The Daily - The Big Lie and The Midterms

Episode Date: May 26, 2022

In Pennsylvania, a candidate falsely claiming election fraud in 2020 prevailed in a crowded Republican primary for governor. But in Georgia, two incumbents — the governor and the secretary of state — beat back challenges from “stop the steal” opponents.Is re-litigating the 2020 election a vote winner for Republicans? Or is it increasingly becoming a losing issue?Guest: Reid J. Epstein, a politics reporter for The New York Times who covers campaigns and elections.Want more from The Daily? For one big idea on the news each week from our team, subscribe to our newsletter. Background reading: Two G.O.P. primaries in Georgia exposed the limit of Donald J. Trump’s hold on his party’s base.But Doug Mastriano’s win in Pennsylvania has provoked dissension and anxiety among Republican strategists, donors and lobbyists.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. 

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. This morning results in some big primary races, giving new insight into how much clout former President Trump continues to have. This week's Republican primaries in Georgia seem to represent a major setback for Donald Trump's attempts to put false claims of election fraud at the center of this year's midterms. Governor Brian Kemp sailed to victory despite Trump calling for his ouster after he refused to get in the way of the 2020 election results.

I spoke to my colleague, politics reporter Reed Epstein, about whether re-litigating the 2020 election is becoming a losing issue for Republicans. It's Thursday, May 26th. Reid, as the midterm election season began, Read. As the midterm election season began, the big question was just how much Donald Trump's false claims that he had won the 2020 presidential election

would animate Republican voters and win elections for Republican candidates who embrace this claim. And it feels like this lie about a stolen election was rejected pretty resoundingly by Republicans this week in Georgia. That's right. What Georgia Republicans did on Tuesday night was reject the purest stop-the-steal candidates that had Donald Trump's backing. For governor, David Perdue, a former senator, lost in a landslide to Governor Brian Kemp. And for secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger defeated Congressman Jody Heiss.

And these races are important because the governor of Georgia, like the governor of a lot of states, certifies the election and has a huge influence over what election laws are in place in the first place. And the Secretary of State in Georgia, as in many states, is the chief elections officer, the person who administers and oversees elections and is actually involved in the day-to-day running of them. And so these are two offices that have direct oversight and influence over how voting takes place, how voting is counted, and how a winner is determined in these races. Right. So having candidates who run on a message of 2020 being rigged or fraudulent means that suddenly your governor, your secretary of state, people with huge influence over the election would perhaps want to meddle in those elections.

Yeah, I mean, that would be the expectation if they're campaigning on a message of meddling in the election. And in Georgia, the candidates who campaigned on meddling lost by a wide margin in all of the races where they ran. So, Reid, I want to step back and really understand these Georgia races, and I want to focus specifically on the Georgia governor's race. So, where should we begin to understand that race? I mean, I think you have to begin sometime last year when Donald Trump had been angry with Governor Brian Kemp for allowing the election results to proceed that had Trump losing to Joe Biden by just under 12,000 votes in Georgia. Right. Trump famously calls Governor Kemp and asks him to essentially try to help him overturn those results in 2020.

Trump did everything he could to try to overturn the election results in Georgia, and frankly is still trying to overturn the election results in Georgia a year and a half later. And that had made Governor Kemp persona non grata to Donald Trump and to his most devoted followers. So Trump started calling David Perdue, a former senator who lost in 2020, to get him to run against Governor Kemp. He called him and called him over and over again, so much so that one friend of Senator Perdue, who I talked to, recalled being at a dinner with him where Perdue holds up his iPhone to show the call log of all the calls he'd had with Donald Trump trying to get him into the Senate race. And eventually that worked. So this becomes a kind of vendetta race where Trump wants anybody really, but in this case, David Perdue, to just take Kemp out. And so how does Perdue campaign against Brian Kemp?

David Perdue campaigns as sort of a pure version of Stop the Steal. Nobody has disproven any fraud here yet, and that's what we've got in this race. A lot of people know the truth in this state, and that's what this is all about. He begins his speeches. He begins the televised debates. First off, folks, let me be very clear tonight. The election in 2020 was rigged and stolen. By telling his audience that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen. That's the animating feature of why he's running.

