SAN JOSE, Calif. (KGO) — Winners in some races of last week’s primary election are still too close to call.
Second place in the 16th district congressional race is now at a razor thin margin.
Whoever wins second place will advance to November’s runoff.
Sam Liccardo is in the lead at first place; he’ll be one of the two candidates in November’s general election.
For second place, the race flipped Wednesday evening with Evan Low moving ahead of Joe Simitian by 59 votes. Simitian held the lead since election night but Low has slowly chipped away.
Liccardo, Low, and Simitian have been leaders in the race for the District 16 congressional seat.
The spot is opening up for the first time in more than 30 years as representative Anna Eshoo retires.
With Liccardo leading Low and Simitian by a relatively wide margin, the Associated Press already called the election in his favor, but the battle for second place is far from over.
Liccardo says he’s grateful to be in the lead and says the tight race for second place shows the importance of voter turnout.
“The reality is, decisions are going to be made for you if you’re not making the decisions,” he said. “So I encourage everybody to get out there and vote in November, because as we’re seeing here, from this March election, this is going to be decided by a very small number of votes, whoever my opponent is.”
Simitian was confident on election night that he was clearly in the top two but the margin between him and Low has closed in the days since.
“What we’re seeing now is a little bit of the votes that come in later, those last minute procrastinators who get their ballots in at the last minute,” said Melinda Jackson, professor of political science at San Jose State University, “(They’re) more likely to be younger voters, less engaged voters, and that seems to be trending toward Evan Low.”
In a statement released Tuesday, Simitian said:
“Every vote counts, and every vote has to be counted. That’s the nature of our process, and that’s as it should be. Having said that, we were in the top two on election night and have been every day since. So, I’m confident and optimistic, but we’ll wait for the results.”
Evan Low also issued a statement saying in part: “To me, no matter the ultimate outcome, the closeness of this race shows that your vote truly matters. Your vote can have a real impact on who represents your community.”
Depending on how close the votes end up being between the two candidates, Jackson said one of them could request a recount that they would have to pay for.
If the candidate who made the request wins, she said they would get that money back.
“We don’t have an automatic recount process in California, where when it’s within a certain margin, it automatically triggers a recount,” Jackson said, “So I think it depends how close it is, at the end of the day, whether either of these candidates will choose to do that.”
County elections officials have to complete final official results by April 4.
The California Secretary of State certifies election results April 12.
More stories on the 2024 California primary election here.
Republicans have had 10 months to hammer out a coherent post-Roe message on abortion. You would think they’d have nailed it by now.
Yet on Tuesday, Nikki Haley set out to declare her position on the issue—and proceeded to be about as clear as concrete.
She began with plausible precision. “I want to save as many lives and help as many moms as possible,” the former South Carolina governor and ambassador to the United Nations told reporters gathered at the Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America headquarters, in Northern Virginia—a press event billed as a “major policy speech.” But her statements quickly got squishier. It’s good that some states have passed anti-abortion laws in the past year, she said. And as for the states that have reacted by enshrining abortion-rights protections? Well, she wishes “that weren’t the case.”
And then she seemed to channel Veep’s Selina Meyer. “Different people in different places are taking different paths,” Haley said, with a self-assurance that belied the indeterminacy of her words.
Questioning whether any national anti-abortion legislation would ever pass, Haley did gesture at a need for some action. “To do that at the federal level, the next president must find national consensus,” she said. As for what that might look like, she had no words. And she took no questions.
Some people seemed to like Haley’s speech, in a tepid way. She sounded human when she described how her husband had been adopted, and how she’d struggled with infertility. “Ms. Haley deserves credit for confronting the subject head on, with a speech that wasn’t sanctimonious or censorious,” The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board wrote, before concluding, “The party could do worse than Ms. Haley’s pitch.” But it could do better—or at least do with something more specific.
Leaders of the self-described pro-life movement were predictably annoyed at Haley’s conciliatory-sounding vagueness. “Disappointing speech by @NikkiHaley today. Leads with compromise & defeatism, not vision & courage,” Lila Rose, who heads the group Live Action, tweeted. “We agree that consensus is important, but to achieve consensus we will need to stake out a principled position,” wroteKristan Hawkins, the president of Students for Life of America.
