WASHINGTON (AP) — In the hours after the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, then-Ohio Republican Sen. Rob Portman voted to accept President Joe Biden’s victory over defeated former President Donald Trump, despite Trump’s false statement, allegations that Biden only won due to fraud.
But as Trump heads toward his rematch with Biden in 2024, Portman has been replaced by Sen. JD Vance, a potential vice president who has repeated Trump’s false claims of fraud and said he will only accept the results this fall “if it is so.” . “free and fair elections.”
Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina and Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, other possible vice presidents, also declined to object to Biden’s victory over Trump but have been less forceful this year. Rubio recently said that Republicans would not sit idly by if “everything goes wrong” in the November election.
And fresh House Speaker Mike Johnson helped organize Trump’s failed legal challenge to Biden’s victory. When asked during an event with other Trump allies about the upcoming election whether he believed the 2020 election was legitimate, he demurred.
As Trump tries to regain power, Republicans in Congress are even more likely to doubt Biden’s victory or deny it as legitimate – a political shift that allows his false claims of fraud to stand and lays the groundwork for a possible challenge to the results in 2024.
A fresh report released Tuesday by States United Action, a group that targets election deniers, said nearly a third of members of Congress supported in some way Trump’s attempt to overturn or overturn the 2020 results another way to cast doubt on the reliability of the elections. Several others hope to join them and run for election to the House and Senate this year.
“The public should have a healthy level of concern about the real risk of having people in power who have demonstrated an unwillingness to respect the will of the people,” said Lizzie Ullmer of States United Action.
The issue is particularly earnest for Congress given its constitutional role as the final arbiter of the validity of a presidential election. It counts the results of the Electoral College as scheduled on January 6, 2021, a date now lost to history due to the violent attack on the US Capitol by a pro-Trump mob.
States United found in its report that 170 representatives and senators out of a total of 535 lawmakers in Congress can be classified as election deniers. Heading into the fall elections, two fresh Senate candidates and 17 fresh House candidates are already on the ballot this fall and are looking to join them.
Not only was Congress filled with people who supported the effort to overturn Trump’s defeat in 2020, but also the highest echelons of the Republican Party.
“This is deeply troubling,” said Wendy Weiser, vice president for democracy programs at New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice. “A democracy can only function if the participants commit to accepting the results of popular elections. That’s it. That’s the entire political system.”
The former president chose Michael Whatley, who has repeated Trump’s election lies, to co-chair the Republican National Committee along with his daughter-in-law Lara Trump. Christina Bobb, who was recently indicted for her alleged involvement in a scheme to recruit fraudulent voters in Arizona, has been named director of the RNC’s election integrity division.
Under Trump’s leadership, the RNC is making the electoral process a top priority by hiring fresh staff and increasing resources, said Danielle Alvarez, an adviser to both the Trump campaign and the party committee.
“Biden is in the White House, that’s true,” Alvarez said, “but there were problems with the election.”
To be clear, there was no widespread fraud in the 2020 election that cost Trump his re-election. Recounts, audits and reviews in the battleground states where he contested his loss all confirmed Biden’s victory, and courts rejected dozens of lawsuits filed by Trump and his allies.
The States United report details how successful election deniers were in strengthening their ranks in Congress. It examines the results of congressional primaries in the 10 states that held them this year and finds that in each state at least one vote-holder made it to the general election for a House or Senate seat.
The report defines election deniers as people who falsely claimed Trump won in 2020, spread false information about that election or took steps to overturn it, or refused to concede a separate election. It concludes that at least 67 of them will be on the House ballot in November, including 50 incumbents. Three of them will run for the Senate – one of them, Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, is an incumbent.
There were also major losses among election deniers. Last week, Republican Rep. Carol Miller, who also voted against accepting Biden’s victory, successfully fended off a primary challenge in West Virginia from Derrick Evans, who was convicted of misdemeanor charges after the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol. Numerous election deniers in 2022 lost bids for swing-state offices such as governor or secretary of state that would have given them direct power over voting in 2024.
Still, the movement has grown by dominating Republican primaries. In the race for the nomination to challenge Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown in Ohio, businessman Bernie Moreno, who previously said Trump was “rightly” to call 2020 “stolen,” won his primary. In Indiana, Republican Sen. Mike Braun voted to certify Biden’s victory, but he will step down this year to run for governor and is poised to be replaced by Rep. Jim Banks, a prominent election denier who easily won the GOP primary in that state.
The report does not classify either Rubio or Scott as election deniers, but skepticism about the trustworthiness of voting has become an organizing principle of the GOP, particularly for the Republican-controlled House of Representatives.
Before becoming speaker of the House, Johnson recruited colleagues to support a lawsuit filed by Trump’s allies that ultimately failed to overturn his 2020 defeat.
Johnson recently met with Trump at the former president’s Mar-a-Lago resort to shore up his own political support amid a far-right rebellion seeking to oust him as speaker. Johnson promised the House of Representatives bills that would exclude immigrants living in the country illegally from voting.
During a news conference on the Capitol steps to announce the bill, the speaker acknowledged that it would be arduous to prove that certain immigrants were voting unfairly. Election experts say it is extremely infrequent for immigrants who are ineligible to vote to violate federal law to do so.
While Congress passed legislation that provided safeguards to better protect against interference after the attack on the Capitol, it will ultimately be lawmakers who will be asked to accept the 2024 results from their states.
Vance stood by his recent comments. And Rubio said he expects there will be lawsuits in jurisdictions where the final results are close, as sometimes happens.
“When people ask me, ‘Are you going to accept the outcome?’ I think some people argue that if there is something wrong with this election, we will point it out,” Rubio said in a brief interview.
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Riccardi reported from Denver.
