‘The Trump playbook’: Republicans hint they will deny election results

Some candidates are already questioning the integrity of the vote and undermining the credibility of the results

Last month Kari Lake, a former local TV anchor on the Fox network, joined a rightwing podcast The Conservative Circus to discuss her bid to become Arizona’s next governor.

Lake, who has been endorsed by Donald Trump, began by complaining that Joe Biden had just made a speech about the threat to democracy posed by election deniers like herself who claim, without evidence, that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. The US president called them “extremists” and warned that they were preparing to repeat their subversion efforts in November’s midterm elections.

Moments later, when Lake was asked by the podcast host a direct question about whether she would concede were she to lose her own governor’s race against the Democrat Katie Hobbs, she was evasive.

“I’m not losing to Katie Hobbs. We have a movement. We are not losing to Katie Hobbs, so don’t worry about it,” she said.

Earlier this month CNN put the same straightforward question to Lake: would she accept the results of her own election on 8 November? “I’m going to win the election and I’m going to accept that result,” she said.

“If you lose, will you accept that?” CNN’s Dana Bash pressed.

“I’m going to win the election and I will accept that result,” she robotically repeated.

That an arch-election denier who has been at the forefront of attempts to overturn Biden’s victory should refuse to state openly whether she will abide by the outcome of her own election has set alarm bells ringing. Lake is one of several prominent election deniers who have dropped hints – some subtle, others blatant – that they might mimic Trump’s anti-democratic tactics in their own elections just days away.

“There’s great danger that the Trump ‘big lie’ is going to spread to states all over the country. If election deniers lose their elections by narrow margins we can expect that they will reject the results and refuse to accept them,” said Fred Wertheimer, president of the non-partisan group Democracy 21.

Almost two years after Trump launched his unprecedented election subversion push, culminating in the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol, the doubts he sowed around election integrity are now blossoming. A new poll from NBC News found that 65% of Republican voters still view Biden’s presidency as illegitimate.

“The cancer that former president Trump injected into our electoral system has spread in 2022 to any number of candidates for important positions. They’re following the Trump playbook,” Wertheimer said.

Arizona is the ground zero of the 2022 threat of election subversion. All four of its Republican candidates in statewide races – Lake, together with the nominees for US Senate, attorney general and secretary of state – are out-and-out election deniers.

Blake Masters, another Trump-backed Republican, has been pre-emptively sowing doubt about the outcome of his challenge to the incumbent Democratic US senator for Arizona Mark Kelly. Masters has been telling supporters on the campaign trail to look out for thousands of fraudulent votes that will snatch victory from him – a pre-election ploy deployed by Trump in both 2016 and 2020.

Blake Masters, Republican candidate from Arizona, is one of the candidates pre-emptively sowing doubt about election integrity.
Blake Masters, Republican candidate from Arizona, is one of the candidates pre-emptively sowing doubt about election integrity. Photograph: Brian Snyder/Reuters

Mark Finchem, the Republican running for secretary of state, led the push to decertify Biden’s victory in Arizona and was present at the US Capitol on January 6. During the primary elections, he said he would refuse to concede.

“Ain’t going to be no concession speech coming from this guy,” he said, suggesting the election could have “impropriety”.

Abe Hamadeh, the Republican running for Arizona attorney general, has claimed without evidence that mail-in voting is riddled with fraud – another pre-emptive move used by Trump in 2020.

Similar signs of Republican candidates manoeuvring for possible mischief can be seen in other swing states that were at the epicentre of Trump’s efforts to destroy democracy. In Michigan, the Trump-backed gubernatorial candidate Tudor Dixon, who is challenging the incumbent governor Gretchen Whitmer, has cast aspersions on the way the state’s midterm elections are being conducted under a top election official who is Democratic.

“We have to wonder what the secretary of state will do when it comes to the ’22 election,” she has said.

In Wisconsin, another state that has become a hotbed of election denial conspiracy theories, both the Republican US senator Ron Johnson who is up for re-election and gubernatorial nominee Tim Michels gave opaque responses to the Wisconsin State Journal.

Asked by the paper whether they would unconditionally accept the certified results of their races, Johnson’s spokesperson said: “It is certainly his hope that he can.” Michels said he would live with the results “provided the election is conducted fairly and securely”.

Doug Mastriano, a virulent election denier who was at the Capitol on January 6 and helped to bus Trump supporters there, is running to be governor of Pennsylvania. He has declined to answer questions about whether he would concede peacefully should his Democratic rival Josh Shapiro win.

It is impossible to predict what will come of the proliferation of election denial ideology in the aftermath of the 8 November elections. But the fact that so many candidates are already laying down objections in a repetition of Trump’s 2020 tactics suggests there may be trouble ahead.

