California recall vote shows Trump’s big lie is now Republican
It was a pre-emptive strike against truth by some of the biggest names on the American right wing.
Former president Donald Trump warned that the ballot would be “rigged”. The Republican candidate Larry Elder predicted “shenanigans”. The conservative media star Tomi Lahren suggested that “voter fraud” was inevitable.
The attempt to sow distrust in California’s recall effort began well before the Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, scored a crushing victory on Tuesday, thwarting Elder and other Republicans who hoped to replace him.
The barrage of mendacious claims echoed Trump’s “big lie” of a stolen presidential election and were equally baseless. But, crucially, they also demonstrated that undermining faith in election integrity has become normalized as a strategy for many Republicans facing defeat at the ballot box.
“We saw it in the November election; we saw it in the January 6th insurrection,” Sean Clegg, a Newsom aide, told reporters this week. “We do not have a Democratic and Republican party in this country. We have a democratic party and an anti-democratic party.”
He added: “They’re trying to throw battery acid on our constitution, on our electoral norms, and it’s a preview of coming attractions. We’re going to see the same thing in 2022 and the same thing in 2024. And unfortunately, it’s become the Trump playbook and they’re going to it. And they’re going back to it.”
Although Democrats outnumber Republicans nearly two-to-one in California, party leaders had feared that Newsom could be vulnerable to a recall over his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, including mask and vaccine mandates.
Talk radio host Elder was the leading contender among 46 on the replacement ballot – which also included the reality TV star and former Olympian Caitlyn Jenner – and would almost certainly have become governor had the recall succeeded.
But as opinion polls showed Newsom in a commanding position, Republicans pushed the circular argument that they could only lose if the vote was rigged. Much of the Republican scaremongering focused on the wide use of mail-in ballots – even though an overwhelming majority of Californians cast ballots by mail before the pandemic without irregularities.
Elder said he believed “there might very well be shenanigans, as there were in the 2020 election”. A website affiliated with his campaign carried a link to a “Stop CA Fraud” site where people could report suspicious voting activity or sign a petition demanding a special legislative session to investigate. Some of the language was identical to a petition circulated to help Trump’s effort to overturn last year’s presidential election.
Trump himself weighed in during the closing days of the campaign, including a statement that asked rhetorically: “Does anybody really believe the California Recall Election isn’t rigged?”
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