A month before the November 2020 midterm elections, the Brookings Institution identified 345 candidates running for local, state, and federal offices who embraced Donald Trump’s Big Lie and the tale that election fraud is endemic. Nowadays they are called ‘election deniers.’ Two thirds of these candidates, 226, won their races. Among the victors, 132 were congressional candidates (including 113 incumbents). With Republicans flipping the House from blue to red, these election deniers will constitute more than half of the majority caucus when the 118th Congress is sworn in on January 3, 2023.
Hardly an ideal result for American democracy, but not a disaster. Members of Congress don’t control elections. That’s a function of state government. And, if we look at the states where presidential elections are decided, the picture is much less bleak.
Voters in the six major battlegrounds where Donald Trump tried to reverse his defeat in 2020 rejected election-denying candidates seeking to control their states’ election systems this year, a resounding signal that Americans have grown weary of the former president’s unfounded claims of widespread fraud.
Candidates for secretary of state in Michigan, Arizona and Nevada who had echoed Trump’s false accusations lost their contests on Tuesday, with the latter race called Saturday night. A fourth candidate never made it out of his May primary in Georgia. In Pennsylvania, one of the nation’s most prominent election deniers lost his bid for governor, a job that would have given him the power to appoint the secretary of state. And in Wisconsin, an election-denying contender’s loss in the governor’s race effectively blocked a move to put election administration under partisan control.
With this week’s victory in Georgia, Democrats increased their majority in the Senate. And in light of the president’s unpopularity, high inflation, and historical patterns that suggested a red wave, the story of the election was not how well Republican election deniers had done, but how well Democrats who pushed back had fared. What happened?
David Shor, of Blue Rose Research, noting that Republican votes outnumbered Democratic votes nationally, said “it really seems like there was a red wave everywhere in the country except for the places that mattered.” He added, “I think that there really is this story that Democrats in swing districts and in swing races really acted very differently than Democrats in the rest of the country.”
On Shor’s analysis: Issues and messaging in swing states and districts mattered. The Dobbs decision mattered in places where access to abortion was in play. Republican candidates who embraced conspiracies related to election integrity and to Trump’s 2020 defeat, also mattered. Democracy and January 6 were not often invoked by Democratic candidates in swing areas, but because democracy resonated with Democratic donors, Democratic campaign spending swamped Republican efforts – and that mattered.
Democracy, including backing free and fair elections and being willing to accept the results, has become a partisan issue. Democrats' victories were triumphs for democracy.
Legal scholar Richard Hasen, who has been sounding the alarm regarding threats to democracy posed by voter suppression, laws that permit overturning the outcome of elections, and disinformation invoked to justify even violence, such as we saw on January 6, pronounces himself “a bit less terrified” after the 2022 midterms than before:
Across the ballot, in the places where it mattered, Democrats, Republicans, and others poured money into defeating election-denying candidates. The message was that if these people were willing to say, against all reliable evidence, that the last election was stolen, how could you trust them to run the next one? Democracy was on the line. This time, the line held.
Professor Hasen still has grave concerns, because election deniers won victories in red regions (keeping alive conspiracies that undermine faith in elections), because Donald Trump (who made up the big lie) still stands atop the Republican Party, and because the next leader of the GOP may be more skillful at election subversion than Trump was.
There is undoubtedly continuing cause for concern. Donald Trump has insisted that massive election fraud in the 2020 presidential election justified "allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution."
Two Republican supervisors in Arizona's Cochise County refused to certify the election results (though they could point to no irregularities in the voting or the counting of ballots) until ordered to do so by a judge. And Kari Lake, the election-denying Republican candidate for governor of Arizona, still hasn't accepted her defeat.
Nonetheless, this time the line held. The Constitution is intact. Every state, including Arizona, has certified the election results. Donald Trump, Kari Lake, and numerous other candidates in the battleground states for secretary of state, governor, and attorney general remain losers.
Election deniers' 2022 defeats in the battleground states strengthen the likelihood of free and fair elections in 2024 and represent a victory for American democracy. Two other factors, not yet determined, could further reduce threats to elections in 2024.
The first is Congressional passage during the lame duck session of the Electoral Count Reform Act, which has bipartisan support in the Senate. Things look promising for success, though time is running out.
The second, is the possible rejection of the independent state legislature theory. While the decision in this case (Moore v. Harper), which was argued at the Supreme Court last week, is uncertain, oral arguments have convinced a number of critics (such as Mark Joseph Stern, who pronounces the theory "dangerous" and "an utter fraud") that ISL will not be embraced by a majority of the justices.
Both of these possibilities will, if they come to pass, serve to bolster the prospects of free and fair elections in 2024. The 2022 midterms delivered good news for American democracy. There may be further good news to come.