Reverberations of Trump ‘Big Lie’ as GOP sows doubt ahead of midterms

With less than a week to go until the midterm elections, supporters of former President Donald Trump’s baseless “Big Lie” that he was the legitimate winner of the 2020 election have taken numerous approaches to questioning the integrity of the democratic process—including, in several cases, Republican candidates echoing Trump as they suggest they won’t accept an electoral loss on November 8.

As The Guardian reported Wednesday, high-profile candidates in Arizona, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania have refused to say they’ll concede to their Democratic opponents if they lose their elections—in some cases repeating ideas that Trump espoused in the weeks leading up to the 2016 and 2020 elections.

Arizona’s GOP gubernatorial candidate, Kari Lake, said at least twice in recent weeks that she had no reason to pledge that she’ll respect the election results regardless of the outcome because, as she told CNN‘s Dana Bash in October, “I’m going to win the election and I will accept that result.”

“I’m not losing to Katie Hobbs,” Lake also said on the podcast “The Conservative Circus” recently, referring to her Democratic opponent, Arizona’s secretary of state. “We have a movement. We are not losing to Katie Hobbs, so don’t worry about it.”

Republican U.S. Senate candidate Blake Masters, meanwhile, has urged his supporters to be on the lookout for fraud when they cast their votes, and while Arizona attorney general candidate Abraham Hamadeh told the Associated Press last month that he will “faithfully follow the law,” he has also promoted Trump’s lies about the 2020 election and claimed that mail-in voting is fraudulent.

As The Washington Post reported last month, a majority of the Republican candidates running for federal and state office this year deny or question the results of the 2020 election, while 65% of GOP voters still believe President Joe Biden’s victory was illegitimate even though dozens of lawsuits challenging the results, that Trump and his allies filed, faced rejection in court.

Along with several Republican candidates in Arizona, Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson and the state’s GOP gubernatorial nominee, Tim Michels, declined last month to say unequivocally that they would accept the election results.

In Pennsylvania, Republican gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano, who organized busloads of people traveling to Trump’s so-called “Stop the Steal” rally on January 6, 2021, ahead of the violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, has refused to say whether he will concede to Democrat Josh Shapiro.

The Republicans’ refusal to commit to a peaceful concession should they lose comes as counties in Nevada and Arizona are pushing for a shift to hand-counts of ballots, driven by conspiracy theories claiming that voting machines were rigged in 2020; as an independent group in Arizona has recruited volunteers—some armed—to “watch” ballot drop boxes, an endeavor that a federal judge curtailed this week; and as election officials have received relentless records requests in what government watchdogs have said appears to be a coordinated attempt to prevent them from preparing for the election.

Originally published at Commondreams.org.