The importance of continuing the lie that the 2020 election was stolen is that it has become a political strategy key to Trump's re-election. No evidence has emerged in nearly four years of trying to find it that would have found enough irregularities to result in Trump being re-elected. By now, rational thought should have debunked the lie long ago. Instead, more political leaders still embrace the Big Lie than ever before. Not all of them are so irrational to ignore the lack of evidence. It has evidently become an important 2024 election tool for Trump supporters.
The brief tenure of Ronna McDaniels as a political commentator on NBC left me with mixed feelings. McDaniels, the former chair of the Republican National Committee, had been brought on to the network to give news coverage a more balanced appearance, I assume. Still, it ended in heated and on-camera objections from many NBC and MNBC stars. the network brass reversed itself. In her first appearance, she refused to back down from being an election denier who contributed to the January 6 violent rioters and Trump's attempted coup to overturn the 2020 election results to turn him from a loser to a winner. I would have looked forward to her defending election denying in the face of challenges from other panel members or moderators. The sign of a true believer is to admit that Biden sits in the White House, so he is now President, but never to admit the 2020 election was legitimate. McDaniels, now a private citizen, passed the true believer MAGA test in her interview on Meet the Press in March, igniting howls of protest that giving a public platform to promote such lies was unacceptable. She refused to agree the 2020 election was fair and referred to all of the "problems" in the 2020 election. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=ronna+mcdaneil+meet+press+first+interview
How can one explain why election denials have such power even in 2024? It makes no sense unless you view it as a cynical political strategy that benefits Trump and the MAGA movement.
1. One explanation could be that it has value as a strategy and a tactic to give some sort of rationale to justify a second coup, violent or otherwise. The 2020 election was stolen, so expect 2024 to be stolen again if Trump loses, goes the pitch. Political violence is already being threatened. The chief election official in Colorado is the Secretary of State, a Democrat, and like other election officials throughout the US, she must have 24-7 security protection because of the threats of violence against them. https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/07/politics/threats-us-public-officials-democracy-invs/index.html
Trump has a long history of supporting violence to accomplish a political goal. Even if you think he is just bluffing and bloviating, then learn how he has promoted violence in the past. It is a big part of who he is Promising to free and forgive violent and convicted January 6 protestors is just the most obvious one, but his inciting violence or advocating it has a record. https://mufticforumblog.blogspot.com/2020/08/trump-fans-flames-of-violence-yet-calls.html
2. Another explanation could be that it is also a way to identify those who are true MAGA supporters from those who are not, like a secret handshake to get entry into the Trump club or as a hex sign to warn off a political attack by MAGA party disciplinarians of being primaried or publicly humiliated. Fear of loss of power or livelihood in a primary is a powerful motivator. Trump's threat of revenge and retribution if he is re-elected is his promise often repeated.
3. There could be another, darker reason for keeping the Big Lie going. It provides motivation and a rationale to enact voter suppression legislation and call it "voter integrity." If the system is broken, we should fix it, according to pious logic. The problem is there is no evidence the system was that broken to justify unlawful purging of voter records, playing keepaway from convenient ballot drop boxes, and stopping mail in voting. However, suppressing the vote benefits the Trump re-election efforts by weakening his feared opposition. What the MAGA "fix" is passing laws making it hard for targeted, presumed potential anti-Trump and pro-Biden voters to vote, all in the name of "voter integrity," based on the presumption that the young and the poorer minorities are the ones to commit voter fraud. The current crusade is to end mail-in balloting (the fraud-free system used in Colorado by most voters). That is both a race-based approach that appeals to the white nationalist element of MAGA and one that does not stand up to evidence of prosecution records. Furthermore, when the MAGA crowd and FOX media lost millions in losing the defamation suit against the vote tabulating systems of Doniniium, they just kept spouting their unproved theories. If the solution is to use only paper ballots, the answer is to keep mail-in voting and still provide same-day polling places as Colorado does. Paper ballots kept secure are the best proof in an audit that the computer systems upheld the validity of the count in an audit. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/5-egregious-voter-suppression-laws-2021
https://www.lwv.org/voting-rights/fighting-voter-suppression
4. It supports the continuing rule of autocrats, which Trump promotes and what he promises to be. However, know when an autocrat controls the election system, as Trump would like to do with his appointments. there is no faith that there is any election integrity at all. We just witnessed the Russian sham elections recently, which were neither fair nor free, giving Putin his 6th term with 87% of the vote, the same incredible outcome of voting as in the old Communist-controlled USSR. Putting MAGA in control, like the fox guarding the henhouse, of counting the vote is about the same lack of faith and credibility as it is in Russia.
5. The Boss requires it. He has honed the technique over many years. Donald Trump has a long history of denying he lost a contest. It was noted when he was the Apprentice star who failed to get the Emmy he thought he deserved. Election denial was again used to explain the rigging that explained Obama's success, which popped up in 2012, and then, in 2020, it set off a bell in an October presidential debate. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/timeline-donald-trumps-election-denial-claims-republican-politicians/story?id=89168408 At first, it was just a comment made during a debate by Donald Trump in October of 2016 that set off the first alarm bells. .https://www.npr.org/2016/10/20/498713509/donald-trump-says-hell-accept-the-results-of-the-election-if-he-wins Some watching the debate thought he was just making a joke, but the joke was on us. He was not kidding. Others thought he believed he would lose, so he was preparing his followers to not lose faith; he never lost anything, and he would do something. And something he did culminating in the January 6 attempted coup. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/no-modern-presidential-candidate-refused-to-concede-heres-why-that-matters
6. The purge is complete.MAGA election deniers have taken over the GOP and many state officials.They got the power and prestige by riding on election denying oratory. The US Speaker of the House is an election denier, and the present and just past RNC (Republican National Committee) chairs are election deniers. Election deniers are in place to administer the 2024 elections in many states. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/election-deniers-playbook-2024
In Colorado, recently mostly blue, a very conservative and disgusted Rep. Buck (R) bailed out of the House before his term was up, leaving the GOP control hanging by a thread. He cited that the lies still promoted by the 2020 election were stolen. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/republican-rep-ken-buck-leaving-congress-eroding-gop-majority-rcna143046 His district is ruby red, so he will likely be his replacement who passes the MAGA loyalty tests. The Colorado state party chair, Dave Let's Go, Brandon Williams, the supreme Colorado election denier, is also running for Congress to fill another announced House vacancy in a red district. Republican state chair Dave Williams wins top-line in Colorado's 5th Congressional District primary | Elections | coloradopolitics.com
Buck's replacement was picked to run in the primary. Greg Lopez is an election denier, against abortions with no exceptions, with a history of domestic violence, DUIs, and other run ins with the law. https://coloradosun.com/2024/03/28/greg-lopez-ken-buck-colorado-4th-district-lauren-boebert/
In my own county, the newly elected County Clerk nearly lost to opponents who suspected she was an election denier who would be running elections. She squeaked by winning her election recently after claiming the retiring loyal and much respected GOP clerk was OK, but the rest of the 2020 election, state and national, was a fraud. Go figure.