Even Haley’s hosts seemed on the wrong page. “We are clear on Ambassador Haley’s commitment to acting on the American consensus against late-term abortion by protecting unborn children by at least 15 weeks,” Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, said in a statement sent to me. But a few hours later, Team Haley emailed me to correct the record: “She committed to working to find a consensus on banning late-term abortion. No specific weeks,” Nachama Soloveichik, Haley’s communications director, wrote. Not only did Haley alienate both sides—she confused them!
Haley is in a tough spot, as are all of the Republican presidential wannabes. They each have their own personal convictions on abortion; former Vice President Mike Pence, for example, has been outspoken in his support for a national ban. But they’re up against an issue that seems to have cost their party a string of recent elections. Most Americans believe that abortion should be accessible, with some limits.
The “consensus” position, then, is somewhere in the foggy zone between no abortion ever and abortion whenever. But primary elections tend to push candidates toward one extreme or another. “The gap between what the base demands and what swing voters will tolerate has gotten really wide,” Sarah Longwell, the publisher of the Never Trump site TheBulwark, told me. “Nowhere is this more true than on abortion.”
What all politicians need to do “is settle on a position they believe they can defend, and they need to repeat it consistently and clearly,” Whit Ayres, a Republican strategist, told me. “Any politician whose position on abortion is vague will be wrapped around the axle eventually with questions and doubts about where they actually stand.”
Some GOP candidates have followed Ayres’s advice. But much axle-wrapping has occurred already in the early days of the 2024 primary season.
Asked on the campaign trail whether he’d support a 15-week federal ban on abortion, Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina told CBS, “I do believe that we should have a robust conversation about what’s happening on a very important topic,” before pivoting so hard to an anecdote about Janet Yellen that I thought he’d need a neck brace. In a follow-up interview, Scott backtracked, clarifying that as president, he would “literally sign the most conservative pro-life legislation” Congress sent to his desk.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who is expected to mount a presidential bid, did approve a very conservative state law recently—a six-week abortion ban. But he signed that legislation in the dead of night earlier this month, while most people in Tallahassee were probably in bed. (By contrast, last year, he celebrated the signing of a 15-week ban with a big party at a church.) The following day, DeSantis gave a speech at a Christian university full of students who are opposed to abortion, yet said nothing about his major legislative achievement. He’s mostly stayed quiet about it since—even at glad-handing events in early primary states.
So far, the only confirmed presidential candidate who seems clear on his position and keenly aware of the political optics is Donald Trump. Despite being hailed by anti-abortion activists as the “most pro-life president” in history, Trump has never been rigid on abortion (probably because he supported abortion rights for most of his life as a public figure), and he doesn’t talk much about the issue now. But a spokesperson told The Washington Post recently that Trump “believes that the Supreme Court, led by the three Justices which he supported, got it right when they ruled this is an issue that should be decided at the State level.” Shorter Trump: I’ve done my bit—it’s up to the states now. God bless.
If any national consensus on abortion exists, the GOP strategist Ayres said, Trump’s position “is pretty close” to it. Trump has always seemed to have “a lizard-brain sense of where the voters are,” Longwell said. “He has a relationship to the base, and he doesn’t have to pitch what he believes.” And, unlike DeSantis, Trump has never signed a law banning abortion at any stage, so it’ll be harder to pin him down. Sure, there’s an activist class that would like to see abortion banned in all cases. To them, Trump could reply, You got your justices. You’re welcome.
Right now Trump and his lizard brain have a commanding lead in the GOP primary. His victory would set up an interesting general-election situation—a fitting one for our complicated post-Roe country: a former president who once personally supported abortion rights and is now politically opposed to them running against a sitting president whose own position on abortion is the exact opposite.
Until a Republican presidential nominee emerges, we’ll hear many more Haley-esque platitudes that sound thoughtful and weighty but ultimately aren’t.
“Whether we can save more lives nationally depends entirely on doing what no one has done to date,” Haley told reporters on Tuesday, before wrapping up her speech with—you could almost hear a drumroll—“finding consensus.” The waffling will continue, in other words, until the primary concludes.
MONTGOMERY, Ala — Republican Katie Britt on Tuesday won the U.S. Senate race in Alabama, becoming the first woman elected to the body from the state.
Britt will fill the seat held by Richard Shelby, her one-time boss who is retiring after 35 years in the Senate. Britt was Shelby’s chief of staff before leaving to take the helm of a state business lobby. Britt defeated Democrat Will Boyd and Libertarian John Sophocleus.
