Nine months ago, when followers of President Donald Trump stormed the Capitol to halt the election of Joe Biden, the insurrection appeared to be the work of an extremist fringe led by right-wing militias and pro-Trump zealots.
But election denialism, the movement that spawned the uprising, has turned out to be much larger, more durable and every bit as worrisome as the violence of Jan. 6.
Stoked relentlessly by Trump, the belief that Biden stole the election has become a tenet of faith for most Republican voters.
In fact, Biden won the election decisively — whether measured by the popular vote (where his margin was a healthy 7 million) or by electoral votes (where he won by the same majority Trump did four years before). It was not a close election.
Since Election Day, more evidence has proved that Trump’s claims of fraud are groundless. The former president’s lawyers filed 65 lawsuits to challenge the results and lost 64. (The single win wasn’t about fraud; it was a suit to stop Pennsylvania from letting voters correct errors on mail-in ballots.)
Last month, a shambolic GOP “audit” of votes in Arizona’s largest county found that Biden actually won more votes than had initially been counted.
None of that has stopped Trump from continuing to proclaim his spurious gospel of fraud.
“We won on the Arizona forensic audit yesterday at a level that you wouldn’t believe,” he told supporters in Georgia. “[Biden] didn’t win in Arizona; he lost.”
Biden won Arizona by more than 10,000 votes.
Unfortunately, the former president’s disinformation campaign is succeeding — at least among the voters and donors he will need if he runs again.
And it’s making violence around future elections more likely.
A CNN poll last month found that 78% of Republicans say Biden lost the election. Almost 6 in 10 said “believing that Donald Trump won the 2020 election” is an important part of being Republican — right up there with low taxes and limited government.
Another survey, the Economist/YouGov poll, found that election denialism has been growing. In January, only 33% of Republicans said Biden won the presidency “legitimately”; last month, it was down to 26%.
It’s tempting to consider this merely more evidence of what psychologists call “motivated reasoning,” the tendency to believe only those facts (in this case, imaginary facts) that conform with your partisan views.
But it’s more dangerous than that. It means a Jan. 6-style insurgency could happen again.
