More than a dozen “election deniers” have shaken up typically under-the-radar secretary of state races across the United States during the 2022 midterm elections.
While secretary of state races typically garner little national media attention, the fact that there are 13 GOP, third-party, and independent candidates who have sowed doubt about the results of the 2020 presidential election has propelled Democrats to pour in at least $31 million combined in 27 states to support their candidates, according to campaign finance disclosures.
In an attempt to combat this dramatic Democratic surge in funding to secretary of state races, Republican contributions have tilted upward of $23 million, filings show. One senior Republican strategist told the Washington Examiner it would be a “colossal failure” if Democrats did not win in many of the races they’ve spent millions on, noting the party would have to “explain that to their donors.”
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As the top elections official, a secretary of state is typically responsible for certifying the results of elections statewide. In 2020, secretaries of state were tasked with making decisions about how voters could safely access polling places, including elderly citizens, despite COVID-19 vaccines not being available.
The importance of secretaries of state became apparent on a national level when Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, refused to change the Peach State’s 2020 election results to favor Trump over then-presidential candidate Joe Biden. The Washington Post relied on an anonymous source in March 2021 to claim that Trump pressured the Georgia secretary of state’s chief investigator, Frances Watson, to “find the fraud,” but the outlet issued a lengthy correction two months later after the Wall Street Journal revealed Trump merely told the investigator she had “the most important job in the country right now.”
Democrats are concerned that secretary of state candidates who questioned Biden’s victory in 2020 could seek to oppose the will of voters in the future. One Republican candidate in Arizona, Mark Finchem, told Time magazine in September that it was a “fantasy” Biden won the election. Minnesota’s Kim Crockett, another Republican, has called the 2020 election “rigged” and “lawless.”
But Finchem has only raised around $82,000, compared to his Democratic opponent Adrian Fontes’s $2.6 million haul, records show. Crockett, on the other hand, has raked in around $2.7 million compared to the almost $4.5 million Democrats have used to boost Steve Simon.
“Republicans attempted a coup the last time they lost an election,” Alexandra De Luca, a spokeswoman for American Bridge 21st Century, a liberal political action committee, told the Washington Examiner. “They’ve spent the last two years coming together to nominate extremist, anti-democracy secretary of state candidates all across the country so that the next time they decide to launch an insurrection, they’ll be successful.”
Republican Kristina Karamo is another election denier that Democrats have placed an emphasis on defeating. Karamo, who has earned roughly $18.2 million to her Democratic opponent Jocelyn Benson’s almost $25 million haul, falsely claimed in December 2020 that Dominion’s voting software changed 6,000 votes from Trump to Biden.
In Nevada, Jim Marchant is taking on Cisco Aguilar. Marchant notably once claimed it is “almost statistically impossible that Joe Biden won” Nevada in 2020.
“The main thing to understand about these races is national liberal groups have gone all in on them,” said Andrew Romeo, a spokesman for the Republican State Leadership Committee, a 527 group that boosts GOP state candidates.
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“Democrats, fueled by their liberal billionaire donors, are dumping unprecedented money into secretary of state races this year because they have given up on American democracy and an election system that has worked for 200 years and want to stack these offices with their far-left allies who will institute a federal takeover of our elections,” Romeo told the Washington Examiner.
