in the waning minutes of tuesday night vice presidential debateGovernor Tim Walz tackled a question that has become central to the 2024 presidential race and America’s political future more broadly.
Walz, who is Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate, debates former President Trump’s running mate Senator J.D. Vance on January 6, 2021, over the attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters intent on overturning the 2020 election. Were staying. Biden.
Walz described the attack as a “threat to our democracy” and stemming from Trump’s refusal to accept defeat. “He’s still saying he didn’t lose the election,” Walz told Vance. “I would just ask: Did he lose the 2020 election?”
Vance was unwilling to reject Trump’s false claims that the last election was stolen, saying he was “focused on the future.”
“That,” Walz said, “is an absolute non-answer.”
Tim Walz speaks during Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate with JD Vance.
(Matt Rourke/Associated Press)
The next day, the issue was raised again to voters by a federal judge in Washington. Released a new court filing From Special Counsel Jack Smith, in which Smith provides the most comprehensive account to date of what prosecutors allege was a widespread criminal conspiracy by Trump and his allies to not only deny the election, but to destroy it.
“When (Trump) lost the 2020 presidential election, he resorted to crimes To attempt to remain in office,’ Smith wrote.
Taken together, the two episodes are a stark reminder of something that Democrats have been eager to focus on in the current race: the former president’s perceived desire to undermine voters’ will in the last race.
State election officials, independent poll experts and most Americans today agree that Biden’s victory over Trump was legitimate. despite this adequate effort For Trump’s supporters to do so, no one has presented substantial evidence of voter fraud or election irregularities, and experts have concluded that there was none.
Special Counsel Jack Smith speaks about the impeachment of former President Trump in 2023.
(Jacqueline Martin/Associated Press)
Democrats have condemned Trump for dishonesty and impeached him in the House for inciting the January 6 attack, and Smith and Prosecutor in Georgia Has accused Trump of his alleged plan to remain in power illegitimately.
Meanwhile, Trump has maintained his stance that the election was stolen from him, and many Republicans still believe the same. A Washington Post-University of Maryland Poll For example, it found in December that 62% of American adults said they believed Biden was legitimately elected. The survey found that while 91% of Democrats believe it, only 31% of Republicans do.
Trump has downplayed the January 6 attack promised to forgive Those who have been convicted in the field. They have also started raising doubts about the validity of the upcoming elections.
As voters begin casting their ballots in the current race, political experts say they will be considering a range of issues, including the economy, immigration and reproductive rights. But especially after last week, they may also be thinking about Trump’s denial of the election and its consequences, experts said — and for good reason.
“This is not just about denying 2020,” said Bob Shrum, director of the Center for the Political Future at USC. “This is about whether you will uphold the basic principles of democracy.”
Richard L., director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA Law. “This should be a major issue for voters because, in fact, this was an unprecedented attempt to steal an election,” Hasen said.
more than just denial
After Smith’s latest filing was released, Trump went on a rampage on his social media platform Truth Social, accusing the Justice Department of “complete and total election interference” and saying he “did nothing wrong.”
Trump called Smith’s case against him a “SCAM” and suggested that the timing of the filing so close to the election was a violation of Justice Department rules to avoid undue political influence.
time is partly due to Trump’s own efforts To fight the case. It was on an earlier trajectory before Trump appealed to the Supreme Court – which found in a unprecedented decision Presidents in July enjoy broad immunity for actions taken as part of their official duties.
Smith’s latest filing is a response to that decision and a detailed account of how Trump’s actions to sabotage the 2020 election occurred not in his official capacity as President, but in his private capacity as a losing political candidate. It was made in – and therefore not something for which he enjoys immunity.
The filing details how Trump allegedly “laid the groundwork for his crimes” even before the election, including telling advisers he would claim victory before the ballots were counted, And how he continued to push the election fraud story for so long. It was repeatedly stated that no such fraud took place.
Smith wrote that Trump conducted a “pressure campaign” targeting Republican leaders, election officials and election workers in states he lost in an attempt to overturn the results there – such as when he tried to get Georgia Secretary of State Brad Told Raffensperger he wanted to do that “Find 11,780 votes,” A margin that would have won him the kingdom.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger attends an election forum in Ann Arbor, Michigan in September.
(Carlos Osorio/Associated Press)
When those efforts failed, Smith wrote, Trump personally initiated action and oversaw a brazen plan to send fake slate of voters He went to Washington to cast the state’s electoral votes for him instead of Biden, who had won him. He continued his “stream of disinformation” on January 6, Smith wrote, giving false suggestions Pence could unilaterally block the certification of Biden’s victory and inspire his supporters to storm the Capitol.
Hassan said all Americans should read the filing “to get a good picture of the depths to which Trump was willing to try to transform himself from an election loser to an election winner.”
