That trite and maybe infuriating maxim is one thing I keep telling people who want me to predict who will win the midterm elections and why.
We can all look at polling that attempts to tell us what the drivers of voter turnout will be. Some say the economy is a top priority, others abortion, others still crime and immigration.
I’m sure all of those things are on voters’ minds heading into November, when in just two weeks’ time we’ll have our answers.
But we won’t know what issues and impulses drove voters to the polls until exit polling tells us.
The thing that makes these midterm elections more important than perhaps any other in modern history, however, is the entirely new issue that’s on the ballot in every state — an issue we’ve never had to contend with collectively as a nation. And in many ways, it could prove more existentially important to our survival: election denialism.
There’s a good chance you will have an election denier on the ballot in your state when you go to vote on Nov. 8.
A full 60% of Americans do — whether they’re running for the House or Senate, governor or state official.
Per FiveThirtyEight, out of 552 total Republican nominees running for office, 199 of them “fully denied” the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election. To remind you, numerous and exhaustive investigations, Republican-led audits, and recounts found little to no fraud in that election, despite former President Donald Trump’s continued insistence that the election was stolen or rigged.
These 199 Republicans have either said outright that the election was stolen from Trump or took actual legal action to try to overturn the results.
On top of those 199, another 61 Republican candidates have “raised questions” about the election results, refusing to say the election was legitimate and raising doubts about phantom claims of mass fraud.
Perhaps most chillingly, there are seven election deniers running for attorney general and seven more for secretary of state. As FiveThirtyEight explains, these are the folks, along with governors, who can refuse to certify elections and submit phony or “alternate” electoral votes to change an election outcome. And then members of Congress — some of whom, remember, will likely be election deniers themselves — get to decide whether those votes should count.
We are literally poised to pack our elected government with people who believe election results they don’t like — the will of the people, in other words — should not count.
There are the obvious immediate and practical implications of this terrible outcome: Americans no longer believe their vote counts, fewer people vote, the fringiest of candidates continue to thrive while reasonable candidates die out altogether. There’s chaos and confusion after every election and virtually no mechanism left to counter mob politics.
If that’s not scary enough, there’s another undeniable reality if election denialism wins on Nov. 8: The insurrection worked.
The attempt on Jan. 6, 2021, to overturn the results of a free and fair election, at the urging of Trump and other Republicans — some of whom are on the ballot this year — was technically unsuccessful. Joe Biden was ultimately sworn in as president.
But despite the arrests of close to 1,000 people in connection with the violent attempted coup at the U.S. Capitol, election denialism, the thing that propelled the insurrection, has survived and even thrived in the months that followed.
Rather than feel chastened by a congressional committee that exposed the hideous horrors of that day — attacks on police, chants to “hang [Vice President] Mike Pence!” and drag Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi out of the building — many Republicans running for office are emboldened.
Everywhere from Arizona to Pennsylvania, candidates are running on the specters of “rigged elections” and threats to nullify results they don’t like. They’re doing that because they know Trump convinced enough voters to believe this and other lies, and told them to try to break democracy — which many did on Jan. 6.
Slaying the dark dragon of election denialism isn’t about jailing insurrectionists, though that justice is important. It’s about killing the idea itself, and that’s much harder to do.
The only way is to vote it out, to vote it into irrelevance, to vote it into obscurity. If we don’t, it will continue to grow and inevitably consume us as a functioning democracy.
Few midterm elections have felt this historically important. Only the midterms of 1858 come to mind. With a nation divided over slavery, the new Republican Party, with a mission to prevent the expansion of slavery, won a plurality in the House. Southerners promised to secede if a Republican was elected president — and when Abraham Lincoln won in 1860, they did just that. We all know what happened next.
S.E. Cupp is the host of “S.E. Cupp Unfiltered” on CNN.
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