Swing-state Republican leaders ramped up voter denial in 2020 — and may do so again

With the 2024 election just weeks away, former President Donald Trump continues to spread false claims of voter fraud in 2020. He also insists, without evidence, that the same thing could happen this year.

In a post on Truth Social on September 7, 2024, Trump, the Republican presidential candidate, repeated the claims he has made over the past four years.

“I know better than most the rampant fraud and fraud attempted by Democrats in the 2020 presidential election. It was a disgrace to our nation! That is why the 2024 election, in which voting has just begun, will be under the strictest professional scrutiny and IF I WIN, those who cheated will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, including long-term prison sentences. This depravity of the Justice will not happen again.”

Trump’s rhetoric bears the hallmarks of the #StopTheSteal movement of 2020: preemptively challenging votes before they are cast, targeting the most contested places, and portraying voting denial as a patriotic duty in response to a grave injustice.

As scholars of political communications, we mapped election fraud allegations as they spread across the campaign trail in 2020, centered on the violence at the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021. We did this to better understand how a myth has become entrenched in thousands of people across the country, encouraging them to take ever more extreme measures.

Our analysis, published in Politics & Society, revealed patterns that are critical to understanding the upcoming 2024 elections.

These patterns showed that the seeds of voter denial were sown early, with spikes in the spring elections as early as April 2020. Local allegations were spread by politicians and media figures across the country, and small allegations of wrongdoing escalated into larger calls for dramatic action. We believe there is a risk of a repeat.

Trump’s comments make it clear that he and his campaign are poised to repeat the allegations of wrongdoing they spread in 2020 and long after.

Will the local Republican Party serve as their mouthpiece again?

Local allegations of fraud

There has been significant debate in recent years about whether and how to hold Trump, his advisers, and the people who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, accountable for their actions.

The organizational infrastructure that supported the #StopTheSteal movement is largely intact. Those who have amplified allegations of electoral fraud remain at the top of national and local parties. And there has even been a concerted effort to put allies of that movement in charge of election administration in key places.

This movement wasn’t just built from the top down at the White House or Mar-a-Lago. We discovered that hundreds of local political party organizations in the county amplified claims that cast doubt on the 2020 election.

According to our analysis of the Facebook behavior of 410 Republican county parties from January 2020 to January 2021, these parties and their members questioned the legitimacy of the election in nearly 5,000 posts to an audience of more than half a million followers. These posts began in the spring of 2020, with a sharp increase in the weeks immediately before and after Election Day.

Some posts were tepid, questioning the existence of “weird numbers” in Michigan or “irregularities” in Wisconsin. Others were more extreme, calling on their followers to “fight” to “defend the Constitution” or warning that “civil war is imminent.” Facebook and its conservative bias, which encourages greater engagement with right-wing content, make it a crucial vehicle for the spread of such conspiracy theories.

At times, local GOP organizations acted as mouthpieces for Trump and his allies, repeating their claims of fraud to local audiences. However, these organizations often created their own content, which gave this national campaign a sense of local urgency.

For example, the Cobb County Republican Party in Georgia amplified false claims from a so-called local “whistleblower” that Cobb County ballots had been “shredded.”

This claim became part of the nationwide story of voter fraud. In fact, Trump referenced these claims of ballot destruction in his infamous phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger when Trump pressured him to “find 11,780 votes.”

Other false claims of voter fraud first emerged at the local level but were also amplified at the national level. The false claims included the alleged “lost” flash drive in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the alleged “17,000 duplicate votes” in Maricopa County, Arizona, and the alleged “20,000 dead people” voting in Pennsylvania.

Many of these false claims became part of a national narrative about voter fraud. They illustrate the crucial role that local allegations of fraud, amplified by local party leaders, played in the nationwide fight to overturn the 2020 election.

Not only did these local party leaders play a role in crafting the election fraud story, they also assembled and transported some of the January 6th foot soldiers. Only a fraction of the thousands of people who heard Trump’s speech on the Ellipse marched to the Capitol; an even smaller group broke through its walls. But among the more than 1,200 people charged with crimes at the Capitol that day were several local party officials.

We argue that the rhetoric we saw used and reinforced by local parties helped give permission for this action. County party leaders in North Carolina urged their supporters to do “something historic” and join “Trump’s army… on the march to DC.” Other county parties chartered buses or sponsored caravans to transport their supporters to the National Mall that day.

From rhetoric to action

In recent years, the president’s political map has become more predictable. Before the presidential election begins, candidates and parties know which states, counties and even districts are likely to be the most competitive and consequential.

This predictability provides a useful guide for those who would question the legitimacy of an election. In 2020, claims of voter fraud from Trump and his supporters followed the political map where the effort was most likely to tip the scales. Their efforts focused on counties with growing Trump support in states where Trump narrowly lost, such as Georgia and Wisconsin.

The #StopTheSteal movement has had four years to investigate and even attempt to influence and gain control of electoral processes in the most politically significant places. It appears that Trump and his allies are preparing for a similar strategy in 2024, putting state and county elections and political institutions once again in the national spotlight.

But 2024 is not 2020. Americans can expect this and work to counter the same escalation of fraud allegations that has already begun and could lead to violence against political institutions and a lack of confidence in the election outcome.

There are warning signs to watch out for in the weeks leading up to the election.

Are local organizations repeating national politicians’ accusations of fraud? Do they target specific jurisdictions before even voting? And are they trying to convince their supporters that it is their moral and civic duty to contest the election? Are they directed against election workers who are in charge of counting votes?

These are the factors that can turn heated political rhetoric into something more threatening.