“It definitely sends a message to the Trump supporters who feel that there were irregularities in the election,” said Rigas, 47. She’d battled the state over pandemic regulations that closed her hair salon and other small businesses, and traveled to Washington for the protests on Jan. 6. “What we saw, outside the Capitol, was an enormous amount of people, people as far as you could see, loving their country and wanting fair elections.”

A year ago this week, the electoral college vote affirmed President Biden’s victory. That was the cue for some Republicans, like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), to say the race was over. It was true, and it turned out to be wishful thinking. The campaign to challenge the last election, and write new rules for the next one, has defined Republican politics, with fewer downsides than Democrats expected — and far fewer than they hoped for.

“We narrowly dodged a bullet in a coup attempt,” Washington Gov. Jay Inslee (D) said in an interview last week. “If Trump could have prevailed on [then-Vice President Mike] Pence to gavel him as president, he would have done it. If he would have had those rioters take over the Congress and steal the electoral ballots, he would have done it. There’s nothing he would not do. And I think we have to recognize the enormity of that risk to democracy itself.”

For much of 2021, Democrats speculated that the former president’s election obsession would hurt the GOP, pointing to slightly depressed turnout in some deep-red parts of Georgia in the Jan. 5 runoffs that ended the Republican majority in the U.S. Senate. By November, when Republicans broke off-year turnout records in New Jersey and Virginia, that clearly wasn’t true. A message that flopped in Georgia — that more Republicans needed to become poll watchers — began to click. After the GOP swept the Virginia races, pro-Trump commentators who claimed the last election was rigged suggested that grass-roots activists had preemptively stopped a steal.

“If you have a voter integrity operation in place on the front end and you have 93 percent of your precincts covered with trained poll watchers and election workers, the opportunity for voter irregularities drops dramatically,” John Fredericks, a radio host and former Trump campaign co-chair in Virginia, said after the 2021 election. “The voter integrity team here will be used as model for the midterms.”

But 2020 lingers. Fraud allegations that were quickly debunked by investigators, including some Republicans, have reappeared in lawsuits and campaign rallies. Documents that spelled out the plan to deny Biden the presidency were spun as efforts to get to the bottom of what happened. A Republican-backed review of ballots in Arizona’s Maricopa County, which found a larger lead for Biden than the state’s certified count, became a rationale for “forensic audits” in other states. Some Republicans who’d congratulated Biden even backtracked, assuring primary voters that they, too, believe that the race was rigged.

“President Trump says the election was stolen, and he’s right,” says Ohio luxury car dealer Bernie Moreno, a candidate for U.S. Senate, in an ad that began running this week. Thirteen months earlier, Moreno had tweeted that fellow conservatives should “accept the results of 140+ million votes cast.”

Rigas was the seventh Republican candidate for Michigan’s House or Senate whom Trump had endorsed; he backed an eighth, Mike Hoadley, on Thursday, explaining that “leaders like Mike” are “going to stop the steal.” Each candidate insisted that the last election was fatally flawed, and each of them supported an audit of the state’s 2020 vote. Seven Republicans who’d gone to D.C. on Jan. 6 have already won down-ballot races, some of them for reelection; Michigan is one of at least nine states where Trump supporters have been going door to door to ask voters if they actually cast the ballots recorded in their names.

It’s typical for a defeated party to focus more on the fairness of an election it lost than the party that won it. After the 2000 and 2004 elections, Democrats campaigned for paper and provisional ballots, to make voting easier, and early-voting periods, to cut down on lines. After the GOP’s 2008 defeats, the conservative movement focused intensely on ACORN, a community organizing coalition that had registered millions of voters in economically distressed cities, convincing a Democratic Congress to deny it any federal funding. 

And the Democrats’ 2021 wins in Georgia came after years of voter registration and contact by Stacey Abrams and her New Georgia Project, supercharged after she lost a 2018 election to a secretary of state who had launched a last-minute pre-election investigation into whether Democrats were hacking his campaign website. More than a year later, the state’s Republican attorney general closed the investigation, finding no evidence.