Britt, 40, cast herself as part of a new generation of conservative leaders and will become one of the Senate’s youngest members. She will be the first Republican woman to hold one of the state’s Senate seats and the state’s first elected female senator. The state’s previous female senators, both Democrats, had been appointed.
“Tonight, parents, families and hard-working Alabamians across the state let their voices be heard. We said loud and clear this is our time,” Britt told supporters at her victory party in downtown Montgomery.
Britt, who noted her early dismal poll numbers and how some initially dismissed her notion of running for Senate, said her campaign is “proof that the American dream is still alive.”
Fueled by deep pockets and deep ties to business and political leaders, Britt ran under the banner of “Alabama First” and secured the GOP nomination after a heated and expensive primary. She was first in the initial round of voting and then defeated six-term Rep. Mo Brooks in a primary runoff.
Brooks, who ran under the banner “MAGA Mo” — Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again campaign slogan — and was initially endorsed by the former president, had been an early favorite in the race. But Brooks faltered under a barrage of attack ads and lackluster fundraising. As Britt surged in the polls, Trump rescinded his endorsement of Brooks and swung his support to Britt.
Britt began her political career working for Shelby. She thanked the outgoing senior senator for taking a chance on her 20 years ago and called him “Alabama’s greatest statesman” who left a lasting legacy on the state.
The senator-elect was introduced by her husband Wesley Britt, a former football player for the New England Patriots and the University of Alabama, who said his best title is, “Katie’s husband.”
Flanked by her husband and two-school-age children, and with her speech occasionally punctuated by the sound of children popping the red, white and blue balloons that fell to celebrate her victory, Britt called herself a “Mama on a mission” to get things done in Washington.
Britt, who spent much of her race in partisan appeals, criticizing the policies of President Joe Biden and lamenting a country she said she no longer recognized, promised to work for all Alabamians, “even those that have different beliefs than I do.”
“No one will worker harder than me in the United States Senate. I am going to listen to you, not lecture you. I know that every one of you is not going to agree with me on every single issue and that’s OK,” Britt said.
“I am going to be a voice for parents and families and hard-working Alabamians across this state,” she said, “and I’m going to work tirelessly every single day to make Alabama proud.”
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Follow AP’s coverage of the elections at: https://apnews.com/hub/2022-midterm-elections
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Check out https://apnews.com/hub/explaining-the-elections to learn more about the issues and factors at play in the 2022 midterm elections.
AUSTIN — Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott sought a record-tying third term Tuesday while Democrat Beto O’Rourke reached for an upset in America’s biggest red state in one of the most expensive midterm races in the U.S.
More than 5 million early votes had already been cast ahead of Election Day in Texas, where anger over the Uvalde school shooting that left 19 children and two teachers dead in May intensified an already heated contest in which both candidates’ campaigns combined spent more than $200 million.
Five months later, Texas state police still face pressure for failing to confront the gunman sooner at Robb Elementary School. O’Rourke said the shooting, one of the deadliest classroom attacks in U.S. history, crystalized the stakes of the election as Abbott waved off calls for tougher gun laws.
But Abbott, 64, has remained formidable in a state where Republicans have won every governor’s race since 1994.
He has rallied his base around a record number of illegal border crossings from Mexico to the U.S., aggressively courted Hispanic voters in South Texas, and seized on economic anxieties and recession fears that have created headwinds for Democrats nationally.
A victory by Abbott would strengthen his position as a potential presidential contender in 2024, secure his place as the second-longest serving governor in the state’s history and extend decades of GOP dominance.
O’Rourke on Tuesday was set to embark on one last campaign blitz through Dallas, San Antonio and Houston before heading home to wait for election returns in his hometown of El Paso. Abbott was spending election night Tuesday in the southern border city of McAllen, underscoring the GOP’s rising confidence in a region that has long been a stronghold for Democrats.
O’Rourke’s hard-charging challenge has rekindled Democrats’ hopes while appealing to voters soured by the Uvalde shooting, a strict new abortion ban and the deadly collapse of the state’s power grid in winter 2021. The former El Paso congressman has cast himself as a fresh start for Texas and a check on a GOP-controlled Legislature, while vowing to legalize marijuana and expand Medicaid.
