The biggest issue in the 2022 election might be the fact that we haven’t moved on from the last one. We’re still living in the shadow of former President Donald Trump’s Big Lie — a baseless assertion that he and his allies refuse to let go of.
The claim that the 2020 presidential election was “stolen” or “rigged” is demonstrably false. And, as the House’s Jan. 6 committee detailed Thursday in what was likely its final hearing, Trump knew it was false — but he wanted to “keep fighting” the results anyway. He publicly insisted he had won the election even after privately admitting he had lost, the committee’s presentation revealed.
Despite the compelling evidence presented by the Jan. 6 committee in its nine public hearings, it often felt like its members were shouting into a void. The most powerful members of the Republican Party have either ignored the hearings or tried to discredit them altogether, and while the committee’s work has changed some minds, it may not have changed enough.
Hundreds of candidates who dispute the results of the 2020 election could take office next year if they win in November, but that’s only part of the problem. What’s even more concerning is the fact that a large part of the electorate might actually believe what they say.
“I think the truly lasting damage of the Big Lie is not January 6, as traumatic as January 6 is, but the loss of faith by a significant portion of Americans in the architecture of their democracy,” Asher Hildebrand, a public policy professor at Duke University, told me. “And it’s more than just a loss of trust — it’s an emerging belief that the election is only legitimate if their side wins.”
Nearly a third of Americans — and a majority of Republicans — still believe that Joe Biden is not the rightful winner of the 2020 election. And in North Carolina, nearly half of Republican voters have little to no confidence that their vote in the 2022 election will be counted accurately, a recent WRAL poll found. I think the truly lasting damage of the Big Lie is not January 6, as traumatic as January 6 is, but the loss of faith by a significant portion of Americans in the architecture of their democracy.
Election deniers across the state have launched a joint effort to “ensure secure and legitimate election processes,” calling themselves the North Carolina Election Integrity Team. The group is part of a nationwide “election integrity” strategy spearheaded by Trump attorney Cleta Mitchell, who aided the former president in his scheme to overturn the 2020 election.
Their work includes training poll observers and sniffing out suspected election law violations, according to reporting published by The Assembly. They’ve overwhelmed local boards of elections with records requests pertaining to the 2020 election, which has made it harder for those officials to do their actual jobs.
“Election integrity” also happens to be a phrase long used by Republican lawmakers to justify suppressive legislation. That, too, has increased thanks to the Big Lie: hundreds of restrictive voting bills have been introduced in state legislatures across the country since the 2020 election, including here in North Carolina.
Ironically, the politicians behind said efforts to “restore trust” in our elections are the same ones responsible for breaking it. Trump may be at the center of this election denialism, but he isn’t the only one at fault. Far too many Republican politicians enabled Trump’s clearly false claims of election fraud in the wake of the 2020 election, and nearly two years later, plenty more still spread them.
It’s almost no surprise, then, that voters might not believe in the legitimacy of our elections. Why would they, when so many elected officials have told them they shouldn’t, and not enough have insisted they should?
The committee’s hearings have given us much-needed answers, and hopefully those answers will also lead to accountability and reform, too. They’ve made a difference in an important way, but in perhaps the most important way, they might not.
“You really do get the feeling that, whatever opportunity there may have been to put a lid on the open embrace of the Big Lie and the idea of subverting future elections, that opportunity seems to be passing behind,” Hildebrand said. “And of course, it wasn’t the January 6 committee’s job to stop all of that.”
About the writer: Paige Masten is a Charlotte-based opinion writer and member of the Charlotte Observer Editorial Board.
