Could Trump's Refusal to Admit He Lost In 2020 Hurt Him In 2024?
New research suggests that Republicans pay a small, but significant, penalty when they're sore losers.
If you ask me, the outcome of the presidential election is essentially a coin flip. Even when I worked on campaigns and Political Action Committees, I never really knew who would win any close race. There’s just no way to know who exactly is going to turn up to vote and who they’ll vote for. The best polls are just guesses.
But one thing that I’ve encountered over and over from people who aren’t Trump’s most loyal base — meaning: independents, Republicans, and Democrats — is that they still resent how the former president handled the 2020 election.
To this day, he has refused to say he lost. Instead, he and his supporters have created countless theories about how it was stolen from him through massive voter fraud and other means they’ve never been able to prove in court (Trump loyalist Rudy Giuliani recently lost basically all of his life’s savings by falsely accusing two Georgian election workers of being in on it).
But how much does that actually matter in 2024? Many people are voting based on the state of the economy, the wars overseas, the situation at the border, or the beliefs about abortion. Is refusing to accept the results of 2020 really on the minds of voters?
A new study published in the American Political Science Review suggests that other candidates who refused to accept the results of the 2020 paid a real electoral price for it in elections two years ago.
Stanford researchers Janet Malzahn and Andrew Hall looked at how candidates for public office during the 2022 elections fared when they happened to also deny the results of 2020.
They examined races for a wide range of public offices — like Governor, U.S. Senate, or Secretary of State — and compared candidates who made rejecting the 2020 election results a main part of their campaign to those who didn’t. They made their best attempt to hold all other factors constant.
What they found was denying the election results seemed to be an electoral loser.
“What we found was there is a penalty. It looks like, as best we can tell, the set of people who to some extent focused their campaigns on making these public statements on skepticism of the 2020 election underperformed other Republicans running in the same state,” Hall told me.
Hall estimated the penalty to be about the size of a couple percentage points.
In the grand scheme of things, that means that most erstwhile-Republican voters are not defecting from these candidates due to their views on the 2020 election. But in close elections that may be decided by a percentage point or two, it could make a difference.
And let’s remember how close some of our elections are these days. Georgia’s 2020 presidential election was decided by around 11,000 votes — a fraction of a single percent of the vote.
It’s not clear that what happened in 2022 would necessarily hold true for 2024. Voters may be less concerned about sore losers this year.
But in our interview, Hall made an interesting point.
“The thing that’s always going on in American politics…if you run a centrist campaign you can run easily. But neither party can ever quite manage these days to successfully field a durable centrist candidate,” he noted. “In a very weird way Trump is the closest thing to that in a while! Because if you just look at his election policies and things like that, he’s pretty centrist.”
Yet his views on the election, Hall noted, don’t have the same centrist appeal.
“He layers on this incredibly unpopular election denial stuff and creates this impression that he’s a threat to democracy,” he said. “And if you were to remove those things and largely be running as an economic centrist, I think he would win quite easily.”
It may be that Trump believed all this time that admitting he lost the 2020 election would’ve finished his political career. But if he loses on Tuesday, there’s reason to believe that his dishonesty on that topic is actually what ended it.
I don't claim to personally know what happened, but I've read that almost every case related to fraud was dismissed due to lack of standing. (If that's wrong I'd LOVE to hear about it). I know the Hunter Biden laptop story was suppressed. The endless lawfare during his presidency and since is obvious. Finally, the Dems haven't run an honest primary since at least 2012. This time (2020) certainly looks different to me.
Bonus evidence? The rise of censorship. That's what you do when you can't win on the truth.
All that said, you may be right about this hurting his chances.
This article makes an interesting and apparently valid point, but the author apparently starts from the position that there were no shenanigans in the 2020 election. Personally, I think that the establishment, aka: The Blob, engaged in massive behind the scenes efforts at all possible levels to put their candidate over the finish line. Many of those efforts fall into a gray zone between legal and illegal, such as censoring online speech. Others, like changing voting laws without proper authority and creating or losing ballots as needed seem pretty illegal to me. I think that anyone who wants to write about this weird episode in American history needs to acknowledge the Time Magazine article of February 4, 2021: "The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election."