The intensity of the campaign to challenge the 2020 election has dwarfed all of that. New laws allow Republicans to replace Democratic election officials, and new investigations have empowered lawyers who sued to throw out votes last year or claimed the election was rigged. On Wednesday night in Minnesota, radio host and Washington Post columnist Hugh Hewitt asked each Republican candidate for governor if the election had been legitimate. Each candidate echoed the claims made by the state party’s chair last year, that “irregularities” made the result unknowable, and Hewitt didn’t follow up.

“I can’t know what I don’t know, and we have to take that attitude toward 2020,” said former state senator Scott Jensen. He suggested that “9,000 more ballots were returned than were sent out,” in Arizona —  an allegation based on a misunderstanding of the mail ballot system that had been debunked by the Republican-led county months earlier.

“I do believe there was voter fraud at a massive scale across the country,” said conservative activist and suburban mayor Mike Murphy, another candidate at the forum. “Can I pinpoint the evidence? No, absolutely not. I’m not privy to the scheme.” He referred to a conservative group’s investigation of Somali voting in Minneapolis, saying that it showed fraud in a 2020 Democratic primary, but not mentioning that one of investigation’s key witnesses had quickly recanted. 

But the more the skeptics are told they had nothing to worry about — that their question has been looked into, and the system wasn’t rigged — the more the skeptics call for an audit. None of that will be left behind in 2021.

“The best hope that we have is putting the processes and definition in place for an audit,” Rigas said. “If we cannot get an audit for 2020, then at least we can assure that what happened in 2020 does not happen again.”

Reading list

The Republican pilgrimage.

How a fight over a top high school’s admission standards changed the 2021 election in Virginia.

No smoking gun to overturn the results, but plenty of interested donors.

Big money vs. Chesa Boudin.

The chief of staff and the problems trailing behind him.

The GOP legislators who fought for a way to overturn the election.

They can’t vote, but they can help rural conservatives win elections.

Just how many people are threatening to put election officials in jail?

Turnout watch

Democrats won the Latino vote in 2020, but by less than they expected, and less than their own data suggested they would. That error has been studied again and again this year, with none of the research making liberals very happy, and none of it seeming to stop a drift of Latino voters — especially young voters — away from Joe Biden’s party.

The latest addition to the research is “The American Dream Voter,” the second of Equis Research’s postmortems on the 2020 electorate, and, from a Democrat’s perspective, the grimmest. 

Launched in 2019, Equis’s first studies have aged about as well as other, rosy pictures of the potential Latino vote. The GOP’s added strength in Florida wasn’t visible in its 2019 look at the potential power of Latina voters, which found most Florida Latinos of any gender disapproving of Trump. A June 2020 look at battleground states, including Florida, found Trump’s support at a weak 26 percent. That study used the word “Latinx,” which most Latinos do not use, 10 times; “The American Dream Voter” uses it just once, alongside “defund” and “Critical Race Theory,” as “new variables and buzzwords” that “media and operatives” have focused on. 

But “The American Dream Voter” suggests that much of last year’s Latino vote shift was rooted in views of the economy, fears of further coronavirus restrictions and fears that Democrats would shake the ladder that working-class Latinos expected to climb. Interviews with Latino voters who backed Trump for the first time last year repeatedly found them citing the economy, deep into the pandemic, even when unemployment soared. Trump, not congressional Democrats, got the credit for emergency spending that kept businesses open.

“While Trump’s approach to border spending (not the wall) earned majority support among Latinos, he lost even the conservatives on family separation,” write the study’s authors. “But family separation was not front-and-center by the end of the election. Reopening the economy — one of Trump’s most popular planks with Latino voters — was.”

Equis’s real-time research last year hinted at this problem, finding that “he’ll lead us out of our current economic crisis and work to build an economy that works for everyone” was an effective message for Biden. That was complicated by a gaffe he made in his first interview, with ABC News, after picking Kamala D. Harris as his running mate. Asked twice if he was “prepared to shut this country down again” if coronavirus infections spiked, Biden buckled and said, “I’d shut it down, I’d listen to the scientists.” The first four words made it into Trump campaign ads, though Biden, in office, wouldn’t have the power to order the sort of shutdowns that governors ordered in their states.