Brian Kemp, left, and Stacey Abrams, right, are two politicians who have pledged to adopt the Carter Center’s principles to uphold trusted elections.
Brian Kemp, left, and Stacey Abrams, right, are two politicians who have pledged to adopt the Carter Center’s principles to uphold trusted elections. Photograph: Ben Gray/AP

“We’re not going to know what we’re dealing with until it happens, but we can expect chaos in a form that we have never seen in any midterm,” Wertheimer said.

Concern about possible attempts to disrupt election counts has led the Carter Center, the human rights group founded by former president Jimmy Carter and his wife Rosalynn, to focus on this election. The center is regarded as an authority on global election integrity, having monitored 113 elections in Africa, Latin America and Asia since the 1980s.

The center’s democracy experts decided months before the 2020 election that the chaos surrounding then President Trump’s campaign merited their attention. Since then they have been attempting to bring back home to the US the lessons they have learned about conflict resolution and how to strengthen democracy from around the world.

“One of the things that was clearly of concern by the summer of 2020 were efforts to pre-emptively undermine the credibility of the result,” said Nathan Stock, associate director of the Carter Center’s conflict resolution program.

As part of its 2022 work, the Carter Center is asking midterm candidates to sign up for five core principles to uphold trusted elections. One of those commitments is to accept the outcome of the vote once the results have been certified.

“We are saying, ‘Yes you get to have your day in court, but once the legal challenges are settled and the result is certified, you have got to accept the result,’” Stock said.

Some 124 candidates in the November elections have so far pledged to adopt the principles. They include Brian Kemp, the Republican governor of Georgia, and his Democratic opponent Stacey Abrams; and Georgia’s current secretary of state Brad Raffensperger who helped rebuff Trump’s efforts to overturn the state’s presidential outcome in 2020, and his Democratic challenger Bee Nguyen.

Key election deniers, however, have yet to come on board.

Contributor

Ed Pilkington

The GuardianTramp

Related Content

Article image
The key races to watch in the 2022 US midterms
Control of the Senate could hang on results in a handful of states while votes for governor and secretary of state could affect the conduct of future elections

David Smith in Washington

08, Nov, 2022 @3:50 PM

Article image
US midterm voters reject election deniers who support Trump’s false claim
Several avid participants in efforts to subvert the outcome of the 2020 presidential contest fell short in the midterm elections

Ed Pilkington in New York and Sam Levine in Detroit

09, Nov, 2022 @5:57 PM

Article image
The ‘election-denier trifecta’: alarm over Trumpists’ efforts to win key posts
Republican contenders for secretary of state, attorney general and governor have loudly echoed Trump’s false claims of election fraud

Peter Stone in Washington

21, Oct, 2022 @10:00 AM

Article image
The key candidates who threaten democracy in the 2022 US midterms
In several states, Republican candidates who dispute the 2020 election results are running for positions that would give them control over elections

Sam Levine in New York and Rachel Leingang in Arizona

15, Nov, 2022 @2:45 PM

Article image
Debunked: Trump’s false claims in letter to January 6 panel
We fact-check each misleading assertion made by the former president in a lengthy letter to the Capitol attack committee

Spenser Mestel

20, Oct, 2022 @10:00 AM

Article image
Abortion rights: how a governor’s veto can protect women’s freedoms
The likely end of Roe has raised the stakes in gubernatorial races with candidates stressing on the urgency of the moment

Joan E Greve in Washington

16, May, 2022 @7:00 AM

Article image
Pro-Trump Republicans’ primary wins raise alarm about US democracy
Crucial races from Nevada to South Carolina returned candidates who back ‘big lie’ of stolen election while Democrats lost Hispanic votes in south Texas

Lauren Gambino in Washington

15, Jun, 2022 @5:04 PM

Article image
Republicans reflect and blame after Trump-backed candidate Walker loses
Herschel Walker’s failure to win Georgia runoff is latest in long list of midterm misfires for extremist candidates endorsed by Trump

Richard Luscombe

07, Dec, 2022 @7:07 PM

Article image
Trump expected to launch dozens of TV ads boosting Republicans in key races
Republican Senate candidates Mehmet Oz, JD Vance and Herschel Walker likely to receive majority of Trump’s assistance

Hugo Lowell in Washington

07, Oct, 2022 @1:16 PM

Article image
Could election denialism in a feuding Arizona county upend US democracy?
Republicans in Cochise county who undermined midterm election gain control in critical swing state for 2024

Rachel Leingang

16, Mar, 2023 @10:00 AM