According to me and, I would say, any fair-minded fact-oriented observer, Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election, even though Trump has never (and probably will never) acknowledge this fact.
And yet, according to a Washington Post story this week, a total of 299 Republican nominees for the US House, Senate and key statewide offices, constituting a majority of the Republican nominees for those offices, either “have denied or questioned the outcome of the last presidential election,” according to ...’s analysis.
... piece can be accessed here, although I’m not sure if non-subscribers can get it.
I don’t claim to know, nor do I even hazard a guess as to how many of election deniers believe what they are saying and how many are just engaging in very dangerous tactical lying. But the deniers clearly feel it is to their advantage to participate in the continuation of this lie, notwithstanding the fairly obvious danger it represents to the continuing health of our 233-year experiment in democratic-republican self-government, which has relied fairly heavily on trust in the honesty of our electoral system.
I feel a bit sorry for those who are deluded by the falsehood and disgusted by those who knowingly perpetuate the lie. I frankly don’t know when it ends, and I suppose it could just become a new normal, with frightening implications for the future of that experiment.
Washington Post national political reporter Amy Gardner, who wrote the piece on which I’m relying, notes that:
“Candidates who have challenged or refused to accept Joe Biden’s victory are running in every region of the country and in nearly every state. Republican voters in four states nominated election deniers in all federal and statewide races ... examined.
Of the 299 election deniers, 174 are expected to win their races, 51 are involved in races that are too close to call, and 74 of the deniers are expected to lose, Gardner estimated.
In Minnesota, ... article identifies three incumbent Republican members of the US House who publicly endorse the falsehood (Tom Emmer, Michelle Fischbach and Pete Stauber) and three Republican nominees (Tyler Kistner, running for the US House from the 2nd Congressional District in the southern Twin Cities suburbs; Kim Crockett, the Republican nominee for secretary of state; and Republican gubernatorial candidate Scott Jensen) as deniers of the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential race.
In all, ... said that election deniers make up more than half of Republican nominees nominated for congressional and statewide office.
