Belief in electoral fraud remains strong among voters loyal to Trump, despite party rejection

Jonathan Riches, who has attended 40 Trump rallies, joined thousands of other Trump supporters at a rally in Arizona on January 15, 2022 – AFP

Jonathan Riches has attended 40 rallies of former President Donald Trump and fervently believes that his idol had votes stolen in the last US presidential election.

Present among thousands of others who spent hours in a dusty Arizona field this weekend to watch Trump speak, this belief is a foundation, as much as the GOP leadership wants to dissuade them.

“We love our president. I call him President Trump because I still consider him my president,” Riches, 44, told AFP.

He was one of thousands who traveled to Florence, 100km from Phoenix, for Saturday’s rally. Some arrived days early and traveled long distances – Riches is from Tampa, Florida – to gather in festive mood with friends from across the country.

“It’s unbelievable,” declared Jennifer Winterbauer, who left Texas. “I have better friends here than at home. Everyone is like a family.”

At the meeting, the great successes of Trumpism were heard: speakers attacked President Joe Biden for considering him a “disturbed”, the press, the supposed “open borders” and masks and vaccines to combat covid-19.

But the dominant theme was the widely contested theories about voter fraud and the alleged illegitimacy of the 2020 presidential election.

However, high-ranking Republicans would like things to be different.

– “Hard” vs. “weak” –

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell came out this week in defense of his colleague, Republican Senator Mike Rounds, who drew the ire of Trump supporters by saying the former president had lost.

“I think Senator Rounds was telling the truth about what happened in the 2020 election,” McConnell told CNN. “And I agree with him.”

McConnell has been quietly trying to steer the Republican Party away from its fixation on re-contesting the 2020 election, which Biden won by millions of votes.

Dozens of judicial attempts to overturn part of the vote have failed and no credible evidence of significant voter fraud has emerged.

With the 2022 midterm elections in sight, McConnell wants to focus his fire on Biden’s record after a difficult term, with the persistence of covid-19, high inflation and supermarket shelves sometimes empty due to chain difficulties. of supply.

But Trump’s dominance over a sizable portion of the Republican Party’s base — and his demand that the 2020 election be redone — makes that difficult.

“We have to deal with 2020,” Winterbauer, 49, told AFP. “You will have the same problem. Because as he (Trump) says, when you rob a bank, they get you. You don’t keep the money. And it will not go unpunished.”

The speakers were introduced to the audience as people “endorsed by Trump” and all cast doubt on the 2020 results.

“That election was rotten to the core,” Congressman Paul Gosar shouted to the crowd.

When Trump took the stage, he established a binary classification of people. Those who support his theories on fraud would be “smart” and “tough”, while those who don’t believe would be “awful” and “weak”.

The message was clear: without aligning with his election fraud allegations, no one will get Trump’s backing.

It was music to Will Garrity’s ears, who traveled from Houston, Texas. “You can’t tell me these were legitimate elections,” he said.

“If you really pay attention to the facts, to the various audits, to the various information that is coming out, you can see it. I mean, it’s crystal clear.”

– Focus on the future –

While that opinion was the common denominator at Saturday’s rally in Florence, that’s not how the country generally thinks.

An Axios-Momentive opinion poll released this month found that about 40% of Americans believe the vote was compromised.

This shows that there is a large majority that wants to move forward and, according to Senator Mike Rounds, the party’s inability to do so could harm them.

“The election was fair, the fairest we have ever seen. We just didn’t win the election as Republicans for president,” Rounds told ABC News last week.

“In the future, we have to refocus on what it will take to win the presidency,” he added.

“And if we look back and tell our people not to vote because there are pranks, we are going to put ourselves at a huge disadvantage.”