Election denial has lately come to be viewed as a feature of the political right, reflected by the lawsuits, conspiratorial documentaries, and "Stop the Steal" protests that followed Donald Trump's loss in the 2020 presidential election. But in the months since 2024, a similar—albeit much quieter—form of election denial has emerged in parts of the progressive left.
These theories range from claims that Elon Musk used Starlink satellites to hack the election to a the quasi-mystical TikTok subculture known as the "4 A.M. Club," whose members believe the timeline glitched and Kamala Harris won in a parallel reality. But the most prominent claims have been rooted in data-heavy spreadsheets and statistical jargon.
One of the most popular of these theories suggests that a 2024 National Security Agency audit confirmed that Kamala Harris won the election, a claim which gained notoriety after it appeared in This Will Hold, an anonymously published Substack. The post alleges that one of the audit's supposed participants, an ex-CIA officer named Adam Zarnowski, possessed insider information about a global cabal of corrupt actors, international criminals, foreign operatives, billionaires, and political insiders who conspired together to manipulate the election's outcome.