GOP head is still floating election conspiracies to absolve Trump's loss: report

Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel got called out for spreading 2020 election conspiracies more than two years after Donald Trump's loss.

CNN teased an upcoming interview with McDaniel where Chris Wallace asked when she stopped being an "election denier," and Washington Post columnist Philip Bump said it's clear that she still casts doubt on President Joe Biden's electoral win.

“I think saying that there were problems with 2020 is very real. I don’t think that’s election denying,” McDaniel told Wallace. “I’m from Wayne County [Michigan]. We had a woman send a note saying I’m being told to backdate ballots. We had to look into that. That’s deeply concerning. When you have friends who are poll-watching and being kicked out, that’s deeply concerning. We have every right to look at that.”

McDaniel, when pressed, conceded that Biden is the president, but she insisted there had been "lots of problems" with that election and so she didn't think "he won it fair."

"This is where a lot of Republicans have landed," Bump wrote. "All of that hunting for fraud has resulted in a tacit admission that there isn’t demonstrable evidence of explicit fraud, so, disinterested in accepting the easy answer — Biden got more votes than the deeply unpopular and polarizing incumbent, Donald Trump — they invent nebulous excuses for the loss."

"It was Hunter Biden’s laptop! It was the media! It was Mark Zuckerberg!" he added. "This argument is great for skeptics because it just vaguely blames the people they already hate for making Trump lose without having to actually offer hard evidence of it."

Like most Republicans involved in politics, McDaniel doesn't want to risk Trump's ire or turn the GOP base against her, and Bump notes that blaming fraud for elections losses is preferable to blaming herself, if she wants to keep her job, but that still corrodes faith in democracy and weakens its foundation.

"External observers won’t have much difficulty seeing the problem here, of course," Bump wrote. "Establishing a system in which any loss can easily be framed as illegitimate means establishing a system in which no loss is accepted as valid. It means institutionalizing the idea that elections are inaccurate gauges of public opinion and, therefore, that the winners of those elections have no mandate to serve."