More than 100 GOP primary winners back Trump's false fraud claims

[mahatmakanejeeves]

WP EXCLUSIVE

More than 100 GOP primary winners back Trump’s false fraud claims

A Washington Post analysis shows the former president’s election denialism has become a price of admission in many Republican primaries

By Amy Gardner and Isaac Arnsdorf
June 14, 2022 at 6:00 a.m. EDT

J.R. Majewski marched to the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and tweeted a photo with the caption: “It’s going down on 1/6.” Last month, he won the Republican nomination in an Ohio congressional district along Lake Erie. ... Monica De La Cruz, an insurance agent, contested her defeat in 2020 by repeating former president Donald Trump’s disproved allegations of mail-ballot fraud. For a second time, De La Cruz is the GOP nominee for a Texas House seat that touches the Mexican border.

In an open primary in a safely Republican Georgia district, all nine candidates questioned the 2020 result. Of the two candidates who advanced to this month’s runoff, lawyer Jake Evans touted his past efforts to “overturn” elections, while physician Rich McCormick emphasized that he refused to concede in a 2018 race. ... “No one was hurt by voter fraud more than myself,” McCormick said during a May debate.

About a third of the way through the 2022 primaries, voters have nominated scores of Republican candidates for state and federal office who say the 2020 election was rigged, according to a new analysis by The Washington Post.

District by district, state by state, voters in places that cast ballots through the end of May have chosen at least 108 candidates for statewide office or Congress who have repeated Trump’s lies. The number jumps to at least 149 winning candidates — out of more than 170 races — when it includes those who have campaigned on a platform of tightening voting rules or more stringently enforcing those already on the books, despite the lack of evidence of widespread fraud.

{snip}

By Amy Gardner
Amy Gardner joined The Washington Post in 2005. She has worked stints in the Virginia suburbs, covered the 2010 midterms and the tea party revolution, and covered the Republican presidential nominating contest in 2011-2012. She was a politics editor for five years and returned to reporting in 2018. Twitter https://twitter.com/AmyEGardner

By Isaac Arnsdorf
Isaac Arnsdorf is a national political reporter for The Washington Post who covers former president Donald Trump, the “Make America Great Again” political movement and the Republican Party. Twitter https://twitter.com/iarnsdorf

[Scrivener7]

1. I bet a lot of them go real quiet on that pretty soon.

[MissMillie]

3. Their Democratic opponents won't

I wonder if the Committee will make footage from the hearings available to the producers of campaign ads. How exactly would that work if the Select Committee wants to appear non-partisan?

Or will the Committee be okay about it because of their oath to protect the country?

[spanone]

2. May it be the very thing that brings them down.

....bragging about deconstructing our Democracy.

[Zambero]

4. For many, "victimhood" sells

In these instances, the Trumpian meme that "the system is rigged against me" is a powerful and relatable force. Political loeers no longer need to concede defeat and move on. Instead, they can proceed to make frivolous claims that what was rightfully theirs was stolen by a corrupt political system. And it's not just the bona-fide losers who glom onto the "I've been cheated" bandwagon, as their supporters are only too eager to see themselves as marginalized by the same electoral process. One more tool in the kit for the anti-democracy alt-right grievance-based crowd.