But four years after O’Rourke, 50, nearly won a U.S. Senate seat in Texas, raising his profile in the Democratic Party, he has confronted more skeptical voters. Abbott has painted him as a liberal crusader, and O’Rourke has been forced to answer for positions he took while running for the White House, particularly his support of mandatory gun buybacks.
A day after the shooting in Uvalde, O’Rourke interrupted an Abbott news conference, telling him, “This is on you,” in reference to the governor’s opposition of tougher gun measures. To Republicans, the moment was a tasteless political stunt, but O’Rourke’s supporters saw it as an authentic reflection of their anger.
During early voting in suburban Dallas, Deborah Thompson said she voted for all Democrats, including O’Rourke, out of concern that Republicans threaten voting and abortion rights.
“I think that an 18-year-old girl that’s been raped should be able to get an abortion,” the 56-year-old Richardson resident said. “I’m not going back. I’m not going back to the ’50s … and I’m so angry at all of this.”
Janie Helms, a retiree, said worries about inflation led her to vote for Abbott.
“I see him as a conservative who will watch our money,” she said.
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Associated Press writer Jake Bleiberg contributed from Plano, Texas.
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Follow AP’s coverage of the elections at: https://apnews.com/hub/2022-midterm-elections
Check out https://apnews.com/hub/explaining-the-elections to learn more about the issues and factors at play in the 2022 midterm elections.
Chris Thomas has made democracy his life’s work. A 73-year-old attorney, Thomas spent nearly four decades leading the elections division in the office of Michigan’s secretary of state. He served under Republicans and Democrats alike, and his mandate was always the same: protect the ballot box. He trained local election workers; sought out and fixed weaknesses in the voting system; investigated errors committed while ballots were collected and tabulated; and, ultimately, ensured the accuracy of the count. Thomas was one of 10 people named to the Presidential Commission on Election Administration in 2013. He earned a reputation as a nonpartisan authority on all things elections, and took pride in supervising a system that was stable and widely trusted.
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Which is why 2020 shook him so badly. Thomas had retired from the secretary of state’s office a few years earlier, confident that Michigan’s elections were in good hands. Then the coronavirus pandemic arrived, prompting changes to election protocols nationwide, and President Donald Trump began warning of a Democratic plot to steal the election. As Michigan rolled out new voting rules—some that had been decided prior to 2020, others that were implemented on the fly during the pandemic—rumors and misinformation spread. Wanting to help, Thomas accepted a special assignment to supervise Election Day activities in Detroit, the state’s largest voting jurisdiction.
What followed was surreal—a scene that Thomas could scarcely believe was playing out in the United States. Michigan had recently expanded absentee voting, allowing any resident to vote by mail for any reason. Because Democrats are likelier than Republicans to vote absentee—and because Detroit is predominantly Democratic—Thomas and his colleagues had to process an unprecedented number of absentee ballots. Complicating matters further, Republican lawmakers in Michigan refused to let election workers start counting absentee ballots until Election Day.
The effect was predictable. Because of the backlog of absentee ballots, Trump took a big lead on Election Night. As Thomas and his team worked into the early hours, Trump’s lead shrank. By Wednesday afternoon, it was clear that Joe Biden would overtake him. “That’s when things got out of hand,” Thomas told me.
Incited by Trump’s acolytes in the state party, hundreds of Republican voters swarmed the event center in Detroit where Thomas and his workers were tabulating votes. Republicans had their allotted number of poll watchers already inside the counting room, but party officials lied to the public, saying they had been locked out. So people busted into the event center, banging on the windows, filming the election workers, demanding to be let into the counting room. Fearing for their safety—and for the integrity of the ballots—the people inside covered the windows. Thomas says the decision was necessary. But within minutes, video was circulating on social media of the windows being covered, and before long, it was airing on Fox News with commentary about a cover-up.
Trump was alleging a national plot to steal the election, and now Detroit—and Chris Thomas—were right in the middle of it.
The GOP assault on the legitimacy of Biden’s victory has led to death threats against election workers and a lethal siege of the United States Capitol. But perhaps the gravest consequence is the erosion of confidence in our system. Late this summer, a Quinnipiac poll found that 69 percent of both Republicans and Democrats believe that American democracy “is in danger of collapse.” They hold this view for somewhat different reasons. Republicans believe that Democrats already rigged an election against them and will do so again if given the chance; Democrats believe that Republicans, convinced that 2020 was stolen despite all evidence to the contrary, are now readying to rig future elections. It’s hard to see how this ends well. By the presidential election of 2024, a constitutional crisis might be unavoidable.
