WASHINGTON — The 2022 midterm elections, one year from now, won’t just decide control of the House and Senate but will also provide the first major test of Americans’ confidence in the integrity of their electoral system since the violent attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6.
People who study campaigns, from academics to operatives, have sounded the alarm about voters’ faith in future U.S. elections given that former President Donald Trump has carried on with his false claim that the 2020 election was fraudulent, long after a “Stop the Steal” rally in support of him turned deadly.
The recent elections pointed to potential political upheaval in the midterms, but they may also have offered small solace to those worried about faith in democracy because losing candidates mostly conceded swiftly. And even in New Jersey, where Republican gubernatorial nominee Jack Ciattarelli has not admitted defeat, he has discouraged supporters from believing internet conspiracies and pledged that after all votes were counted, the result would be “legal and fair.”
Still, some of the ensuing political rhetoric offers cause for concern.
Many GOP congressional candidates and incumbents have sided with Trump over his 2020 election charge, even as he lost repeated legal challenges. Senate and House Democrats, meanwhile, have intensified their messaging that the political system is rigged and that new state laws passed by Republican-controlled legislatures are designed to suppress voters.
“The ‘Stop the Steal’ movement has seeded both misinformation and disinformation about our elections system and has undermined confidence in the election process throughout the country,” said Meredith McGehee, a longtime advocate of campaign and voting reforms, who recently retired as executive director of government watchdog group Issue One. “There is the possibility that we could have midterm elections and a large swath of Americans — not the majority — who are doubting the validity of the outcomes.”
The success of American democracy hinges on voters’ trust in the electoral system. Without that confidence, turnout could plummet — and, as Jan. 6 proves, violence and lawlessness could erupt.
“We still have the Trump Big Lie that is metastasizing,” said Stephen Spaulding, senior counsel for public policy and government affairs at Common Cause. “Trust is the glue that really holds the system together. When it starts to erode, it really threatens the whole system.”
Groups such as Spaulding’s are gearing up for big efforts ahead of the midterms to combat election disinformation. They plan to dispatch nonpartisan poll monitors and scrub social media of inaccurate information, especially about dates, places and ways of voting.
Reasons for optimism
Recent elections, including the gubernatorial race in Virginia and the California recall before it, may offer some reasons for optimism. In California, the losing Republican candidate conceded. Ditto for Democrat Terry McAuliffe in Virginia, who lost a race for his old job to Republican businessman Glenn Youngkin.
Katie Harbath, a former lobbyist for Facebook who is now a technology and democracy fellow at the Bipartisan Policy Center, said such signs made her a bit more hopeful about the upcoming midterms, though she acknowledged that with redistricting, voters could still be misled and confused about their polling places or other important information.
“We’ve had candidates on both the left and the right concede and do all those things we’ve traditionally seen as part of an electoral process that we need to instill confidence,” she said during a recent discussion on election misinformation.
Youngkin met last week with Virginia’s current governor, Democrat Ralph Northam, and the two pledged to cooperate with the transition between their administrations. Vice President Kamala Harris, who campaigned for McAuliffe, told reporters last week that even though the result wasn’t what she preferred, “it clearly was a fair election.”
A record number of voters turned out in Virginia. And Trump, with whom Youngkin did not campaign, urged his supporters to head to the polls as a way of winning “bigger than the margin of fraud.” It was a shift in rhetoric from the former president, who just weeks before had warned that his supporters would not vote in the midterms if the “fraud” that he alleges denied him a second term had not been resolved.
Republican operatives believe that Trump’s post-2020 rhetoric of election fraud depressed turnout in the pair of Georgia Senate runoff elections in early January, leading to Democratic victories in both.
As GOP-controlled states, including Georgia, have enacted legislation to curb some of the pandemic voting practices, including universal vote-by-mail, Democrats have said such laws represent attempts at voter suppression.
Amid all that, “Turnout nationally is massively up,” said Doug Heye, a former GOP campaign operative and House leadership aide.
But Heye said he still sees reason to worry, especially about Trump’s messages, as the former president has sought to capitalize on a general weakening of institutions, from football and religion to democracy.
“What Trump has done is really weaponize that,” he said.
