Democrats seeking high office in battleground states this year are increasingly pitching themselves to voters as a bulwark against any efforts that Republican allies of former President Donald Trump might make to subvert the next presidential election.
The six states where President Joe Biden scored his narrowest victories — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — will all elect governors this year.
Voters in four of those states will also choose secretaries of state who will administer future elections, while the new governor of Pennsylvania will appoint someone to that role. The fight could be particularly consequential in Wisconsin, where two GOP candidates for governor favor scrapping the bipartisan commission that oversees elections.
Trump leaned on Republican state officials to overturn his losses in 2020 and is backing primary challengers in Georgia against Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger because they refused. The former president, who remains influential with GOP voters, is promoting midterm candidates who support restrictive voting laws and who echo his debunked claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him.
Layered atop Trump’s eagerness to have loyalists in place is the inability, so far, of Senate Democrats to pass federal election legislation they contend is necessary to blunt state-level voting restrictions. Democratic governors and secretaries of state are already pushing back on proposed voting restrictions advanced by conservative legislatures.
“I think what is clear is that the state actors, like a governor, are going to be critical to defending our democracy,” Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro, a Democrat running for governor, said in an interview with NBC News. “And Pennsylvania, I believe, will be at the epicenter of that fight.”
Voting rights and election integrity rated as a top-three issue facing the country — behind jobs and the economy and the pandemic — in an NBC News poll last month. Among the adults surveyed, 76 percent said they believed there was a threat to democracy and majority rule.