That branding hurt Biden, according to Equis, because the salience of the immigration issue tumbled during the pandemic, and the salience of the economy surged. Democrats were also out-campaigned at multiple levels, with a nominee who restricted his in-person activity and local campaigns that were wary of crowded events and canvassing. The Trump-led GOP rushed into the gap, and Equis found that caravans and parades for Trump reduced Latinos’ wariness about supporting him, while the most effective ad from the campaign, targeting Latino voters, accused Democrats of taking them for granted. 

The economy, in Equis’s research, is a solvable problem for Democrats. An issue that got plenty of media attention — Democrats embracing last year’s Black Lives Matter protests — doesn’t loom as a problem at all. “Feeling very favorably toward police or unfavorably toward BLM didn’t show any significant effect beyond what we would predict based on a Hispanic voter’s partisan and demographic profile,” the authors write.

But the Republican linkage between Democrats and “socialism” looks like a problem with no quick Democratic solution. First, there are self-identified socialists in the party — not a factor in modern Democratic campaigns before 2016. Second, there was mistrust in mainstream media and trust in social networks, where stories that wouldn’t pass a lawyerly fact-check could be spread freely. Third, the most frequently cited negatives about “socialism” were about economic redistribution, which Republicans more effectively framed as contrary to an “American Dream” of hard work leading to success. 

In states where the Latino vote moved hardest toward Trump, the pivotal voters usually interpreted socialism as meaning “people will become lazy and dependent on government,” and the government “will raise our taxes to give money to undeserving people.” That, according to Equis, cost Democrats votes from people who had no interest in backing Trump four years earlier.

“This modern ‘red panic’ is a story about uncontested propaganda in isolated media ecosystems, what is sometimes reduced to ‘disinformation,’” the report concludes. “And it’s a story about the weaponization of the American Dream — the true opposite of socialism in the right-wing narrative.”

Georgia First Leadership Committee, “America First.” One advantage for Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) in his 2022 primary is a new law that allows incumbent politicians to create funds with no donation limits. That’s where this new committee and its $1 million ad buy came from, and the content repurposes attacks that have been thrown at former senator David Perdue (R) for years: He “outsourced jobs to countries like China,” and was paid to cut costs for a bedding company by moving the work to East Asian companies with cheap labor. That negative attack emerged in 2014, when Perdue was running for Senate, after a piece by reporters at Politico.

Mooney for Congress, “Vote Out RINO McKinley.” U.S. Rep. Alex Mooney (R-W.Va.), forced into a race with Rep. David B. McKinley (R) by the latest round of redistricting, has run ads trumpeting his endorsement from Donald Trump, and condemning McKinley’s vote for the bipartisan infrastructure package. “Biden’s trillion-dollar spending bill was dead, until McKinley resurrected it,” a narrator says, as footage of Biden stumbling up the stairs to Air Force One plays on-screen. That’s half of the ad; the other half once again reminds voters that Trump endorsed Mooney, not McKinley.

Bernie Moreno for Ohio, “Truth.” On Nov. 7 last year, months before he entered the 2022 GOP primary for U.S. Senate in Ohio, Moreno wrote tweets congratulating Joe Biden for winning the presidency and downplaying allegations of fraud. “Was it anywhere near enough to change the result, no,” he explained. That message hasn’t survived the campaign, and Moreno, a wealthy car dealer who is spending $4 million of his own money on early ads, says here that Trump is right to say the election was “stolen,” on the basis that Democrats and the media were “smearing” Trump, and that the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop were suppressed by media companies. “Facebook may delete this ad, but I’m paying for it so you know the truth,” Moreno says.

U.S. Chamber Action, “Thank You, Joe.” Partnering up with the West Virginia Chamber of Commerce, the national group is trying to bury the Democrats’ Build Back Better spending package — its plan all year — by thanking Sen. Joe Manchin III (D) for his infrastructure vote and urging him to move on. The spending bill is referred to here as one that will “raise prices for West Virginia families.”