I’ve met men and women like Thomas in small towns and big counties, public servants who have devoted their career to safeguarding the infrastructure of our democracy. Over the past two years, they have been harassed, intimidated, and in many cases driven out of office, some replaced by right-wing activists who are more loyal to the Republican Party than to the rule of law. The old guard—the people who, like Thomas, committed their career to free and fair elections—are witnessing their life’s work being undone. They are watching the rise of Trump-mimicking candidates in this year’s midterm elections and wondering if anything can stop the collapse of our most essential institution. “This election,” Thomas said, “feels like a last stand.”
The irony is that America’s voting system is far more advanced and secure than it was just two decades ago.
The 2000 election was a catalyst for reform. Mass confusion surrounding the showdown between Al Gore and George W. Bush in Florida—butterfly ballots, punch cards, hanging chads—demonstrated that murky processes and obsolete technology could undermine public confidence in the system. Recognizing the threat, Congress passed a law to help local administrators modernize their voting machines and better train their workers and volunteers. Elections officials from around the country began collaborating on best practices. Several states introduced wholesale changes to their systems that allowed ballots to be cast more easily, tracked more accurately, and counted more efficiently.
There were hiccups, but the results were overwhelmingly positive. One study conducted by MIT and Caltech showed that the number of “lost” votes—ballots that because of some combination of clerical rejection and human error went unrecorded—had been cut in half from 2000 to 2004. Florida, once synonymous with electoral dysfunction, now has arguably the most efficient vote-reporting program in the U.S.
At the same time, the machinations that Americans observed—poll workers studying ballots through a magnifying glass, teams of party lawyers and CNN camera crews looking on—bred a public skepticism that never quite went away. In the years following Bush v. Gore, the number of cases of election litigation soared. The small chorus of congressional Democrats who objected to the certification of Bush’s 2000 victory swelled to several dozen following the president’s reelection in 2004, with 31 House Democrats (and one Democratic senator) voting to effectively disenfranchise the people of Ohio. Republicans could not return the favor in 2008—Obama’s margin of victory was too wide—so they sought to delegitimize his presidency with talk of birth certificates and mass voter fraud, introducing measures to restrict voting access despite never producing evidence that cheating was taking place at any meaningful scale.
Much of this can be attributed to what Richard Hasen, a law professor and an elections expert, has called “the loser’s effect”: Studies have shown that voters report more confidence in our elections after their party or candidate has won. But partisan outcomes are no longer the decisive factor: In October 2020—weeks before Trump lost his bid for reelection—Gallup reported that just 44 percent of Republicans trusted that votes would be cast and counted accurately, “a record low for either party.”
This isn’t entirely surprising, given Trump’s crusade to undermine our democratic institutions, which began well before he was ever elected. In 2012, he called Obama’s victory over Mitt Romney “a total sham,” adding: “We can’t let this happen. We should march on Washington and stop this travesty.” In early 2016, after losing the Iowa caucus to Ted Cruz, Trump called the chair of the Iowa GOP and pressured him to disavow the result; when that failed, he took to Twitter, denouncing the “fraud” in Iowa and calling for a new election to be held.
By the time November 3, 2020, arrived, Trump had already constructed his elaborate narrative of a rigged election. Republican leaders did little to keep their voters from falling for the president’s deception. In fact, most of them enabled and even participated in it. What began as a fringe movement after Bush v. Gore has spread into the GOP mainstream: Polls continue to show that more than half of all Republican voters believe that the 2020 election was stolen.
They are acting on Trump’s lies, flooding into local party offices, demanding to be stationed on the front lines of the next election so they can prevent it from being stolen. They have nominated scores of candidates who deny the legitimacy of Biden’s victory; seven are running to become the chief elections official in their state. Several of these Republicans—Mark Finchem in Arizona, Kristina Karamo in Michigan—are hinting at administrative actions that would reverse decades of progress in making elections more transparent and accessible, in turn leaving our system more vulnerable.
The great threat is no longer machines malfunctioning or ballots being spoiled. It is the actual theft of an election; it is the brazen abuse of power that requires not only bad actors in high places but the tacit consent of the voters who put them there.