I'm not trying to undo an election, but I'm trying to figure out what happened and make sure it never happens again. And frankly, it didn't work that well. It didn't bring him any grassroots energy. I want to say something personal for President Trump. And David Perdue was not very successful in raising money for himself. God bless you. We love you, Mr. President. His biggest donor was Donald Trump. David Perdue is a great leader and a wonderful guy.

He has my complete and total endorsement. Who directed a little more than $2.5 million backing David Perdue. David Perdue is going to win the general election big, and I mean very big. And by the end, David Perdue was out of money. He was not advertising on television, and he really wasn't doing his own events. He was showing up at events that other people had organized. And so it was not a very well-run or well-thought-out campaign from David Perdue, who really thought that being the stop-the-steal candidate in this race and having Donald Trump's support would be enough to win a Republican primary. It turned out it was not.

Right. Perdue, as you said, lost in a landslide. A 50-point landslide. A landslide so large, I think if you had told the political media world beforehand that it would be a 50-point landslide, far fewer of us would have trekked down to Georgia over the last few months to cover this race. But it wasn't the only surprising result on Tuesday night. Brad Raffensperger, the Secretary of State, who was facing a stop-the-steal election denier in Jody Heiss, a congressman who, like David Perdue, Trump had recruited into the race. He also defied expectations and won by, you know, almost a 20-point margin. It was a significant showing and a surprising showing for someone who was widely expected to wind up in a runoff with Jody Heiss and have six more weeks of debating

whether the 2020 election was legitimate. So, Reid, taken together, what do these two results in Georgia, this really important swing state in presidential elections, what does it tell us about the future of Stop the Steal, as Trump and his allies call it, as a political force in these midterms, it seems like it raises really big questions

about whether claims of election fraud, knowingly false claims of election fraud, are really a winning strategy in 2022. Michael, on the one hand, yes, this was Georgia voters rejecting two candidates who made stop the steal central to their political identities. to be solicitous both to Donald Trump and to his voters, frankly, because they know that, you know,

they're still running in Republican primaries and they will need those voters in the general election come November. Right. On Tuesday afternoon, I spent a couple hours in Tallapoosa, a town of about 3,000 people an hour west of Atlanta near the Alabama line. And the voters we talked to were overwhelmingly pro-Kemp, but they also, every single one of them expressed doubts about the

2020 election. They thought that Trump had been the real winner of the election, and yet they still voted for Brian Kemp. You know, the voters, as they often are in this country, are more complex than one issue. So perhaps this was not a rejection of Stop the Steal and false claims of election fraud. This was a rejection of David Perdue. It was overwhelmingly a rejection of David Perdue. And frankly, it was also a referendum on Governor Kemp, who remains widely popular among Republican voters. And the other thing to remember is that Kemp last year ushered through a suite of new restrictions on voting in Georgia that he and his allies have promoted as an effort to maintain what they call election integrity in the state.

Right. Your point being that Governor Kemp isn't necessarily a champion of voter access just because he rejects the most extreme version of the big lie about the 2020 election. That's right. You know, stop the steal isn't going anywhere in Republican politics. And for the evidence of that, all you have to do is look at Pennsylvania the week before, You know, Stop the Steal isn't going anywhere in Republican politics. And for the evidence of that, all you have to do is look at Pennsylvania the week before, where Republicans nominated probably the most Stop the Steal-y candidate in a major race in the country to be their nominee for governor. We'll be right back.

