The GQP ‘Big Lie’ Part Deux: The California Recall Election

MSNBC reports that the California recall election is Trump’s new election fraud testing ground:

Call it Stop the Steal, California edition: Former President Donald Trump and other leading conservatives are aggressively pushing the false narrative that California’s election system is rigged ahead of Tuesday’s special election to recall Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom.

The efforts show how Trump’s disinformation agenda surrounding the trustworthiness of elections is becoming more widely adopted and even institutionalized by the right almost a year after the 2020 elections. Now, California is serving as a worrying new testing ground for how the GOP might want to deploy new versions of election disinformation in the midterm elections.

The efforts have a certain irony to them: Republicans have long sought to use voter disenfranchisement as a tool for suppressing Democratic voter participation; now they’re using the claim that Republicans are the victims of disenfranchisement to try to whip up their own base and cast doubt on Democratic victories.

On Tuesday, the polls will close for a special election in which Californians will vote on whether Newsom should be removed from office, and, if so, who should take his place. The recall effort was kicked off by a retired county sheriff’s sergeant, a Republican, furious about Newsom’s progressive positions on the death penalty and protecting undocumented people, and then it picked up steam in response to Newsom’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic.

Polling experts say it looks like Newsom will survive the recall effort in the deeply blue state, but also caution that a victory is far from guaranteed, especially since this election is being conducted primarily by mail and because it’s an off-year election held in September, meaning polling estimates might not capture actual voting trends.

Despite the fact that Republicans actually do have a nontrivial chance at toppling Newsom, they are spreading evidence-free claims that the election is rigged against them. Trump told the right-wing media outlet Newsmax last week that the recall is “probably rigged,” and suggested that the fact that California mailed out vote-by-mail ballots to all registered state voters is somehow a sign of impropriety or vulnerability to fraud.

Politico: Trump is already claiming the California recall is rigged.

Five states—Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah and Washington—allow all elections to be conducted by mail. Three states—California, Nebraska and North Dakota—permit counties to opt into conducting elections by mail.Ten states allow specific small elections to be conducted by mail (including Arizona). Six states permit all-mail elections for certain small jurisdictions.

In reality, mail-in ballots have been used reliably since the Civil War, and the rate of fraud committed through mail-in-ballots is almost unfathomably small. In the last 20 years, about 250 million votes have been cast through mail-in-ballots across the United States, and Amber McReynolds, CEO of the National Vote at Home Institute, and Charles Stewart, director of the MIT Election Data and Science Lab, estimate that the fraud rate among those ballots is “0.00006 percent of total votes cast.”

[T]rump is not considering their actual security, but trying to generate suspicion about the electoral system as a whole, and is engaged in a heads-I-win, tails-you-lose political strategy of trying to explain a likely failed effort to eject Newsom from office as a conspiracy against him and his allies.

And what’s perhaps more disconcerting than seeing Trump wielding his influence to cast doubt on yet another election is seeing his “Big Lie” seep further into the right-wing media ecosystem and the Republican Party.

With Gavin Newsom currently up double digits in recall polls, Fox News' Tomi Lahren declares that "the only thing that will save Gavin Newsom is voter fraud."

The rest of the Fox panel just smiles and nods along with her. pic.twitter.com/k6eoNfsr7b

— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) September 7, 2021

CNN: Right wing media’s latest misinformation campaign targets the California recall:

Right-wing media pundits are pushing a new misinformation campaign — this time about election fraud in the upcoming California gubernatorial recall, echoing debunked claims from the 2020 presidential election.

An emerging narrative pushed by major Fox News personalities and others claims California Governor Gavin Newsom will only win the recall because of election fraud and so called ballot harvesting, despite the lack of any credible evidence.

It’s part of a playbook that is becoming increasingly common across the country.

“Fraud is presented as an excuse to explain away any future Republican loss,” CNN’s chief media correspondent Brian Stelter said Sunday.

Media Matters: With polls showing Newsom ahead, Fox News is laying out conspiracy theories that California recall election will be stolen:

Fox News is rolling out the next round of election-related conspiracy theories: This time, by casting doubt on the idea that a Democrat could win an election in the heavily Democratic state of California, where incumbent Gov. Gavin Newsom is facing a recall election backed by Republicans.

What we can see here is a two-pronged strategy meant to simultaneously encourage Republican voters to trust the system enough to vote, while also systematically encouraging them to look for a nonexistent fraud problem. In a political approach bordering on paradoxical, the GOP is using the specter of a sham election to encourage participation in the election.

The Republican front-runner for replacing Newsom, conservative talk radio host Larry Elder, is also embracing the “this election is a fraud but vote” strategy, calling on his supporters to report “suspicious activity” and claiming he has already prepared to file a lawsuit which could dispute the election results — while also calling for Republican voters to turn out for him in big numbers.

Republicans have long supported disenfranchising voters as a strategy for winning elections. But they’re increasingly experimenting with the lie that they are the disenfranchised ones to try to encourage more participation in the electoral process, and protect their reputation when they lose. No party seriously interested in democracy would succumb to such a a strategy.

The New York Times reports, False Election Claims in California Reveal a New Normal for G.O.P. (excerpt):

This swift embrace of false allegations of cheating in the California recall reflects a growing instinct on the right to argue that any lost election, or any ongoing race that might result in defeat, must be marred by fraud. The relentless falsehoods spread by Mr. Trump and his allies about the 2020 election have only fueled such fears.

More:

Philip Bump at the Washington Post, California’s recall becomes the new epicenter of unfounded fraud claims.

Aaron Blake at the Washington Post, Trump and the next big, bogus stolen-election claim.

Igor Bobic at the Huffington Post, Republicans Already Lying That California’s Recall Election Is ‘Rigged’.

