Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chairman Sean Patrick Maloney (D-NY) says that Democrats and Republicans do not share equal blame for election denialism.
He’s right. The Democratic Party has been much worse over the decades about throwing tantrums after election losses.
When asked about Hillary Clinton’s comments that “right-wing extremists already have a plan to literally steal the next presidential election,” Maloney dodged and claimed he didn’t see them. (Yeah, right.) He then said we shouldn’t “pretend for a second that both sides have the same amount of accountability for the loss of confidence in our elections. He added that Democrats “always have, always will” accept the results of elections.
POLL WORKERS BRACE FOR CONFLICT AS BOTH PARTIES PREPARE FOR POST-ELECTION LEGAL FIGHTS
Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney says Democrats “always have, always will” accept election results. pic.twitter.com/ZbgukTMNbq
— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) October 30, 2022
Except that they haven’t and they don’t.
The Democratic Party’s election denialism precedes former President Donald Trump’s conspiracy theories by two decades. Twenty years before Trump claimed the 2020 election was stolen from him, prominent Democrats claimed, baselessly, that the 2000 presidential election was stolen from Al Gore. Sixteen years before Trump claimed that voting machines were to blame for his loss, Democrats claimed that voting machines were responsible for John Kerry’s loss in Ohio in the 2004 presidential election.
Democrats objected to the certification of electoral votes in 2000 and 2004, and again objected to certification after Trump won in 2016 — four years before Republicans did the same after Joe Biden’s victory. To top it all off, several major Democratic Party figures (including prominent senators) claimed that the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial election was stolen from Stacey Abrams, who lost decisively by 55,000 votes. Abrams herself has, to this day, refused to concede that she lost — she has only conceded that her opponent became governor, which is not the same thing. Yet now she is running again for the same job, and she enjoys the full support of the Democratic Party.
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On top of that, Democrats have repeatedly shown they want to tear down all the democratic norms of our government that are placing checks or balances against their authority. Democratic legislators have advocated for packing the Supreme Court to get the decisions they want, packing the Senate by making the city of Washington D.C. a state, and abolishing the Electoral College. Even Joe Biden himself attempted to delegitimize the possibility that he could lose fairly in 2020, and now he is delegitimizing the 2022 outcome in advance by suggesting that Democrats cannot lose if the election is fair.
What Trump and some Republicans did in the aftermath of his 2020 election loss was despicable, of course. But it followed 20 years and at least four election cycles worth of Democratic Party precedent. Democrats have not reckoned with their own election denialism or their impulse to burn down the system every time they lose. Maloney’s revised history suggests they never will.
