MEMO: Don’t Take the Bait: False Election Narratives to Expect From MAGA Republicans
MAGA Republicans have spent the last several years casting doubt on our electoral systems and preparing to claim that the election was ‘rigged’ if President Trump does not win the electoral college – if a primer on that is helpful, look no further.
The tl;dr: MAGA Republicans have laid the legislative and messaging groundwork to attack the integrity of the election if they don’t like the results. This effort is fueled by a “secretive billionaire network” – that’s how a Wall Street Journal headline described it – which has given over $140 million to almost 50 groups focused on “election integrity.”
MAGA Republicans will cry foul and generate false claims at every opportunity, whether it’s changes in early vote behavior, polling errors, or weirdly skewed prediction markets. If you are working to make sure every vote counts and Congress certifies the election results, it’s critical that you are prepared to rebut the lies.
CLAIMS vs REALITY:
Here are the ways we expect MAGA Republicans to cry foul – your job is to push back hard because we can’t take the bait.
For months, MAGA Republicans have been previewing that they will contest any election result that is not a Republican victory. Their strategy will certainly include a legal challenge – like the one now-Speaker Johnson led in 2020 – and may include a massive grassroots mobilization, the likes of which have not been seen since January 6th, 2021.
It will also include an aggressive public relations strategy that draws together the fact pattern they have manufactured since 2020. Three of the primary arguments we should expect to see MAGA Republicans draw on are laid out below:
CLAIM: The polling averages and betting markets showed Trump in a strong position – something must have happened.
REALITY: There are several reasons why we should anticipate that polls will be less reliable than usual, and polling averages in particular have experienced intentional partisan interference in the closing weeks of the 2024 election.
THE BOTTOM LINE: Polls are a snapshot in time based on assumptions about who will make up the electorate, and betting markets are highly vulnerable to manipulation. Pollsters and gamblers don’t decide elections, voters do – and we need to make sure every vote counts.
- The shape of the electorate in 2024 is hard to predict for a number of reasons, including a rapidly changing electorate (about a quarter of voters in 2020 had not voted in 2016, according to estimates by the Pew Research Center) and, of course, the obvious issue that the most recent presidential election results came during the height of the pandemic.
- In consecutive elections, pollsters have underestimated Trump’s support, missing by 4 points nationally in 2020, which has led pollsters to make often significant changes to their methodology. “There’s a real possibility that having Trump on the ballot makes it hard to poll for whatever reason,” said Berwood Yost, director of the Franklin & Marshall College Poll of Pennsylvania. “But the other possibility is that we’ve made all these adjustments to correct the error. And perhaps we’ve overcorrected,” he added. “I don’t know which it is.” No one does, and we should be clear-eyed about this.
- There has been a noticeable lack of quality state-level polls, meaning polling averages are more susceptible to large swings and variance from reality. This has been weaponized by partisan actors who have intentionally dumped low-quality conservative polls into the polling averages to shift the averages toward Republicans.
- Particularly with a glut of low quality polls, identifying specific demographic shifts is increasingly unreliable. A non-partisan analysis of 2024 U.S. election polls shows that “there is a growing realization among survey researchers that weighting a poll on just a few variables like age, race and gender is insufficient for getting accurate results. Some groups of people – such as older adults and college graduates – are more likely to take surveys, which can lead to errors that are too sizable for a simple three- or four-variable adjustment to work well.”
- Here’s what the NYT reported on the peril of looking to both polling averages and betting markets as any indicator of reality: “some argue that the real purpose of partisan polls, along with other expectation-setting metrics such as political betting markets, is directed at a different goal entirely: building a narrative of unstoppable momentum for Mr. Trump.”
- And as for trusting the political betting markets? Even “[Nate] Silver, who is a consultant to one of the leading prediction markets, Polymarket, says he wouldn’t pay much attention to the betting markets data right now, as they simply may not be very accurate at this moment in the election cycle.”
CLAIM: This election was rife with voter fraud, which we would have stopped if Democrats had joined with us in our legislative agenda.
REALITY: The Republican legislative agenda wasn’t designed to protect our elections, it was designed to lay the groundwork for baseless accusations that are a cynical attempt to stop Americans from picking their own leaders. They were never serious bills and they were never rooted in facts. In many instances, the Republican legislative agenda is designed to make it harder for Americans to vote, while ignoring requests for help from election officials.
THE BOTTOM LINE: The most important thing in our elections is that Americans get to pick their leaders and hold them accountable through elections. We need to protect our sacred right to vote by protecting our elections and ensuring every vote counts.
- The SAVE Act is the centerpiece of the Republican election agenda, and its core promise was to stop non-citizens from voting en masse in American elections. The only problem? It’s already illegal for non-citizens to vote in elections and it almost never happens. The SAVE Act exists entirely for the purpose of undermining faith in our election and fear mongering.
- Another Republican bill, the ACE Act, was widely panned by local election officials because it imposed significant new requirements without giving them what they actually need to administer our elections: the funding to effectively conduct elections.
- And while Republicans in Congress refuse to properly fund our elections, their agenda is designed to attack third-party and non-profit groups that do provide funding to local election officials to ensure our elections run smoothly.
- In fact, “An Associated Press review of every potential case of voter fraud in the six battleground states disputed by former President Donald Trump has found fewer than 475 — a number that would have made no difference in the 2020 presidential election.”
- And, while voter fraud is extremely rare, there was a massive case of election fraud committed as recently as 2018, when the Republican campaign for Congress in North Carolina’s 9th district intentionally targeted Black voters during GOTV and collected, tampered with, and even threw out their ballots. That investigation resulted in the State Board of Election throwing out the results and ordering a special election – what the Washington Post reported as “the first recorded instance of a federal election being thrown out over fraud.” That candidate – Mark Harris – is now once again the Republican nominee running for Congress.
CLAIM: Trump was leading on Election Day, but Democrats fabricated votes in the days following to steal the election.
REALITY: Patterns in how votes come in are not a sign of any malfeasance, in fact they are a highly predictable result of the way each state administers elections differently and when different types of ballots cast are counted and reported.
THE BOTTOM LINE: It is more important to be accurate than fast, so that we can make sure every vote counts – and that means following the unique vote counting process in each and every state.
- While early voting in recent elections has been extremely polarized (reminder: then President Trump told his supporters NOT to vote early) – with Democrats tending to vote early and Republicans tending to vote on Election Day – we are now seeing depolarization of actual voting methods with more Republicans voting early.
- Early voting data in 2024 bears this out – showing stronger than normal Republican use of early voting. But the data in at least one swing state also signals that “the returned Republican ballots in Pennsylvania largely come from voters who cast a ballot in 2020, a sign that the early vote isn’t bringing new voters to the polls so much as cannibalizing the election day vote.”
- The same is true in North Carolina, according to political scientist, Dr. Michael Bitzer.
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About House Accountability War Room
House Accountability War Room is an independent rapid response operation. The war room will leverage research, deploy messaging and engage partners to hold House leadership accountable as the caucus moves to take away core freedoms, distort the truth, and put the profits of corporations above the wellbeing of working families.