Voters turn away from the Republican Party in the US to avoid extremist candidates

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Not so long ago, Joe Mohler would have seemed an unlikely person to help bury Donald Trump’s political legacy.

Mohler, a 24-year-old Republican committee member and law student in Lancaster Township, Pa., voted for Trump in 2016 and voted for him again in 2020, but this time with some misgivings.

And when Trump began spreading lies and conspiracy theories about his 2020 defeat, Mohler, who grew up in a staunchly conservative region of southeastern Pennsylvania, was concerned to hear many people he knew repeat them.

Last January, after his county’s Republican leaders allied with a group known for spreading misinformation about the 2020 election and Covid vaccines, Mohler spoke out against them — a move he says cost him his job as president. of the municipal committee of the Republican Party.

“I just realized how much of a sham the whole movement was,” he said. “The moment the veil is lifted from your face, you realize how ugly the face you are looking at is.”

Mohler was part of a precariously narrow but significant slice of the electorate that went against their own voting record this year to reject Republican candidates seeking control of the election, at least in part out of concern for the health of the political system and the future. of democracy.

After deciding that preserving the integrity of elections was his most important issue in 2022, he voted last month for the party’s Senate candidate, Mehmet Oz, who carefully dodged the question of who won the 2020 election but ended up saying that would have voted to certify Joe Biden’s victory had he been in office.

But in the gubernatorial race, Mohler decided he couldn’t vote for Doug Mastriano, the Republican nominee, who, as a state senator, was instrumental in efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Pennsylvania.

Mastriano pledged to decertify voting machines in counties where he suspected the results were fraudulent and to nominate someone who shared his views for the commonwealth secretary, the post that oversees elections in Pennsylvania.

“It was so reprehensible,” Mohler said. “I didn’t want anyone like that in the governor’s office.”

The decisions of voters like Mohler, discernible in polls and voiced in interviews, have not necessarily put an end to concerns about the electoral system’s ability to withstand the new pressures unleashed by Trump. But they suggested a possible cap on the appeal of extreme partisanship — one that has, this cycle, prevented the worst fears for the health of democracy from being realized.

Mastrian lost by nearly 15 percentage points to Democratic nominee Josh Shapiro — part of a midterm election that saw voters reject all election deniers who were running to oversee elections in a swing state.

In Arizona, Michigan and Nevada, Republican primary voters nominated candidates who campaigned on Trump’s electoral lies for secretary of state, the post that oversees the electoral system in 40 states. In those three, these candidates lost.

The defeat eased immediate concern that strident partisans who have embraced conspiracy theories about hacked voting machines, foreign meddling and smuggled ballots could soon have the power to wreak havoc on electoral systems.

The election results suggest that a focus on Trump’s election lies has not only galvanized Democrats, it has alienated Republicans and independents alike. Final turnout numbers show that registered Republicans outvoted registered Democrats in Arizona and Nevada, but candidates who denied elections lost key races in those states.

Republican candidates in state races who embraced Trump’s electoral lies also significantly underperformed compared to Republicans who did not. That was true even in districts that voted overwhelmingly for Trump in 2020, suggesting that the defection of ticket splitters like Mohler likely played a role.

In a poll of voters in five swing states conducted by research firm Citizen Data for the advocacy group Protect Democracy, one-third of those who voted for a mix of Democrats and Republicans in November cited concerns that GOP candidates had strong opinions. or promote policies “that are dangerous to democracy”.

And in a post-election poll conducted by Impact Research, a Democratic polling firm, 69% of independents and Republicans who voted for a Democrat for the House said democracy was central to their decision.

“It gives me some optimism that the general election voter wants a return to some normality and some stability,” said Ethan Demme, a former GOP chairman in Lancaster County, Pa., who formed a new third party in Pennsylvania. after Trump supporters attacked the US Capitol, on January 6, 2021.

Democrats welcomed the defecting voters with open arms. After all, they were looking for them.

In the Pennsylvania gubernatorial race, Shapiro hired focus groups of Trump voters to come up with ideas on how to steer them away from Mastriano.

About a third of Trump voters did not believe Mastriano’s claims about the 2020 election, and Shapiro’s team found that voters with such doubts were also receptive to appeals on other issues.

“These voters had real sensitivity not only to Mastriano’s history and position on democracy issues, but also to his positions on abortion, marriage equality and climate change,” the Shapiro campaign wrote in a post-election memo.

The campaign’s strategy reflected the awareness that electoral denialism could be an indicator of other weaknesses as well as a weakness in itself.

“This extreme talk of voter fraud attracts people of an extreme flavor,” said Kristopher Dahir, an alderman and pastor in Sparks, Nevada, who ran as a Republican for secretary of state this year. After losing the primary to Jim Marchant, a prominent figure in the election-denying movement, Dahir endorsed Marchant’s Democratic opponent, Cisco Aguilar, who won in November.

Mastrian was outscored by Shapiro 14-1 in television and digital ads between Labor Day and November 8, and lost by nearly 15 points.

The most high-profile races for Secretary of State were similarly lopsided. National Democrats spent nearly $8 million on advertising in Nevada to promote Aguilar; Republicans spent nothing to help Marchant. In Arizona, Mark Finchem was buried under more than $14 million in ads run by Democratic groups.

A significant factor in the imbalance was Trump, who openly promoted candidates who denied the secretary of state’s Republican primary election, but put almost none of his money where he said.

The Save America PAC, its leadership PAC, spent just $10,000 of its war chest of over $100 million on candidates for Secretary of State who made it to the general election. A spin-off super PAC, MAGA Inc., opted to spend money on Senate races.

The narrowness of some of the defeats of those who denied the elections and the diversity of factors that probably contributed to them led some experts to warn that the November results should not be confused with an outright rejection of politics against the Democrats.

“Anyone who believes we’re out of the woods because a handful of election deniers lost close races in swing states is deluding themselves,” said Brian Klaas, a scholar of authoritarianism at University College London.

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