GOP candidates add a repulsive new twist to Trump’s ‘big lie’

GOP candidates add a repulsive new twist to Trump’s ‘big lie’

Greg Sargent — Read time: 4 minutes

Columnist

It’s hardly surprising to hear that Republican Senate candidates are campaigning on the “big lie” that the 2020 election was riddled with fraud. This has become so routine that it’s no longer treated as newsworthy, which further normalizes it, a terrible development that we should resist.

But at least four of these candidates have added an even more repulsive twist: In inventing widespread fraud in 2020, they go out of their way to emphasize that it took place primarily in urban centers.

What is it about urban centers that might make this lie attractive to GOP candidates?

In addition to its obvious racial implications, Republicans trafficking in this are following a path blazed by Donald Trump. Fake GOP claims of voter fraud to justify voter suppression are an old story, of course. But Trump added his own toxic ingredients to the stew: a more explicit focus on cities, to create a pretext for express efforts to overturn election losses.

So it’s hardly a coincidence that Senate candidates adopting this line are among the most devoted Trump sycophants in the GOP.

“Our concern is Milwaukee,” Sen. Ron Johnson, who’s running for reelection in Wisconsin, recently said. “This is one of these big Democrat strongholds that just can’t seem to get their votes counted until they know exactly how many votes they need.”

Good one, Senator. You know who actually did pressure election officials in Georgia to “find” precisely the number of votes he needed to overcome his deficit?

This trend, which Democratic operatives are closely tracking and highlighting, is metastasizing. This week, former hedge funder David McCormick, who’s running for Senate in Pennsylvania, attacked the “lack of oversight in many of the precincts of Philadelphia.”

“The majority of Republican voters in Pennsylvania do not believe in the outcome of the election,” McCormick said, claiming the only way to ensure “an accurate election in 2024” is to elect more Republicans.

Note that McCormick effortlessly glides from claiming the problem is merely that GOP voters “don’t believe” Trump lost to insisting our election outcomes actually are suspect. Thanks to urban centers, naturally.

The only way to fix this problem in urban strongholds, McCormick forthrightly declares, is to elect Republicans to suppress more votes in them — oops, I mean, pursue measures ensuring “election integrity.”

Then there’s Josh Mandel, who’s running for Senate in Ohio. He has called for audits of voting in numerous states, while name-checking their urban centers.

“I believe the election was stolen from Donald J. Trump,” Mandel recently said in debate video posted by Ohio Democrats. Mandel vowed the use of the federal government’s “investigatory power” to examine “what was going on” in Philadelphia, Detroit, Milwaukee and Cleveland.

The case of Mandel is particularly instructive. Mandel is running against J.D. Vance of “Hillbilly Elegy” fame, and Mandel’s full-throated commitment to Trump’s big 2020 lie has forced Vance, who’s been tentative on this point, into a mad scramble to fully commit to it as well.

Now a new polling memo from Vance’s campaign warns that he’s suffering “precipitous decline.” The memo suggests Vance is seen as insufficiently conservative and that his unfavorable rating among GOP voters is tied to perceptions that he isn’t sufficiently worshipful of Trump.

Vance has tried to cast himself as faithful to Trumpist ideology by emphasizing his economic populism. But this hasn’t worked: Mandel is more widely perceived as conservative than Vance and is viewed positively by far more Trump supporters.

It’s likely that Mandel’s relentless fealty to Trump’s stolen-election mythology — and the centrality of the corrupt-urban-vote trope to it — helps explain these perceptions. This is apparently what passes for “conservative” and “supportive of Trump” among GOP voters these days.

But the best example of all may come from Adam Laxalt, who’s running for Senate in Nevada. Laxalt has lent support to the stolen-election myth, while insinuating that the integrity of voting is suspect in counties that include Las Vegas and Reno.

But as NBC reports, Laxalt has paired this with an explicit declaration that voting in heavily Republican areas is “legitimate.”

Behold the logical extension of this Trumpist trope: Voting in urban strongholds is suspect, voting in heavily Republican outlying areas is above reproach, and the former justifies more voter suppression to maximize gains from the latter.

In the most extreme cases — such as Mandel, who wants the Jan. 6 commission disbanded and describes the attack as a false-flag executed by the “deep state” and George Soros — this doesn’t just absolve the rioters of guilt. It seals their status as righteous martyrs who face persecution precisely because they’re warriors on behalf of an underlying cause that is just.

There is a long tradition in U.S. politics of justifying racially targeted restrictions on voting — or even outright authoritarian rule — with the claim that the targets of those tactics have no business voting at all, that allowing them a say in who rules is itself a form of tyranny over the “rightful” voters:

It’s constantly argued that GOP voters “really believe” Trump’s lies. But you cannot witness this kind of talk from would-be GOP lawmakers without grasping something much uglier at play: They are unabashedly declaring for themselves and their followers the power to pronounce the opposition’s votes illegitimate in the full knowledge that they were, in fact, procedurally valid.