US pro-Trump election deniers crash against ‘blue tsunami’

WASHINGTON – For months, conspiracy-peddling supporters of US President Donald Trump spread baseless theories that the vote would be rigged. But those claims all but dried up after Democrats swept the US midterm elections.Political pundits had anticipated a wave of legal challenges from election deniers seeking to contest the results of the vote on Nov 3, or efforts by Trump himself to tilt the outcome in his favour – as he did when he tried to overturn his 2020 election defeat.But none of that materialised.And evidence-free claims of fraud slowed to a trickle after what observers called the decisive “blue tsunami” of Democratic victories that handed the party control of both chambers of Congress.Trump’s acceptance of the results, signalling he would not challenge his Republican Party’s sweeping defeat, set the tone for many of his loyalists to follow suit.“Election day 2026 featured a few rumours about election integrity. However, election denialism was not a core narrative used to explain the sweeping victories by Democrats once they became apparent,” said the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public.“Absent a political elite to champion election denialism, rumouring about election integrity has not coalesced into a coherent or significant narrative to explain election results.”‘Margin of victory’Many analysts said the scale of the Democratic victory – widely seen as a repudiation of Trump’s political agenda – may have played a role.However, David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research, argued that fraud claims persisted in the past even when the President’s preferred candidates lost by large margins.“I don’t know necessarily that margin of victory makes much difference to those who have profited off of the economy of grift around election conspiracies for quite some time,” Becker said.“It might be that politics overall in the nation have changed to some degree, and that creates a different incentive structure.”It also did not help that many election deniers on the ballot lost their races – and chose not to challenge the results.Among them was Andy Biggs, one of the Republican politicians who joined Trump in challenging the 2020 election results after his defeat to Joe Biden.After losing Arizona’s gubernatorial race, Biggs conceded to incumbent Democrat Katie Hobbs, making no mention of voter fraud and instead blaming what he perceived as a low voter turnout.“We just didn’t get our turnout quite as full as we wanted to,” he said in comments reported by US media.‘Banging the drum’Even conservative influencers – including prominent supporters of Trump’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement who have been vocal election sceptics – appeared subdued.Ahead of the midterm elections, some sceptics went so far as to call for a “national emergency”, urging Trump to grant himself “king-like powers” over the midterms, according to the left-leaning watchdog Media Matters for America.“I have been banging the drum of rigged and stolen elections since 2020, but that is not why we lost the midterms,” conservative political commentator Rogan O’Handley wrote to his 2.3 million followers on social media platform X.“We lost because we failed to fix the things voters sent us to do... Lower gas and food prices and stop the Iran war.”Media Matters’s John Knefel cautioned against “premature” hopes that “the election denial fever has permanently broken”.“Rejecting Democratic Party wins remains a core, foundational element of the movement that Trump built and will likely continue to be one for the foreseeable future,” he said.But striking a note of optimism, Becker said “American voters are tired” of evidence-free election denialism.“A smaller number of election sceptics ran this time than in past cycles, and there seem to be substantially less stomach for these claims among voters,” said Pamela Smith, president of the nonpartisan nonprofit Verified Voting.Citing an independent poll, Smith added: “Most voters are interested in other issues – fraud in elections does not seem to be a driver for deciding their vote.” AFP