, “We lost because we failed to fix the things voters sent us to do,” and he asserted that “election fraud” surely unfolded but “not enough to explain what happened.” Trump’s acceptance of the results set the tone for many loyalists to follow suit, and the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public said “Absent a political elite to champion election denialism, rumouring about election integrity has not coalesced into a coherent or significant narrative to explain election results.”
What Comes Next
Tuesday’s midterm results are likely to have significant implications for the next presidential race in 2028, because Trump is entering the final two years of his lame-duck second term and is ineligible for re-election under the US Constitution.
It is unclear who will succeed him as the Republican standard-bearer, and battleground states like Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin are critical for 2028.
The rhetoric around fraud in the 2020 presidential election contrasted with Trump’s stance after the 2020 defeat, when he claimed, without providing evidence, that there was fraud to favor Democrat Joe Biden.
Slate said Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson, who will no longer be speaker on Jan. 3, acknowledged that Democrats will control the House, and it said there were no ICE agents at polls, Department of Justice officials challenging voters, or federal agents forcing state and local election officials to set aside ballots from alleged noncitizens.
Slate warned that “We cannot let our guard down against future attacks on American democracy,” while it said the just-concluded U.S. midterms survived President Donald Trump’s relentless attacks and that Senate and House winners will be able to peaceably assume office in January.