Poll watch

Do you support or oppose instituting, or reinstituting, these pandemic restrictions? (Monmouth, 808 adults)

Face mask and social distancing guidelines
Support: 55% (-8 since September)
Oppose: 42% (+8)

Requiring proof of vaccination for offices and public settings
Support: 46% (-5 since September)
Oppose: 50% (+3)

Polling from Monmouth has found steadily declining ratings for every public official — the president, governors and health professionals — since the delta variant of the coronavirus arrived over the summer. It’s also found a supermajority of Americans getting vaccinated, or planning to get vaccinated, with resistance in this poll (people who never intend to get vaccinated) limited to a third of Republicans and a fifth of independents. The mixture of compliance with guidelines and exhaustion with having to do so gets you these results: Slippage in the number of people who support the pandemic measures backed by the White House and nearly all Democrats. There’s a partisan gap between Republicans and Democrats, on both questions, of around 50 points. Independents are more divided: A majority (52 percent) support mask mandates, but just 37 percent support requiring proof of vaccination.

Do you think Biden’s proposed multitrillion dollar social spending plan for programs such as health care, child care and climate change would help lower inflation, push inflation higher, or not make much difference? (Fox News, 1,002 registered voters)

Help lower inflation: 21%
Push inflation higher: 46% 
Not make much difference: 28% 

For most of the year, the Democrats’ Build Back Better social spending package has floated above 50 percent in polling, even when the president’s approval rating has dipped. Only in the past two months, as lobbying against it focused on inflation, has opposition made a dent — though economists disagree about whether a combination of spending programs and tax hikes would increase or lower inflation. Republicans are driving the inflation worries here — 73 percent of them are convinced that passing the spending package would drive prices higher, compared with 40 percent of independents and 20 percent of Democrats.

Special elections

No seats changed hands in Tuesday’s special legislative elections, the last ones that will be held in 2021. In both races, turnout was low, and Republicans ran ahead of their 2021 margins.

Paltry turnout and a third-party candidate were both factors in the race for Connecticut‘s 116th House District, where Democrat Treneé McGee won by 101 votes — good enough for a 10-point win in a race with only 1,088 voters. As we wrote on Tuesday, McGee’s antiabortion views frustrated some local Democratic activists, and turnout fell to less than a fifth of what it was in the 2020 election, when no Republican bothered running for the seat. 

Fortunately for McGee, neither of her opponents appealed to liberals on her biggest vulnerability. Richard DePalma, the Republican nominee who’d previously run and lost a 2018 race for the seat, tried to link McGee to the corruption scandal that forced out her predecessor; Portia Bias, a Democrat who petitioned to run as an independent, simply argued that replacing one Democrat with another wouldn’t help the district. After her win, McGee suggested that the attention paid to her views might have helped her.

“People were inspired by my bravery,” McGee told CT Mirror — though her 10-point win in a district that Democrats typically have won by 50 points represented one of the biggest shifts right in any special election this year.

In Iowa, Republican Dave Rowley easily held on to the state’s 1st Senate District, winning by 52 points and improving on Donald Trump’s 46-point margin in that part of northwest Iowa. And in the 7th Senate District of Arkansas, where both parties held primaries ahead of a Feb. 8 special election, Republicans Colby Fulfer and Steven Unger advanced to a runoff, while Democrat Lisa Parks won her party’s nomination outright. 

Parks is the first Democrat to even bother competing in the conservative northwest Arkansas district since 2012, and the winner of the GOP’s Jan. 11 runoff is favored to hold the seat. It just won’t be Jim Bob Duggar, the patriarch of a family whose starring role on the show “19 Kids and Counting” briefly made him and his oldest children into social conservative celebrities. His eldest and most politically active son, Josh Duggar, was convicted last week of possessing child pornography, a verdict handed down just outside the borders of the Fayetteville-area district.

“I am thankful to God for His love and kindness toward us,” the elder Duggar said in a statement, “and pray He will cause His face to shine on our state and nation.” He pledged his support to whoever won the GOP primary.

In Washington, Seattle City Council member Kshama Sawant continued to gain ground as votes were counted in her Dec. 7 recall election. As of Wednesday night, after a few dozen more ballots were counted, the “no” tally led by 317 votes out of 40,972 cast. Ballots postmarked by Election Day can be counted, if verified, if they arrive by Dec. 27.