So Reid, you just said that the candidate falsely claiming election fraud prevailed in the Republican race for governor of Pennsylvania. So tell us about that race. So in Pennsylvania, there was a busload of Republicans running for governor. And the three sort of main characters in that race, one of them was Trump's U.S. attorney for Philadelphia, who Trump blamed for not sufficiently prosecuting his case to overturn the election in Pennsylvania. One of them was a former congressman who was on the slate of fake electors that Pennsylvania Republicans submitted to Congress to try to overturn the election. And the third one was a state senator named Doug Mastriano, who was so stop the steely that he spent several thousand dollars to charter buses from Pennsylvania to Washington on January 6th. And he has been seen in footage and photographs marching toward the Capitol on January 6th. He says he did not enter the Capitol,

and there's not any evidence yet that he did. But Mastriano is, among statewide candidates this year, probably the most aggressively stopped the steal of anyone in the country. And Reid, how does that figure into his campaign for governor? Look, Governor Wolf didn't look into any allegations and blew them off. Secretary of State Bookvar blew off all the allegations and shenanigans. Our attorney general, you know, declared a winner before one vote was counted.

And so the whole process has been corrupted. So Mastriano is among the Republicans who is pushing an idea that you could decertify the results of the 2020 election, which is something that's constitutionally impossible. Even still, this late into the Biden presidency. Even this late into the Biden presidency. So we're going to rise up and say, well, constitutionally, we have the final say on who the electors are. You certified an election that can't be certified because you didn't look into the allegations of cheating. This is an idea that's taken root in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and Arizona. There are dozens of state legislators who have signed a petition to try to decertify the election.

And Mastriano is a subscriber to this theory that it could still be done. As governor, I get to decertify any or all machines in the state. And obviously I have my eyes on several counties that have machines that I believe are compromised. He's talked about changing voting laws in Pennsylvania to essentially limit the ability to vote absentee or early. But the most important thing is I get to appoint the secretary of state and that secretary of state is going to clean up the election logs. We're going to reset.

In Pennsylvania, the governor is particularly powerful when it comes to election administration because the state does not have an independently elected secretary of state. The chief elections administrator for Pennsylvania is appointed by the governor. That individual has agreed to be my secretary of state. I'm going to have, of course, a team around that individual that that's really good on voting reform. And Mastriano has said that he would appoint someone who is of like mind of him to run these elections in the state. So this is quite significant and extreme because Mastriano is not just subscribing to some very unorthodox views about how to overturn the 2020 election. how to overturn the 2020 election, he's in a unique position as governor and the person who would appoint the Secretary of State who oversees elections to actually potentially make that kind of thing happen. Yeah, I mean, you can certainly make the argument that the governor of Pennsylvania has more power and authority over how elections run than any governor in the country. And Mastriano has clearly articulated views that if he were to win election in November,

it would create a very new type of situation in Pennsylvania heading into the 2024 presidential campaign, both in what sort of laws he would try to usher through the Pennsylvania legislature and what type of laws he would try to usher through the Pennsylvania legislature, and what type of administration of elections would take place under his appointee. And how well does that message land in Pennsylvania during this campaign? Well, the voters seem to like Mastriano. He took a big lead in all the polling in the final weeks. The Republican Party establishment hated him. They became very worried that he would win the primary and lose the general election.

That didn't stop President Trump from endorsing him a couple days before the primary. Trump had stayed out of the race, but once it was clear that Mastriano was going to prevail, Trump came in with an endorsement a couple days before the primary. And the other person who was boosting Mastriano was his Democratic opponent in the general election, Attorney General Josh Shapiro. Wait, explain that. Because Shapiro viewed Mastriano as the weakest possible general election opponent for him. And frankly, Shapiro spent more on ads boosting Mastriano in the Republican primary than Mastriano did. Wow. So interestingly, both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party in Pennsylvania think that Mastriano's message is a losing one when it comes to the general election. That's right. But the voters don't really care. The Republican

primary voters picked Mastriano by a pretty healthy margin in the Pennsylvania primary, and all the Republicans in Pennsylvania who had spent all this time howling about how he was unelectable have quickly rallied behind him. And presumably have rallied around his false claims of election fraud in 2020. Well, they certainly aren't disavowing it now. Mm-hmm. And so the message here in Pennsylvania is that Republican voters want their next governor to be somebody who will defy the Republican Party's wishes

and perpetuate the big lie about the 2020 election and do something about it. So that seems like a very clear victory for Donald Trump and for his claims of election fraud and his efforts to put them at the center of the midterms. Right, and that's why you can't just look at Georgia and think that Stop the Steal is inviolable moving forward or is losing steam.