This makes for a terrifying scenario in 2024—but first, a crucial test in 2022.
In August, when Michigan held its primary elections, all eyes were on the Republican race for governor. It had been a volatile contest; two of the perceived front-runners had been disqualified for failing to reach signature thresholds. Most of the remaining candidates were champions of Trump’s Big Lie, but none more so than Ryan Kelley, who participated in the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol and was arrested this past June by the FBI on misdemeanor charges. (Kelley pleaded not guilty in July.)
When the returns came in and Kelley lost, he refused to concede. Instead, he called for a “publicly supervised hand recount to uphold election integrity.” But Kelley had a problem: He had finished in fourth place, capturing just 15 percent of the vote and losing to the Republican nominee by 25 points.
It was a similar story in another closely watched Michigan race. State Senator Lana Theis, a Republican who’d co-written a committee report debunking Trump’s voter-fraud allegations after the 2020 election, defeated a MAGA conspiracy theorist, Mike Detmer, by 15 points in their primary contest. Detmer’s response? “When we have full, independent, unfettered forensic audits of 2020 and 2022 I’ll consider the results,” he wrote on his Facebook page. This pattern has played out in races all across the country, with sore Republican losers doing their best Trump impressions, alleging fraud to explain a drubbing at the ballot box.
“This gives me real hope,” Thomas told me in early September. “Because people understand, when there’s a margin like that, you lost. And if you’re going to insist you didn’t lose, well, now people are going to be skeptical of what you’ve been telling them all along. Is the sky really falling? You can only tell a lie so many times before people stop listening to you.”
His optimism struck me as misplaced. For one thing, these were just primary elections. Tudor Dixon, the GOP’s gubernatorial nominee in Michigan, is herself a 2020 conspiracy theorist. In fact, all three Republicans on top of the statewide ticket this fall—Dixon, as well as the nominees for attorney general and secretary of state—have claimed that Democrats stole the election. Michigan’s GOP lawmakers have not allowed changes to vote-processing laws despite the chaos of 2020. In the event of close Democratic victories in November, we can expect another “red mirage,” in which the Republican nominee jumps out to a big lead soon after the polls close, only to fall behind as the backlog of absentee ballots is counted. The conspiracy theories will practically spread themselves.
Sensing my skepticism, Thomas told me there was additional cause for hope. Two years ago, the Republican volunteers who monitored the vote-counting in Detroit on behalf of the party were completely out of their depth; most had never worked an election, and thus confused standard protocols for what they swore in affidavits were violations of the law. Following the grassroots outcry of November 2020, the Michigan GOP recruited hordes of new volunteers who have since received enhanced training. Thomas says his first encounter with this new class of Republican poll watchers came this summer, on primary day in Detroit, where he was once again tasked with overseeing the count. “It was night and day from 2020. They were respectful,” he said. “There were no issues.”
Hours after I finished speaking with Thomas, CNN published a report exposing a Zoom training seminar in which Republican leaders in Wayne County, Michigan—home to Detroit—instructed poll watchers to ignore election rules and smuggle in pens, paper, and cellphones to document Democratic cheating. That seminar was held on August 1—the day before Michigan’s primary.
I want to believe our system of self-government is durable enough to withstand all of this; I want to believe Thomas, that everything will be all right. But as we spoke, it struck me that, despite his expertise, and despite his ringside seat to the unraveling of our democracy, Thomas is like millions of other Americans who can’t quite bring themselves to face what’s happening. Like so many of them, he clings to fleeting hints of a return to normalcy and ignores the flood of evidence suggesting it will not come. He still trusts a system that is actively being sabotaged.
Thomas has never belonged to a party. He remains proudly nonpartisan. But he acknowledges what must happen in 2022 for America to swerve off the road to national calamity. The Republicans who have made election denying the centerpiece of their campaign must lose, and lose badly. They will cry fraud and demand recounts and refuse to concede. They will throw tantrums sufficient to draw attention to their margins of defeat. At that point, Thomas says, maybe a critical mass of GOP voters—the very people who supported these candidates in the first place—will finally realize that they’ve been duped. Maybe they will abandon the lies and choose a different path before it is too late.
But based on the number of candidates who sold a lie to earn their spot on the November ballot, in Michigan and beyond, I fear it may already be.
This article appears in the November 2022 print edition with the headline “Bad Losers.”
