It’s hard to say exactly when Donald Trump started lying about widespread fraud in the 2020 election because he’d never really stopped lying about it in the 2016 election. But if you had to pinpoint when his outlandish, self-serving conspiracy theories really began to accelerate, it was probably around the late spring of last year, when polls indicated that he could lose to Joe Biden and that his desperate attempts to brand his opponent as a “sleepy” socialist didn’t seem to be working. As I asked in May 2020, “Is Trump Setting the Stage to Dismiss the 2020 Election Results?” Trump appeared to answer that question by the summer: “2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history,” he wrote. “It will be a great embarrassment to the USA.”
Most Americans, no doubt, understood these outbursts for what they were: The efforts of a delirious demagogue to, if not successfully overturn his eventual defeat, at least save face from it. But the campaign worked on its intended audience—his ever-loyal base—and the conspiracy theory burrowed into the body politic of the American right. And while Trump may be gone—sort of, at least for now—his lies remain an animating force in the GOP, fueling the party’s assault on voting rights and becoming a blueprint for other Republicans seeking to explain away potential losses.
For a time, the GOP seemed bullish about their chances to oust Governor Gavin Newsom in California’s upcoming recall election. But a spate of recent polls may be dampening their confidence: The Democrat appears poised to survive the removal attempt, with the numbers trending even more in the incumbent’s favor in recent weeks. That doesn’t mean he and the Democrats can take a sigh of relief just yet—polls have missed the mark before—but it has already sent his GOP opponents scrambling for preemptive excuses.
“There might very well be shenanigans,” Larry Elder, one of Newsom’s top right-wing foes, told reporters last week, inviting supporters to report alleged instances of cheating on a website that already describes the results of the election as “twisted.” “The only thing that will save Gavin Newsom is voter fraud,” the right-wing commentator Tomi Lahren said on Fox News. “Well, it’s probably rigged,” Trump himself said of the California race on Newsmax. “The one thing they’re good at is rigging elections, so I predict it’s a rigged election. Let’s see how it turns out.”
The idea here is pretty transparent: To erode confidence in the process to avoid confronting defeat and to justify attacks on the voting system. “This is baked into the playbook now,” as Michael Latner, an associate professor of political science at California Polytechnic Institute, told the New York Times. Like other MAGA moves now in the GOP playbook, this maneuver began as a Trump tick, based on his neurotic inability to accept ever being seen as a “loser,” but has since been adopted by more calculating operators. They may not believe, as Trump apparently does, that this kind of bellyaching will actually succeed in getting the results dismissed. But they are certainly aware that it lays the foundation for future election challenges, voter suppression laws, and other anti-democratic overtures. “It’s all designed to make it easier to raise the doubt and uncertainty to allow a close election to be overturned,” Ben Berwick, an attorney at the nonpartisan Protect Democracy, told CNN. “2020 was a preview of what is likely to be darker times to come, if we continue down this path away from democracy.”
One of the frightening things about all this is how easily these lies go down, how little effort is required of the people selling these fictions to get the base to buy them. A CNN poll released Sunday found that 59% of Republicans say believing Trump won the 2020 election is at least a somewhat important part of being a Republican. It’s not just that Trump has never provided evidence in court to support his fraud claims; it’s that he’s never defined what the fraud is supposed to be. But this is what makes the conspiracy theories so durable: By never fully nailing down what, precisely, he’s accusing his opponents of doing, their efforts to disprove his allegations can never quite extinguish them. Those lies may not have helped Trump against Biden in 2020—despite the efforts of 139 House Republicans, who, notably didn’t challenge their own victories last November—and they may not help Elder and his fellow GOP hopefuls against Newsom now in 2021. But the more Republicans invest in these insidious lies now, perhaps, the more likely is that they will pay off for them down the road.