The most important thing, Hasen said, is how many times it turns out that Trump ignored the evidence that he lost.
“In terms of morality, knowing that the election was not stolen and continuing to claim it was and undermine American democracy is incredibly dangerous and worthy of condemnation,” Hasen said.
why it matters
Trump claims the majority of Americans think the 2020 election was rigged. According to the polls that wasn’t the case, and they don’t. However, a sizeable minority feels this way, and many prominent Republicans have done little to dispel this perception.
For example, during the debate, Vance downplayed the historical threat of the January 6 attack and suggested that Trump had followed democratic standards by handing over power to Biden at his inauguration on January 20, 2021.
“It’s really rich for Democratic leaders to say that Donald Trump is a unique threat to democracy when he peacefully hands over power on January 20, as we have done in this country for 250 years,” Vance said.
Actually, Trump refused to attend Biden’s inauguration made him the first president in 150 years to leave office.
Walz accused Vance of pursuing “revisionist history” and told reporters the next day that it would be “disrespectful” for Vance not to acknowledge Biden’s victory.
Experts said that denying the election like this is indeed a serious issue, and a dangerous thing for Trump and Vance to pursue.
Sophia Lynn Lakin, director of the Voting Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union, said her organization is among dozens legal proceedings He said that across the country ahead of next month’s election, groups are “setting the stage for the narrative that there is some nefarious play going on, that there is something suspicious, that the election results are not legitimate.”
Lakin said the lawsuit is clearly part of a broader strategy, largely on the political right and clearly born out of what happened in 2020, to push election denial claims through the legal system later. The validity of the law can be “cheated”.
Sean Morales-Doyle, director of the Voting Rights Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, agreed.
“The effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election and everything that followed gave rise to a kind of entire election denial movement that has spread and been funded and supported not only by Trump but by many other prominent It’s been pushed forward by celebrities, and it’s created a situation in 2024 where there’s a platform for undermining confidence in our elections, creating distrust, and overturning the results of the election in 2024,” Morales-Doyle said. “There’s a much broader, more coordinated effort being made to prepare.”
Both he and Lakin said there is room for hope, he said. Among other things, there were prominent election deniers running for electoral offices in swing states in 2022 heavy defeatHe noted. And some states have passed new laws since 2020 to tighten election systems and make it more difficult to make frivolous challenges to election results.
Morales-Doyle said he wants people to be aware of election denial and the dangers it poses, but also not to be discouraged by it — because the evidence shows that American election systems are robust, and thinking otherwise is based on misinformation. It only works to weaken them.
“The best way to respond to these unprecedented attacks is buy into Democracy, participating, going and voting,” he said.
Shrum said Vance was clearly “speaking to Donald Trump’s audience” when he would not answer Walz’s question about the 2020 election, but his doing so did Trump no favors.
“Trump has convinced a large portion of his base, the people who are voting for him, that there is something wrong with the election, but I don’t think Americans generally think that way,” Shrum said. ” “In fact, it drives voters away.”
Polling shows that many Americans have a lukewarm view of the election refusal. a recent Monmouth University SurveyFor example, it found that 58% of Americans believed that the reluctance to accept the election results was a “major problem” for the country.
Republican election officials are also among those expressing concern.
Late last year, the Johns Hopkins SNF Agora Institute and Gallup Poll issued It showed that only 40% of Republicans were very or somewhat confident in the accuracy of US elections. In conjunction with the poll, a group at Johns Hopkins and the conservative-leaning think tank R Street Institute released a set of “core principles” to restore that trust — including requiring conservative leaders to publicly advocate for election system security and champion policy. Involves confirming changes that build trust.
“As Republican state elections officials, we believe in the power of citizens to freely and fairly elect their leaders, and we have confidence in the integrity of election systems to carry out the will of the voters,” the group said. said members — including Raffensperger of Georgia, Secretary of State Phil McGrane of Idaho, Secretary of State Scott Schwab of Kansas and Lieutenant Governor Deidre Henderson of Utah. “We are also worried. “Our democracy cannot survive if citizens do not have confidence that elections accurately reflect the will of the people.”
Charles H. Stewart, professor of political science and director of the MIT Election Data + Science Lab, said that many Americans already understand — at least broadly — that Trump rigged the election and worked to overturn the results .
Stewart doesn’t expect Smith’s latest filing or Walz’s debate efforts to sway voters in any way, but he said they could “keep the issue more visible” and make the most of Trump’s actions. Can increase “enthusiasm” for voting among fearful people.
Hasen said he hopes more Americans will work to understand the full implications of Trump’s refusal to contest the election and vote accordingly.
“The question of whether we will have a peaceful transition of power,” Hassan said, “should be one of the top things on every voter’s consideration list.”
