What Went Down At The California Recall Election: Live Results

This question is fascinating to me because it’s about people’s ability to believe two contradictory ideas at once — that the election is rigged and that their participation matters. Accepting that an election is rigged should, logically, prompt people to tune out. But, of course, logic is not what drives politics, and repeating outrageous (if untrue) claims about election fraud probably does a pretty good job of stoking people’s outrage and — ironically — keeping them engaged that way.

Galen, Republicans will have more faith in the election results if they win. But I don’t think that’ll tell us whether they’ll be more confident going forward in cases when they lose. Based on the 2020 result, Republicans were far more confident in results when Trump won their state than when he didn’t. I am suspicious we’ll see more of the same going forward because of the consistent tendency to claim there’s fraud.

I agree with Kaleigh here. Even if Republicans win the House and Senate, they will have lost up to 217 individual House seats and up to a dozen Senate seats, many of which are less Democratic than the state of California.

And don’t forget the legislative agenda element. If Republicans retake control of Congress and some of the various states, there will be immense pressure from their base to focus on election integrity and these false claims of fraud. That alone will keep the issue alive for Republican voters.