Abandoned: Trump’s election denialism meets 2022 electoral reality

Donald Trump reportedly had a plan to do an encore of his 2020 election denialism and to sow chaos in Tuesday’s midterm election. It depended on the willingness of his crew of MAGA candidates to cry foul if they lost.

His plan was a spectacular failure.

A bandwagon of commentators are calling the Nov. 8 election a stinging rebuke to Donald Trump. They are highlighting the electoral defeats suffered by prominent Trump-backed candidates.

But that is not the only reason why Trump lost and lost big.

He also failed because many of the people he supported accepted their defeats rather than falsely complaining about electoral shenanigans. Now that’s news in 2022 Trump-world — and it signals the hornet of election-denialism just might be losing his sting.

What is really remarkable in the aftermath of the 2022 midterms is the return of a once-settled American tradition, electoral defeat followed by graceful concession. It was this tradition as much as any other that Trump cast aside in 2020 and that he and his acolytes were planning to trash in the midterm election cycle.

On Oct. 28, Politico reported that it had obtained a recording of John Eastman’s Oct. 19 speech at a gathering of election deniers who were part of the army that Republican operatives were organizing to undermine our elections.

Eastman was one of the architects of Donald Trump’s lawless 2020 post-election coup strategy to enlist fake electors from battleground states and attempt to persuade then-Vice President Pence to unilaterally overturn the electoral count. He was apparently undeterred by bar disciplinary complaints pending against him for spreading false information in 2020 or by having his cell-phone seized by the FBI.

Eastman’s speech confirmed that — no longer content simply to replay their 2020 Big Lie — MAGA Republican challenges were planned for states, cities and neighborhoods across the country.  

They hoped to spread the disease of election doubt and denialism, like metastasizing cancer, everywhere they could. If we needed evidence of the recycled plan for this election, Eastman’s speech gave it. He reportedly told his audience of Republican “poll watchers” to file election day complaints with election officials, complaints that would become the basis for subsequent court challenges to whatever midterms Republicans lost.

Politico reported him giving inaccurate information just as he did last time. In fact, not only were Eastman’s and Trump’s court challenges last round built on a lie, evidence shows they knew it. The Jan. 6 Committee showed video of former Mark Meadows’ aide Cassidy Hutchinson testifying that Trump admitted to Meadows that he lost the 2020 election: She said he told Meadows, “I don’t want people to know we lost, Mark.” Likewise, former Trump White House aide Alyssa Farah Griffin testified to hearing Trump ask Meadows: “Can you believe that I lost to this guy [Biden]?”

Of course, neither knowledge of the truth nor 60 court losses after the last election stopped their plan for a re-run. On Nov. 3, The Guardian featured a news story titled, “The Trump playbook’: Republicans hint they will deny election results.”

This plan seemed to be working in the run-up to Tuesday’s election. MAGA candidates like Arizona’s Republican candidate for governor Kari Lake refused to say that she would accept the results of the election. Trump seized on reports of voting machine issues in Maricopa County, Ariz., to rehash his phony fraud claims.

Republicans also filed suit in an effort to slow down the counting of ballots in Philadelphia.

One can only imagine Trump’s chagrin when his hand-picked Pennsylvania senatorial candidate, Dr. Mehmet Oz, did not follow the playbook.

On Wednesday, Oz put out a straightforward concession statement without a word about voting fraud. It said “This morning I called John Fetterman and congratulated him. I wish him and his family all the best, both personally and as our next United States Senator.” A “wounded” and “furious” Trump promptly threw Oz under the bus and reportedly blamed wife Melania, claiming that she had suggested Oz.

Oz was not the only MAGA candidate to abandon the Big Lie after suffering electoral defeat.

In Michigan, Tudor Dixon, Trump’s chosen GOP gubernatorial candidate, phoned Gov. Gretchen Whitmer to concede and told her supporters, “We came up short.”

In Wisconsin, Tim Michels, the Trump-endorsed Republican candidate for governor, conceded defeat. He told his supporters: “The math just simply does not add up. I just called Governor Evers and conceded. I wish him and his family well.”

Lee Zeldin, the Trump-backed candidate for New York governor, and Don Bolduc, who the former president supported for the Senate in New Hampshire, both eschewed election denialism. Zeldin offered congratulations to his opponent, and Bolduc said directly: “We didn’t win today.”

And in Massachusetts, Geoff Deihl, the Trump endorsed candidate for governor, quickly conceded defeat to Maura Healey.

In response to his supporters pushing him to question the results of the election, Deihl said, “I understand every vote counts. It will be counted. I know the state will count those votes. But right now, with the gap that we have, it is impossible to close.” He ended his speech by urging his supporters to give governor-elect Healey “the same opportunity for success that I would have asked were the shoe on the other foot.”

These candidates did the right thing because they knew that a stable democracy requires that the people’s will prevail and that the 2022 election, like the last election and those before it, was free and fair. Documented acts of ballot fraud were insignificant in number … and committed largely, if not entirely, by Trump’s supporters.

Of course, not every losing MAGA candidate accepted reality.

Some said nothing. Others — especially some down-ballot candidates in Michigan, Minnesota and New Mexico as well as defeated Alaska Congressional candidate Sarah Palin — followed the Trump/Eastman playbook in raising questions about the conduct of the election. “We’ll see,” Palin said, “if Alaska falls in line with so many of the other states where, collectively, residents and states are having questions about how the vote count is going.”

But the results make clear that many of Trump’s cronies have parted company with him over spreading the Big Lie about the 2022 election.

Trump’s fury at all this could do nothing to stifle the sounds of Republican concession speeches across this country. They are the sounds of democracy. And while the danger to our republic is not over, it is good to hear them. We all win when the people’s will is expressed and is honored quickly when the votes are counted.

Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College. He is author of numerous books on America’s death penalty, including “Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America’s Death Penalty.” Follow him on Twitter @ljstprof.

Dennis Aftergut is a former federal prosecutor.