Aaron Rupar at Vox, Republicans are priming their voters to believe the California recall was stolen.

A CNN poll released Sunday found that 59% of Republicans say believing Trump won the 2020 election is at least a somewhat important part of being a Republican. (So being delusional and a stone-cold liar are Republican attributes?)

As Greg Sargent of the Washington Post says, A dangerous trend among GOP candidates shows the Trump threat is here to stay:

So is this really how it’s going to be? Are more and more Republican candidates across our great land going to treat it as a requirement that they cast any and all election losses as dubious or illegitimate by definition?

We’re now seeing numerous examples of GOP candidates running for office who are doing something very close to this. Which suggests the legacy of Donald Trump could prove worse for the health of democracy than it first appeared.

It isn’t just that Republicans will be expected to pledge fealty to the “lost cause” of the stolen 2020 election. It’s also that untold numbers of GOP candidates will see it as essential to the practice of Trumpist politics that they vow to actively subvert legitimate election losses by any means necessary.

One high-profile GOP candidate now playing this ugly Trumpist game is Larry Elder, who is running in a recall election against California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom. This week, Elder told reporters that “there might very well be shenanigans” in the vote counting, just like “in the 2020 election,” and vowed that his “voter integrity board” of lawyers will “file lawsuits.”

“The 2020 election, in my opinion, was full of shenanigans,” Elder also told Fox News. “My fear is they’re going to try that in this election right here and recall.”

It’s common for campaigns to prepare for post-election litigation. But Elder is going much further. He’s hinting at a concerted effort to steal the recall and linking that to the “big lie” that there were widespread problems in 2020. The goal is plainly to tap into the deep well of paranoia and conspiracy-mongering that Trump fed for years — and to undermine in advance faith in any outcome but a win.

[In] Pennsylvania, for instance, Trump just endorsed Army veteran Sean Parnell as the GOP candidate for an open Senate seat. Parnell has declared his supportfor a “forensic audit” of the 2020 results.

Parnell has piously claimed he wants to reinforce confidence in those results. But this is a smokescreen: This audit has been pushed by Trump allies who hope to duplicate the Arizona sham audit, which is a dry run at manufacturing fake ways to cast doubt on election outcomes.

And indeed, in Arizona, GOP senate candidate Jim Lamon has openly claimed credit for helping make that sham “fraudit” happen. Here again the willingness to undermine confidence in election results is held up as a point of honor.

Now over to Georgia. The Republican candidate running a primary challenge against Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger — who rebuffed Trump’s pressure to help steal the election — is basing his candidacy on a vow to use his powers to overturn elections in a way Raffensperger wouldn’t.

What this all adds up to is this. As it is, Trump’s “big lie” about 2020 has been widely echoed among GOP senate candidates, as Cameron Joseph documented in July.

But it’s gotten worse. In the nationally watched recall election in the most populous state — and in high-profile statewide campaigns in many key swing states — we’re all but certain to see future legitimate election losses treated as illegitimate by definition.

Accusing your opponent of cheating & attempting to overthrow negative election results is become a baseline Republican strategy — unconnected to evidence, just something required by all candidates to get the base's approval. Democracy can't survive normalizing this. https://t.co/PM934MXIOH

— David Roberts (@drvolts) September 9, 2021

An important feature of all this is that the lies about the majorities who win fair elections, and even the undermining of faith that our electoral system is fundamentally capable of rendering legitimate outcomes, are essential first steps toward overturning such outcomes later. The lies are the foundation, the starting point for potential future efforts to subvert our democratic order.

It’s unclear what this will mean for the GOP as a whole over time. But it’s ominous that you rarely hear condemnation of any of this from the most senior figures in the party.

The willingness to abide by election losses as legitimate, on the understanding that our system is worth preserving and you can live to fight another day, is a hallmark of democratic stability. But it’s becoming a hallmark of GOP primary politics to publicly renounce that ethic, and to do so defiantly and proudly.

The Party of the Big Lie has convinced itself that only elections in which GQP candidates win are legitimate. Elections in which GQP candidates lose, ipso facto, must be fraudulent and illegitimate. This is the conceit of GQP authoritarianism.

This is how our MAGA/QAnon cult Arizona state legislators can take the paradoxical position that their own election was safe, secure, and legitimate, but Joe Biden winning Arizona must have bern massive fraud and illegitimate.

This actually goes back to 2018 when Democrats won some statewide offices and the Arizona Republican Party immediately alleged fraud and said it would conduct its own audit. Remember? Trump, Republicans call vote count into question amid tight McSally-Sinema race for Senate. But Despite rampant claims, there is no evidence of voter fraud in Arizona.

Then-AZGOP Chairman Jonathan Lines commissioned the audit in November 2018 in response to Republican concerns about the party’s November losses, which came after Democrats took the lead in several statewide races in the days after Election Day. AZGOP audit says Fontes actions questionable, not illegal: “Preliminary results of an audit commissioned by the Arizona Republican Party concluded that Maricopa County’s Democratic recorder didn’t violate any laws during the 2018 general election and that two disputed policies he implemented didn’t affect the outcomes of any races.”

The attorney who conducted the audit for the Arizona GQP, Stephen Richer, replaced Adrian Fontes as Maricopa County Recorder. Richer now vociferously defends the Maricopa County Recorders office and elections department against MAGA/QAnon cult “election truthers”claims of rampant fraud in 2020. Richer defends Maricopa County audit amid GOP lawmakers’ criticism; Arizona GOP election official defends office against Trump voting conspiracy theory: ‘We are humans, it has to stop.’

The only election fraud is false claims of voter fraud by Donald Trump and his MAGA/QAnon cult followers.