The election results suggest that a focus on Mr. Trump’s election lies did not merely galvanize Democrats but also alienated Republicans and independents. Final turnout figures show registered Republicans cast more ballots than registered Democrats in Arizona and Nevada, but election-denying candidates nevertheless lost important races in each of those states.
Republican candidates in statewide contests who embraced Mr. Trump’s election lies also significantly underperformed compared with Republicans who did not. This was true even in districts that voted overwhelmingly for Mr. Trump in 2020, suggesting that the defection of ticket-splitters like Mr. Mohler likely played a role.
In a survey of voters in five battleground states conducted by the research firm Citizen Data for the advocacy group Protect Democracy, a third who cast ballots for a mix of Democrats and Republicans in November cited a concern that G.O.P. candidates held views or promoted policies “that are dangerous to democracy.”
And in a postelection survey conducted by Impact Research, a Democratic polling firm, 69 percent of independents and Republicans who voted for a Democrat for the House said that democracy was critical to their decision. The poll was shared exclusively with The New York Times.
“That gives me some optimism that the general election voter wants a return to some normalcy and some stability,” said Ethan Demme, a former G.O.P. chairman in Pennsylvania’s Lancaster County, who formed a new third party in Pennsylvania after Trump supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol last year.
Even so, a review of the election outcomes in several states, along with interviews with voters, political strategists, pollsters and political scientists, suggests that what happened in November was something less than a clear repudiation of an anti-democratic push in the Republican Party.
While election deniers suffered losses across the board, in states like Nevada and Arizona they still won nearly half the vote. And in interviews, Republicans and independents who rejected election deniers often said they did so for other reasons, like the candidates’ stances on abortion or a more general sense that they were too extreme or too closely aligned with Mr. Trump.
n most statewide races, Democrats enjoyed conventional advantages over election-denier Republicans, fielding much better-funded campaigns with more unified support from their party. On the Republican side, many election deniers ran poorly financed and generally lackluster campaigns, with almost no monetary support from Mr. Trump or other national Republicans, and depressed the use of mail-in voting by inundating their supporters with dire warnings about its insecurity.
But even though voters’ reasons for opposing election deniers were often more complex than an intent to defend the electoral system, some experts suggested that they might have done just that — by showing the political limits of campaigning on election conspiracy theories.
“The good news from the 2022 elections is that election denial seems like a loser for Republicans to run on,” said Richard L. Hasen, an election law scholar at the University of California, Los Angeles. “Maybe that will lead more Republicans to speak out against fact-free claims of election fraud.”