The NPR Politics Podcast - American Democratic Norms Continue To Falter As Some Republicans Refuse To Concede

Episode Date: July 5, 2022

Republican primary candidates who lost by substantial margins are refusing to concede their races — echoing Donald Trump's baseless claims of voter fraud and potentially setting up lucrative post-election fundraising schemes.This episode: congressional correspondent Kelsey Snell, Georgia Public Broadcasting reporter Stephen Fowler, and senior political editor and correspondent Domenico Montanaro.Support the show and unlock sponsor-free listening with a subscription to The NPR Politics Podcast Plus. Learn more at plus.npr.org/politics Connect:Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Find and support your local public radio station.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, this is Liz from Queensland, Australia, and I'm about to board the plane to finally see my family after almost three years. This podcast was recorded at 2.07pm on Tuesday, July 5th. Things may have changed by the time you hear it, but I will finally give my family a great big hug. Okay, here's the show. Well, I hope it was a safe but long flight. That's very exciting. Three years is a long time. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Kelsey Snell. I cover Congress. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. Elections in strong democracies share some central tenets, chief among them that candidates will concede elections that they clearly lost. We respect the majesty of the democratic system.

I just called Governor Clinton over in Little Rock. I say to President-elect Bush that what remains of partisan rancor must now be put aside. And may God bless his stewardship of this country. A little while ago, I had the honor of calling Senator Barack Obama to congratulate him. Please. To congratulate him

on being elected the next president of the country that we both love. Last night, I congratulated Donald Trump and offered to work with him on behalf of our country. I hope that he will be a successful president for all Americans.

But that norm and that tradition has begun to fray in the United States. We're not yet two years past the 2020 presidential election, but former President Donald Trump is still lying about the results and pushing the lie to his supporters. The election was rigged and stolen, and now our country is being systematically destroyed. Elections, as you know, have consequences. I ran twice. I won twice. Refusing to concede is now a trend with candidates in smaller races around the country. Our friend Stephen Fowler of Georgia Public Broadcasting has been reporting on that. Hi, Stephen. Hey there.

So tell me about some of the races you've been tracking. How widespread a problem is this? Well, let's start here in Georgia. We had a pretty decisive Republican governor primary. There was Candace Taylor, this fringe far right figure who only got 3.4 percent of the vote she hasn't conceded she's put out videos saying she hasn't conceded and is currently working to try to tell her supporters that if they fill out enough affidavits they will prove that she won the election and it'll be overturned and it's not just here in ge. In Colorado, an election clerk there who has been indicted on multiple counts of election

tampering came in third in that primary and said there was probably cheating and fraud there. In South Carolina, some Republican challengers that challenged incumbents for the governor and attorney general tried to plead their case to party officials that there was fraud. That got denied. And in Nevada, there was a candidate who said there was no way that he lost and is currently paying about $200,000 to have the votes recounted there, even though he lost by about 11%. So some of these statistics you're talking about, some of these margins of victory or loss for these people have been like, you said 3.4%.

That's not a huge amount of the vote, but they are still contesting their win? Absolutely. I mean, it's really hard to believe that 3% is greater than 77%, but here we are. And it's not something that's limited to last place finishers or second place finishers. It's just something we're seeing across the board in these Republican primaries in this 2022 midterm election after the 2020 race where we still have former President Donald Trump not conceding that he lost. You know, Domenico, you look at races across the country all day long, basically, and I'm wondering if this is something that you are seeing as a big, broad trend. Well, I think Stephen there is at the tip of the spear when it comes to some of these races. You know, this is not typical generally, but it's certainly a growing trend.

You know, what a lot of these folks are doing is really for show. You know, I mean, they're not really officially contesting their elections, because there are mechanisms for that within the states. What they're doing is, you know, being able to raise their name identification in case they want to run again, continue to try to build on a following, maybe even, you know, we say with presidential candidates, try to get contracts to work at other places because people start to know them. And perhaps most importantly, raise money. And we saw that with former President Trump, this attempt to raise all this money, quarter billion dollars, the January 6th committee says, for he was, a legal defense fund, and most of that money, if not all that money, didn't go to that fund, but to organizations with links to Trump and to allies of his.

So you hit on kind of some of the incentives there for why candidates would do this, but there is a flip side of that, right? Is that they're sowing doubt and that they are, you know, there are people who support them who are believing the position that they didn't lose. It's a huge problem for democracy. I mean, the fact that this is a country that is built on the essentially the peaceful transfer of power. And in that, you know, waterfall of sound that we heard earlier, of all of those clips of people, I was gonna say someone was left out. And that was former President Trump, who's really spurred on this trend. And I think it's really difficult to see

where this winds up going. Because we have already had violence, for example, that was spurred on by election lies by a lack of concession, because of January 6. And Domenico, I also spent a lot of time covering what local elections officials do, how they handle a lot of these responses and handle a lot of these claims. And in Georgia and other states, we've seen elections officials quit

because people have harassed them and say that they've helped cheat or helped their candidate lose. And we've seen, even this week here in Georgia, we've got a county that's voluntarily doing a count of all the ballots, even though it won't change the results, it's past the deadline, because there's just this huge distrust in the voting equipment and the voting procedures because these candidates who never had a shot are telling their supporters that the only way they lost is because there's fraud.

