Tuesday, February 20, 2024
Year : 2, Issue : 8
At least 17 Republican candidates who put false claims about the 2020 election at the center of their 2022 and 2023 statewide campaigns are running for office again in 2024.
But this time around, most of them aren’t making the debunked claims that the race was stolen from Donald Trump a linchpin of their pitches to voters. Rather, these candidates have generally broadened their focus on the issue, campaigning on ideas such as “election security” and “election integrity.”
After outspoken 2020 election deniers suffered defeats in battleground states across the board in the last midterm elections, it’s a shift GOP operatives say is critical for these candidates to appeal to voters beyond the hardcore Trump supporters.
But groups tracking candidates who have sown doubt about Joe Biden’s 2020 victory say the pivot is also intended to obscure these candidates’ disproven, and dangerous, positions.
Many of those 17 Republican candidates running again are doing so in crucial swing states and for offices, including Senate and Congress, whose responsibilities in some cases could be tied to certifying results in those states.
In Arizona, which had been a hotbed for false claims about the 2020 election results, the list includes Kari Lake, who is running for U.S. Senate, Abraham Hamadeh, who is running for a U.S. House seat, and Mark Finchem who is running for the state Senate.
Lake had made her support of Trump’s unfounded claims that the election was stolen from him a centerpiece of her failed run for governor in 2022 — a race she still hasn’t acknowledged she lost.
But her 2024 Senate campaign has not focused on election denialism. Rather, Lake, who was endorsed by both Trump and the Senate GOP campaign arm, has emphasized issues like border security and the economy, while also, periodically, pushing for the importance of “honest elections.”
Asked if Lake still believed the 2020 election was stolen from Trump and whether she’d moved away from talking about it, as well as her claims about her own gubernatorial race, her campaign spokesperson Alex Nicoll told NBC News that the campaign website was “a good reference point” for “the issues that we are focusing on.” Lake’s website does not mention election integrity or election security.
Further down the ballot, Mark Finchem, who made his insistence that Trump won the 2020 election a cornerstone of his failed race for Arizona secretary of state in 2022, has launched a long-shot bid for state Senate in a central Arizona district.
Meanwhile, Hamadeh, who focused most of his own unsuccessful 2022 campaign for Arizona attorney general on false claims about the 2020 election, has kept his foot on the gas on the issue in his race this year for a Phoenix-area congressional district, and has pushed false information about his 2022 election, too.
Source: NBC News
