Many of the nation’s most outspoken 2020 election deniers are staying quiet or conceding defeat after their own election losses this cycle.
Prior to the election, experts had warned that democracy itself was at risk of being overrun by an army of acolytes of former President Donald Trump who would take a page out of his playbook and refuse to accept any loss.
But with a few exceptions, and with some races yet to be finalized, that has not happened, heartening those who feared the worst.
“I’m pleasantly surprised that several election deniers have conceded and some others that haven’t have at least seemed to remain quiet,” said David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, a nonpartisan group that works to support elections officials.
In states including Michigan and Wisconsin — epicenters of Trump’s baseless claims that voting machines were rigged and Democrats stole the election from him — a number of candidates who fanned conspiracies about fraud in the 2020 election have accepted their own losses in 2022.
Those include Trump-backed candidates who were vying for secretary of state, attorney general and governor; posts that, in certain cases, would have given them direct input in overseeing future elections.
The margins of loss in some cases were wide, making it more difficult to launch a redux of 2020, when baseless lawsuits flooded swing-state courts. And not every election denier has lost. Indeed, many running for House seats won their contests and will serve in the next Congress.
But the broader trend underscores that Trump himself was likely the critical ingredient in spreading and amplifying falsehoods about the election system and demanding legal challenges to overturn the results.
“Some of the election denialist language turned out to be bluster to please the Trumpian base of the Republican Party,” said Rick Hasen, a professor and director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at the UCLA School of Law. “Even if some of these denialists wanted to contest the results of the election, they don’t command the same attention that Trump does, and things could have fizzled.”
Hasen added some caution, however: “That’s not to say the movement wouldn’t be more successful again if Trump were on the ballot in 2024.”