October 07, 2024 12:33 PM UTC

The Big Lie is Back, But it's Really About 2024 Now

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• by: Colorado Pols

The 2024 election will conclude in less than a month. Naturally, Republicans across the country have decided to focus their attention on the 2020 election as they make their final pitch to voters.

Questioning the results of the 2020 Presidential Election rushed back in a big way last week during the closing moments of the Vice Presidential candidate debate between Democrat Tim Walz and Republican JD Vance, which has prompted new questions for other Republicans about their position on an election that took place four years ago.

After Vance claimed — absurdly — that then-President Donald Trump “peacefully gave over power” after losing the 2020 election to Democrat Joe Biden, Walz followed up with a question about the election that will never end for Republicans:

WALZ: [Trump] is still saying that he didn’t lose the [2020] election. Did he lose the 2020 election?

VANCE: Tim, I’m focused on the future. Did Kamala Harris censor Americans from speaking their mind in the wake of the 2020 COVID situation…

WALZ: That is a damning non-answer.

VANCE: It’s a damning non-answer for you to not talk about censorship…

Vance went on to vomit out a word salad about tech censorship, or something, but never attempted to actually answer a very straightforward question. Other Republicans apparently got the same memo in the days that followed.

Here’s Arkansas Republican Sen. Tom Cotton on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday with host Kristen Welker:

WELKER: Can you say definitively here and now that Donald Trump did lose the 2020 election?

COTTON: Kristen, Joe Biden was elected president in 2020. It was an unfair election in many ways. You had states that were changing their election practices, election laws, sometimes in violation of the Constitution.

Cotton then pivoted to complaining about the media working with “big tech” to “suppress” the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop. Welker waited for Cotton to finish, and then tried again:

WELKER: But did Trump lose?

COTTON: Joe Biden was elected.

Cotton finished this non-answer by mansplaining about how the Electoral College works before Welker gave it one last shot.

WELKER: As you know though, it has been stated that this was one of the most secure elections in US history. But do you just not want to say that Trump lost? Why not just say…if Biden is president, can you just simply say ‘Trump lost’?

COTTON: Joe Biden was elected president in 2020.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Can you say unequivocally that Joe Biden won the 2020 election and Donald Trump lost?

JOHNSON: See, this is the game that is always played by mainstream media with leading Republicans. It’s a gotcha game. You want us to litigate things that happened four years ago when we’re talking about the future. We’re not going to talk about what happened in 2020. We’re going to talk about 2024.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So like Sen. Vance, you cannot say unequivocally that Joe Biden won the 2020 election and Donald Trump lost?

JOHNSON: George, I’m the Speaker of the House. I work with the president of the United States all the time. Joe Biden has been the president for four years. There’s not a question about this, OK? It’s already been done and decided, and this is a ‘gotcha’ game that’s played, and I’m not playing it. I want to talk about the future. Let’s talk about policies.

Or you could just, you know, say, “Yes” to the first question and be done with it. Johnson’s refusal to answer that question should also prompt a renewal of the topic for Evans — particularly given that they were just together over the weekend.

Now, if you’re thinking to yourself, Who cares? This is old news, then you might want to consider what this all means for 2024. As Philip Bump writes for The Washington Post:

What’s being “litigated” here, as you might have guessed, is not some intricate, disputed issue that arose four years ago. It is, instead, the most fundamental element of that presidential contest: who won. The voters and the votes and the states say that Joe Biden won. But former president Donald Trump says that he himself did, or at least that Biden didn’t — and that attitude trickles down through his party. [Pols emphasis]

Stephanopoulos, interviewing Johnson on “This Week,” had several reasons for asking Johnson whether he would acknowledge that Biden won four years ago, which Johnson didn’t. One is that Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), refused to say that Biden won in 2020 when asked during last week’s vice-presidential debate. Another is that Johnson, as the leader of the House of Representatives, has a role in ensuring that the 2024 presidential results are finalized next year.

Johnson insisted that he would carry out that role, saying that “Congress has a very specific role and we must fulfill it.” But that came shortly after his telling Stephanopoulos that he was “hopeful that we have a free and fair election” — qualifiers that, last month, he applied to his insistence that he would fulfill that congressional role.

“If we have a free, fair and safe election,” he said then, “we’re going to follow the Constitution.”

Left unsaid, of course, is what Johnson might do if he decides that 2024 was NOT what he might consider a free or fair election.

This, fundamentally, is why “was the 2020 election legitimate?” is a fair question for Republican elected officials. It’s certainly useful in the abstract to document which elected officials are willing to deny obvious reality. But it’s also a measure of the extent to which Republicans are going to be willing to stand up to Trump’s efforts to subvert the 2024 results should he once again fail to win more votes. [Pols emphasis]

This isn’t only about the “very specific role” assigned to the House of Representatives, the counting of electoral votes that, as it did in 2021, will unfold on Jan. 6. It’s about everything that led up to Jan. 6 last time around: the denial, the scrambling, the pressure campaigns, the lies. It’s about the extent to which people lower on the pro-Trump ladder are going to be willing to try to make him the winner anyway…

…The “was 2020 a legitimate election” question is a proxy for evaluating whether Republicans will allow Trump to do that again. If you ask them whether they would prevent Trump from elevating false claims about this year’s election, you would get responses that centered on a hypothetical. When you instead ask them whether they are willing to acknowledge obvious reality — or if, instead, they believe that doing so is an unacceptable sign of disloyalty to Trump — you get a better answer to that question anyway. [Pols emphasis]

In fact, as CNN reported on Friday, many of the tactics that Trump and his supporters used in 2020 in an effort to hold on to power are still very much in play in 2024:

“There are a number of parallels in the strategy we are seeing develop to what we saw in 2020,” said Sean Morales-Doyle, director for the Brennan Center’s voting rights program. “The election deniers’ playbook – the plan to subvert the outcome of the election – is more coordinated, it’s more planned out, it’s much more well-funded and sophisticated than it was in 2020.”

The details alleged in special counsel Jack Smith’s filing unsealed this week were ultimately part of an unsuccessful effort. But several of the strategies Trump and his allies deployed four years ago have been fine-tuned in 2024, raising fears that Republican activists and officials are actively laying the groundwork to contest the results again if Trump falls short.

“The attacks on voter eligibility, lies about immigrants and voting, also attacks on methods of voting,” said Hannah Fried, executive director of All Voting is Local. “These are about laying groundwork for challenging results.” [Pols emphasis]

If Republicans can’t or won’t say whether or not Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, then what is to stop them from refusing to acknowledge the outcome of the 2024 election as well? Plenty of Republicans are still willing to stick with any version of The Big Lie for this very reason. Former Mesa County Clerk and Recorder Tina Peters might have received a lighter sentence for her various crimes related to “The Big Lie” if she had merely been willing to admit wrongdoing…but she couldn’t even do that. The result of that refusal is to encourage others to hold onto the election fraud lie as well.

“I’m convinced you would do it all over again if you could,” said Judge Matthew Barrett prior to announcing Peters’s sentence on Thursday. Those words may apply to a whole host of Republican elected officials in the coming months.