Nearly two years after President Donald J. Trump refused to accept his
defeat in the 2020 election, some of his most loyal Republican acolytes
might follow in his footsteps.
When asked, six Trump-backed Republican nominees for governor and the
Senate in midterm battlegrounds would not commit to accepting this
year’s election results, and another five Republicans ignored or
declined to answer a question about embracing the November outcome. All
of them, along with many other G.O.P. candidates, have pre-emptively
cast doubt on how their states count votes.
The New York Times contacted Republican and Democratic candidates or
their aides in 20 key contests for governor and the Senate. All of the Democrats said, or have said publicly, that they would respect the
November results — including Stacey Abrams of Georgia, who refused to
concede her 2018 defeat to Brian Kemp in the state’s race for governor.
Mr. Kemp, now running against her for another term, “will of course
accept the outcome of the 2022 election,” said his press secretary, Tate Mitchell.
But several Republicans endorsed by Mr. Trump are hesitant to say that
they will not fight the results.
Among the party’s Senate candidates, Ted Budd in North Carolina, Blake Masters in Arizona, Kelly Tshibaka in Alaska and J.D. Vance in Ohio all declined to commit to accepting the 2022 results. So did Tudor Dixon,
the Republican nominee for governor of Michigan, and Geoff Diehl, who
won the G.O.P. primary for governor of Massachusetts this month.
The candidates and their aides offered an array of explanations. Some
blamed Democratic state election officials or made unsubstantiated
claims that their opponents would cheat. In Alaska, a spokesman for Ms. Tshibaka pointed to a new ranked-choice voting system that has been
criticized by Republicans and already helped deliver victory to a
Democrat in a House special election this year.
An aide to Ms. Dixon, Sara Broadwater, said “there’s no reason to believe” that Michigan election officials, including Jocelyn Benson, the Democratic secretary of state, “are very serious about secure elections.”
To some degree, the stances by these Republican candidates — which echo
Mr. Trump’s comments before the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections —
may amount to political posturing, in an effort to appeal to G.O.P.
voters who do not believe the former president lost in 2020. An aide to
one Republican nominee insisted that the candidate would accept this
year’s results, but the aide declined to be publicly identified saying so.
And unlike Mr. Trump two years ago, the candidates who suggest they
might dispute the November results do not hold executive office, and
lack control of the levers of government power. If any were to reject a
fair defeat, they would be far less likely to ignite the kind of
democratic crisis that Mr. Trump set off after his 2020 loss.
But they do have loud megaphones in a highly polarized media
environment, and any unwarranted challenges from the candidates and
their allies could fuel anger, confusion and misinformation.
https://electionlawblog.org/?p=131983
Retrumplican scumbags. All of them.
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