Republicans are beginning to shift their 2020 presidential election focus away from directly contesting the results toward reforming and reinforcing election laws for the future, days after the Electoral College cast a majority of its votes for Democrat Joe Biden as president-elect.
President Trump has continued to contest the results in several closely fought battleground states and has yet to concede the presidential race, alleging voter fraud swung the result against him.
“This hearing should not be controversial,” Sen. Ron Johnson, a Wisconsin Republican, said in a Wednesday Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee meeting that featured testimony about alleged voting irregularities. “A large percentage of the American public does not believe the November election results are legitimate. This is not a sustainable state of affairs in our democratic republic.”
Johnson had already told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel the day before, “I haven’t seen anything that would convince me that the results, the overall national result, would be overturned.” He also indicated that he would not block the congressional certification of the electoral vote in January, paving the way for Biden to take office later that month.
“The election, in many ways, was stolen, and the only way it will be fixed is by in the future reinforcing the laws,” said Sen. Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican, speaking at the same hearing. He emphasized lax enforcement of absentee ballot requirements, outdated voter rolls, and reports of dead people voting.
Courts have mostly tossed lawsuits filed by the Trump campaign and its allies alleging widespread irregularities. The Justice Department, under the leadership of soon-to-be-former Attorney General William Barr, has said it has not uncovered fraud sufficient to alter the outcome of the election.
But many Republicans do not like the ballot harvesting that took place in a number of states, as an unprecedented number of people voted by mail due to the pandemic. They are also concerned that COVID-19 protocols were used to limit the access of GOP poll workers and skirt laws setting deadlines for absentee ballots to be received, among other issues. They would like to raise these concerns, in some cases without claiming they necessarily decided the election, while acknowledging many of their voters agree with Trump on this topic.
“How quickly or to what degree a serious election reform push happens is directly correlated to how loudly and often President Trump stays on this rigged election topic after Jan. 20,” said Nicholas Everhart, a Republican strategist. “While President Trump has tapped into base Republicans’ institutional mistrust and openness to believing we’re all part of a giant conspiracy, the truth is, if he stops beating that drum, the more it’s going to dissipate and grow dormant.”
The shift in focus could prove too subtle or too clever by half. Democrats still pilloried Johnson’s hearing on 2020 voting. “Whether intended or not, this hearing gives a platform to conspiracy theories and lies,” said Sen. Gary Peters, the Michigan Democrat who served as the ranking member of the committee. Much of the media coverage zeroed in on Paul’s use of the word “stolen,” despite the “many ways” qualifier and emphasis on future procedures.
“I don’t want to talk about the election anymore,” said a second Republican strategist. “I just want to look forward.”
GOP operative and former George W. Bush aide Bradley Blakeman took to Facebook to urge Trump to “formally concede the election with a warning about the need for national voting standards to prevent the problems that occurred this cycle. There were irregularities, incompetence, negligence and fraud, just not on a scale that would change the results.”
Last month, Sen. Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, introduced legislation to ban ballot harvesting, require mail-in or absentee ballots, and not have the pauses in counting that raised GOP suspicions in some states where Trump led on election night only to be later overtaken by Biden.
“The debacle of the 2020 election has made clear that serious reforms are needed to protect the integrity of our elections,” Hawley said in a statement. “The American people deserve transparency — that means banning ballot harvesting, empowering poll watchers, and taking steps to ensure that all legally cast ballots are accounted for.”
Polls have shown Republican voters have grave doubts about the fairness and accuracy of the election. Trump has repeatedly urged the party’s elected officials to continue fighting the results into January, even as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell finally recognized Biden as president-elect following the electoral vote this week.
