In the contest to join former president Donald Trump on the 2024 ticket as his running mate, aspirants have had to follow his path on questioning election integrity in the United States. Many refuse to say they would accept the election results if Trump doesn’t win. Some in contention have echoed Trump’s falsehoods, as Vivek Ramaswamy did when he declared in one of the GOP primary debates that “the 2020 election was indeed stolen by Big Tech.” (The theory, without evidence, is that more coverage of the Hunter Biden laptop would have changed the election results.)
In a recent television appearance, Rubio managed to achieve a trifecta.
He refused to say he would accept the results: “If it’s an unfair election, I think it’s going to be contested.”
He suggested that more coverage of the laptop would have affected the results: “What undermines elections is when NBC News and every major news outlet in America in 2020 censored the Biden laptop story, which turned out to be true, not Russian misinformation, unprecedented.”
And he made three specific claims about 2020 — one misleading, two debunked. Let’s examine them in the order he made them. A Rubio spokesperson declined to address his statements in detail. She forwarded the office’s news release on his appearance, which cast his comments as addressing the “legacy media’s one-sided questioning on election denying.”