On Wednesday, following the GOP's surprisingly lackluster performance in the 2022 midterm elections, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), who won his own race fairly effortlessly, took to Twitter to implore the party to move beyond conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election — although he declined to specifically mention former President Donald Trump by name.
"Let’s look to the next election. Quit talking about 2020," wrote Grassley.
He added that people should take the advice of President Abraham Lincoln, who said, “I do not deny the possibility that the people may err in an election; but if they do, the true [cure] is in the next election, and not in the treachery of the person elected.”
Republicans going into Election Day this week were expecting to pick up dozens of House seats and possibly flip control of the Senate. So far, control of neither chamber has been called, with a low number of House seats flipped and control of the Senate down to a Georgia runoff in December and the uncalled races in Arizona and Nevada, where tens of thousands of outstanding ballots are expected to be favorable to Democrats.
Many of the Republicans who lost or underperformed in their races, like Pennsylvania gubernatorial nominee Doug Mastriano, were proponents of Trump's conspiracy theories that the 2020 election was stolen. Some of the GOP's secretary of state nominees in key states vowed to change election rules and restrict voting to prevent the supposed fraud, with Kristina Karamo even citing the debunked documentary "2,000 Mules" alleging that thousands of people were illegally delivering multiple ballots.
Trump, who is widely expected to run for president again in 2024, has subsequently tried to push conspiracy theories about the 2022 election as well, seizing on a temporary software issue in Arizona vote tabulators as proof of fraud.
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