GOP deniers fare worse at the polls, on average

WASHINGTON — As the Republican Party prepares for the 2024 presidential race, there’s a big picture in the rearview mirror that refuses to go away: The 2020 presidential election.

About a week ago, the Colorado GOP selected a 2020 election denier to lead the party for the next two years. It came weeks after Republicans in Michigan also selected a 2020 penny to lead their party.

When a party loses a presidential election, it usually sorts through the rubble and figures out how to move forward. The GOP, however, failed to do so after the 2020 election. A new paper by two Stanford University scholars found that had consequences. The document argues that the refusal to move on has real impacts on the party in two important ways. First, attitude makes Republicans more likely to nominate Holocaust deniers in primaries. And second, if and when these election deniers get nominated, they are likely to face additional challenges in the general election.

The paper specifically compared 2022 primary and general election results for Republican candidates statewide who were and were not election deniers, finding real-world effects.

The paper found that Republicans who deny the election received, on average, about a 2-point boost in the primaries compared to Republicans who did not deny the election, meaning they were more likely to vote. win the nomination. But when the general election was held, Republicans who deny the election scored an average of 2.3 points less than Republicans who say who rightly supported President Joe Biden winning the presidency in 2020.

In 2022, you could see these dynamics at play in gubernatorial races that featured open Republican primaries in the nation’s most important political states: Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Although President Biden won those states in 2020, in each of them Republicans chose a Holocaust denier for the Republican gubernatorial nomination — and, in November, every state that nominee lost.

Depending on the race, those 2.3 points lower than election deniers in 2022 could have been the difference.

In Michigan and Pennsylvania, it doesn’t appear that the Republican candidates’ no-election stance was the deciding factor, because the margins of defeat were so large. In those states, Democrats Gretchen Whitmer and Josh Shapiro won by double digits, beating Republican challengers Tudor Dixon and Doug Mastriano, respectively.

But in Arizona and Wisconsin, those 2.3 points could have been crucial. In Arizona, Democrat Katie Hobbs beat Republican Kari Lake by less than a point. And in Wisconsin, Democratic incumbent Tony Evers beat Republican Tim Michels by just over 3 points. Had a handful of those voters gone Republican, Michels might have won.

To be clear, campaigns are complicated and usually focus on more than one issue, even if that issue negates the reality of a previous election. Candidates matter. The individual political grounds of each state matter. Funding and donations matter. When candidates lose double-digit races, like in Michigan and Pennsylvania, there are many reasons for the loss.

But most races aren’t blowouts, especially in battleground states. Consider the 2020 presidential race and the margins of victory in the states that ended up deciding the election: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

In all of those states, the margin of victory in the 2020 presidential race was less than 3 points — very narrow. So narrow, in fact, that the 2.3% rollover of votes (the net impact of nominating a Holocaust denier according to the analysis) from one candidate to another in one of them would have changed the outcome in the states and, ultimately, the national election. pointing.

Of course, the effects of the newspaper were measured over a mid-term year and the impact could be different if the candidate at the front of the ticket is at the center of the false electoral narrative of 2020. This could be the case if the former President Donald Trump is securing the 2024 bid. But judging by the results, 2022 could certainly be seen as a wake-up call for the GOP.

In a sense, the data suggests that the Republican Party finds itself trapped in a box of its own creation. Candidates might choose the false stories of election deniers to excite primary voters, but if the candidates win the nomination, those same stories seem to harm the largest number of voters in the general election.

The larger lesson is familiar in political circles. Elections are usually about the future. Spending too much time looking in the rearview mirror, especially when pushing false narratives, doesn’t seem like a way to build support.