So it's not just about raising money, even though that's a big part of it. It's not just about the notoriety and intention. It's just grinding down the gears of our democracy at the most basic local level. Domenico, Stephen, we are hearing a lot about Republican primaries where this election denial is happening. Is there any similar trend for Democrats? Well, you don't have to look very far. Here in Georgia, in the 2018 governor's race, Democrat Stacey Abrams lost by about 55,000 votes to Brian Kemp, who was then the Secretary of State. There were a lot of accusations of problems with voting and voting equipment and election laws. And Stacey Abrams gave a speech where she said, you know, I will not concede

because she said conceding was not in the cards, even though she acknowledged she would not be the governor. So it's important to note that this is not quite the same thing. Stacey Abrams is not running around claiming that she's the governor of Georgia. She's not fundraising saying that she's going to remove Brian Kemp from office

and be installed the rightful governor. There were a lot of different process questions grounded in reality about elections. And so, yes, this is not just a Republican Party thing, but we're talking about apples and denial oranges here. Yeah, and Abrams has said in defending that, that she acknowledged that Brian Kemp is the governor and wished him well at the end of her speech, but she didn't concede, right? And she sort of pushed on the idea that Kemp was overseeing a

system where there was, in her words, voter suppression. And she, you know, dedicated herself to that. Nationally, you know, a lot of conservatives talk about Hillary Clinton saying that former President Trump was illegitimate, was an illegitimate president. And, you know, while there's some legitimacy to saying that, you know, maybe she had a little bit of sore loserdom, she won 3 million more votes than Trump in the popular vote. And, you know, she lost by way of the electoral college. And it's also different because she did concede to Trump. She said, quote, this is not the outcome we wanted or worked so hard for. I'm sorry, we didn't win this election, right? I mean, it doesn't get much clearer than that. And the reason for that, she said, was because of the peaceful transfer of power. She even said, we owe him, Trump, an open mind and a chance to lead our constitutional democracy enshrines the peaceful transfer of power. We don't just respect that we cherish it whole lot different than this month's year plus long effort by Trump lying about the election.

All right, we need to take a quick break, but we're going to come back to this conversation in just a second. And we're back. And Stephen, this is all coming up in Republican primaries, making these candidates from a single party running against one another. Do you have any indication of how these candidates are approaching the upcoming general election matchups where they'll be facing people with party affiliations and values that are substantially different than their own? Or are these races where the primaries essentially decide who will be elected based on the political balance in the area?

Well, we're seeing a lot of different things at play here, Kelsey. I mean, at first, it's hard to make the case that there's some sort of fraud and that Democrats are perpetuating fraud in a Republican primary, especially in some states and places where it's a closed primary, meaning you have to be a registered Republican to vote. So these are Republican voters choosing not to vote for Republican candidates that are pushing conspiracy theories about the election. But there are some races, especially for key races like secretary of state and governor and things, where we've seen election deniers win their primaries. lot higher in these general elections because you have candidates in states like Pennsylvania and other places that do have positions of power if they win that could help alter the election

landscape and election laws and rules and procedures. And so what we've seen so far is that those messages haven't really changed. These candidates were elected on the premise of making misleading claims about the elections, and that's their strategy to move forward in the general election. But it remains to be seen if the majority of voters in the state who might not fall neatly into Republican or Democratic labels feel that same type of way about elections. I mean, Georgia is an outlier for many reasons, but we did have just overwhelming, resounding defeats for candidates that pushed election fraud, conspiracies, and other things about 2020. But the rest of the country, we'll just have to see. You know, Domenico, I don't think it's overly dramatic to say that this is an extremely troubling trend to see in any democracy. What are some of the ripple effects that you're watching?

Well, I mean, whether or not this goes up the ballot even further, and, you know, as Stephen mentioned, wind up having these local elections officials who take so much heat, and they had been, you know, for so long been seen as nonpartisan actors who are just trying to do the jobs of grinding the gears of democracy. And if, you know, Republicans and conservatives or people who believe these conspiracies wind up, you know, pushing out those folks, who do they put in place in return to make this system work? And how will that work? I mean, we're just through the looking glass here if that winds up happening. I mean, speaking of going up the ballot, there was some news today, Stephen, there in Georgia, from a grand jury out of Atlanta. Can you tell us what's going on?

Right. So while we have this conversation about 2022 midterms and people pushing false claims about the election and things like that, we have a special grand jury here in Fulton County, where Atlanta is located, that's been investigating former President Trump and his circle and their efforts to overturn the 2020 election. And literally minutes before we said hello, there were a bunch of subpoenas that came down seeking more information about different elements of potential crimes committed in Georgia. And these are notable.

U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham is one because he had calls with Georgia's secretary of state about absentee ballots. Rudy Giuliani, the former president's counsel who testified in front of lawmakers and made a bunch of fantastical claims, and other lawyers that had roles in Georgia and other states trying to mess with the election. So we're moving into a new phase here where we could potentially see penalties for pushing these false claims. And it kind of mirrors the penalties at the ballot box where voters are choosing not to

support these candidates. All right, we're going to talk more about election denial with Miles Parks tomorrow. He's been tracking denial influencers who have taken the show on the road. So make sure to listen for that. In the meantime, Stephen Fowler of Georgia Public Broadcasting, thank you. Always a pleasure. I'm Kelsey Snell. I cover Congress. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent.

And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.