In the states

Texas. Filing for the March 2022 primaries ended Monday, and a Republican-drawn map that shrank the number of state and congressional swing seats didn’t stop the ballot from filling up. In most cases, districts redrawn to become safer for one party attracted challengers who see a wider path to victory, by appealing to the party’s base.

In the new 3rd Congressional District, which backed Trump by 14 points, former Collin County judge Keith Self is challenging Rep. Van Taylor (R) from the right, accusing him of betraying the conservative movement by voting for a committee to investigate the Jan. 6 insurrection. “It weaponizes the federal government against conservatives,” Self said in an Oct. 20 speech launching his campaign. He’s continued to whack Taylor over decisions made by the committee, and criticize the congressman for being part of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus. (The old district voted for Trump by a single point.)

The new 4th Congressional District in East Texas, which backed Trump by 26 points, will host a primary after former TV news anchor Dan Thomas filed to challenge Rep. Pat Fallon (R). Thomas, who hasn’t run for office before, announced in October that he was let go after refusing to get a coronavirus vaccination, despite getting a medical exemption from his physician. “I know what it’s like to have your life turned upside down and lose your personal freedom,” he said in a launch video, “all because of government overreach.”

In the new 7th Congressional District, a slice of the Houston suburbs that Republicans turned into a safely Democratic seat, health-care executive Tahir Javed filed at the last minute to challenge Rep. Lizzie Fletcher (D). Javed spent more than $1 million of his own money on a 2018 campaign for a neighboring, majority-Latino district, where his omnipresent ad campaign got him just 21 percent of the vote.

Colorado. State Rep. Dave Williams (R) announced a primary challenge to Rep. Doug Lamborn (R) on Tuesday, explaining in a statement that Lamborn’s “lack of effective leadership and compromised integrity” had “cost our community dearly.” The incumbent’s “corruption,” said Williams, was being “exposed” by a lawsuit from a former staffer, who’s said the congressman defied coronavirus protocols and compelled his staff to do campaign work.

Lamborn, first elected in 2006 with the backing of the conservative Club for Growth, has beaten back a series of primary challengers. None, over the years, were able to take advantage of some controversies around Lamborn’s campaign spending; he’s one of several members of Congress who’s paid his wife from reelection funds. Williams, whose mother is Hispanic, would be the only Latino Republican in the delegation if he were to win the summer 2022 primary.

North Carolina. State Sen. Jeff Jackson (D) ended his U.S. Senate bid, endorsing former state Supreme Court justice Cheri Beasley, who now has no serious competition for the nomination.

“We’ve run a strong campaign,” Jackson said in a video posted to Twitter, “but everyone needs to know when to step aside.”

Beasley lost another challenger last month, when former state senator Erica Smith quit the race for the 2nd Congressional District seat. (Smith ran for Senate in 2020, with most of her support coming from a Republican PAC that ran ads for her in the hope it would hurt the eventual nominee.) Legal challenges to the state’s new congressional map, which draws most Democratic voters into just three districts, have delayed the primary from March 2022 to May 2022, but Beasley’s only remaining competition is from Beaufort Mayor Rett Newton and virologist Richard Watkins. Combined, the two candidates had less than $60,000 in their accounts as of mid-October. Beasley had $1.7 million.

Vermont. State Senate President Pro Tempore Becca Balint joined the race to replace Rep. Peter Welch (D) on Monday, a few days after Lt. Gov. Molly Gray announced her own campaign. Both Democrats raised more than $100,000 quickly — Balint claimed to hit the number within 24 hours — and both would be the first woman to represent Vermont in either branch of Congress. Welch is seeking the U.S. Senate seat now held by the retiring Patrick J. Leahy; filing doesn’t end for another six months, but Welch’s personal popularity and his endorsement from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) have helped clear the field for him so far, driving other Democrats into the open House race.

California. Five-term Rep. Alan Lowenthal (D) will retire next year at age 81, opening up a Long Beach-based district that backed Joe Biden by 27 points last year. Long Beach Mayor Robert Garcia, 44, has been eyed as a candidate if Lowenthal retired, depending what happens to the 47th Congressional District in the ongoing redistricting process.

… 26 days until the election in Florida’s 20th Congressional District 
… 75 days until the first 2022 primaries 
… 327 days until the midterm elections