Donald Trump was gearing up to claim the 2024 election was rigged, just as he baselessly claimed about 2020 — but fell completely silent about it as soon as it became clear he was actually on track for a victory — but that doesn't mean that Stop the Steal conspiracy theories have completely gone away, wrote Hayes Brown for MSNBC.
It just means they're mutating into something else.
The dropoff in belief in fraud was stark, Brown wrote. Before the election, "a full 87% of Trump voters contacted in a survey by Politico and Morning Consult agreed that voter fraud was going to be a serious issue that could determine the race’s outcome. You may be shocked to learn that number plummeted during a survey conducted after the results were in, with only 24% thinking now that fraud could have determined the winner (or did)."
But even so, conspiracy theories continue to circulate on the far right.
For one thing, many MAGA activists believed in the aftermath of the election "that Trump’s victory vindicated their claims of fraud in 2020. Seeing Vice President Kamala Harris lose with fewer votes than Trump had earned four years ago became warped evidence that the previous race was rigged."
ALSO READ: Will Trump back the FBI’s battle against domestic extremists? He won’t say.
In reality, wrote Brown, many voters from 2020 just stayed home, and they also didn't even have all the data yet, with California facing weeks of counting the remaining ballots due to their notoriously sluggish system. Indeed, Republicans started crying fraud as some of those late-counted ballots may end up flipping seats from red to blue.
Lizzie Ulmer of States United Action recently told reporters, “The election denial movement has been evolving and shapeshifting in an effort to stay relevant,” with many of the lawmakers who have fought to suppress the vote trying to "lock in" Trump's gains in states like Arizona and Georgia by introducing new, stricter voting laws.
"The thing about MAGA is that it doesn’t have to provide a coherent set of facts to uphold its ideology," concluded Brown. "At its core is the presumption that Trump should be victorious and deserves the power that he amasses and distributes. Anything beyond that is plasticine ready to be sculpted for whoever is hoping to benefit, much the same way that many voters projected their hopes onto Trump — despite not liking a lot of the things he’s promised to do."