It's not losing steam. On the same night that Brian Kemp won in Georgia, in Texas, the Attorney General Ken Paxton, who was one of the chief propagators of Stop the Steal in 2020, who led Arizona, where there are stop the steal candidates on the ballot, and they are expected to do very well. And so we're going to see, as these next months play out, more stop the steal candidates. We're going to see Donald Trump getting himself involved in some of these races, and we're going to see the potency of this argument. And I think we'll see it's stronger in some of these other states than we saw in Georgia. Right. But Reid, there seems to be a relatively high level of confidence among Democrats that

these candidates claiming election fraud will not fare well in the general election races for governor around the country, that they will be seen as extreme. That's clearly what Democrats in Pennsylvania are thinking when it comes to Mastriano. They want him to be the Republican nominee because they don't think he's going to win. But is that the right approach for Democrats in these races? I mean, we'll see. But here's the thing. Democracy is now on the ballot in Pennsylvania and will be in a bunch of these other battleground states where stop the steal candidates are expected to be nominated by the Republican Party. They might say it to donors, they might say it to reporters, but when you see the advertisements they're putting on the air, when you see what they're saying to voters directly, it's not part of their core message. see as way out of step with voters in the same way that Democrats in early 2016 were licking their lips to run against Donald Trump because they figured he'd be easy to beat in the general election. Right. And he wasn't. And he wasn't. The stakes in these governor's races, particularly in

the presidential battleground states that we all know about, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, the stakes are very high because it will only take a couple of governors refusing to certify the results of an election that went the way they didn't want it to, to muck up the system in the 2024 presidential race. And that's a place that this country has never really been in before. Right. You know, the 2020 election was unprecedented in a lot of ways. But what we learned in the end was that the system worked.

If you put in Republican candidates who are not committed to the system working, then we don't know what's going to happen. And it's a whole different universe. then we don't know what's going to happen and it's a whole different universe over it thank you very much thank you for having me Michael we'll be right back Here's what else you need to know today. To begin with, let me point out the obvious.

Evil swept across Uvalde yesterday. During a news conference on Wednesday, the governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, described in chilling detail the sequence of events that led to the massacre of 21 people, including 19 children, at an elementary school in the city of Uvalde. The first thing that happened was that the gunman shot his grandmother in the face.

She then contacted police. After critically injuring his grandmother inside the house where they both lived, the 18-year-old gunman fled in her pickup truck. He drove about two miles before crashing the truck into a cement barrier outside the school. There, the suspect was confronted by a school security officer who fired no shots and allowed the suspect to gain access to the school. The gunman then entered a back door and went down

two short hallways and then into a classroom on the left-hand side. Armed with a high-powered AR-15 rifle, the gunman entered a fourth-grade classroom where he shot students and teachers. As police converged on the school, the suspect barricaded himself in the classroom for about an hour before he was killed by a border patrol officer. The ability of an 18-year-old to buy a long gun has been in place in the state of Texas for more than 60 years. has been in place in the state of Texas for more than 60 years. Pressed by reporters about the role of the state's gun laws in the massacre,

Governor Abbott said that mental health, not gun laws, were the problem. Why is it that for the majority of those 60 years, we did not have school shootings? And why is it that we do now? One thing that has substantially changed is the status of mental health in our communities. At one point during the news conference, Excuse me. Excuse me. Excuse me. Abbott was confronted by his Democratic rival in this fall's race for governor, former Congressman Beto O'Rourke, who approached the stage and accused Abbott

of failing to take simple steps that O'Rourke said could prevent such bloodshed. The next shooting is right now, and you are doing nothing. No, he needs to get his ass out of here. This isn't the place to talk this over. This is totally predictable. Today's episode was produced by Eric Krupke, Mujsadi, and Nina Feldman, with help from Claire Tennesketter. It was edited by Paige Cowett, with help from Rachel Quester, contains original music by Marian Lozano and Rowan Nemisto, and was engineered by Chris Wood.

Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.