Belief that 2020 election was stolen 'has fed a new wave of post-Trump activism on the right,' New York Times reports

The "insistence — a belief, a lie or an act of motivated reasoning, depending on whom you’re talking to — that the election was stolen . . . has fed a new wave of post-Trump activism on the right," Charles Homans reports for The New York Times Magazine. "In 17 of the 27 states holding elections this year for secretary of state — the top elections officer in 24 states — at least one Republican candidate is running on the claim that the 2020 election was illegitimate, according to States United Action, a nonpartisan organization that advocates for free and fair elections. In four of the eight Republican primaries held so far, that candidate has won. Scores of groups have organized at the state and local levels to conduct partisan audits of the 2020 election results, support officials and candidates who would do the same and run or volunteer for local positions that operate or monitor elections. Providing the oxygen for these efforts, and often working to connect them, are a cohort of national right-wing media figures and activists, many of them tied to the postelection efforts to stop the transfer of power."

The movement says it's for “election integrity” but it “has next to nothing in common with earlier efforts to shore up genuine vulnerabilities in the American election system,” Homans writes. He explores the movement's roots in the never-fully-organized Tea Party, which reflected concerns that were as much social and cultural as economic ("tea" stood for taxed enough already). That included immigration, which Donald Trump made the lodestar of his 2015-16 campaign, but it also included "conspiracism," one narrative of which was "a narrative of dispossession in which true Americans were losing their country to actors from outside the proper bounds of public life." That belief was disproportionately rural.

Homans reports that vote-fraud conspiracy theories began in 2016, not 2020. Trump operative Roger Stone registered stopthesteal.org in February, and the site began putting out misinformation in March and inspiring protests in April as Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas tried to catch Trump. After Trump won, he "shifted to warning of a Democratic plot to steal the election in November. When Trump won in November too, the narrative did not end. It simply shifted again — this time to the popular vote, which he lost." He tweeted falsely, “I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” In August 2020, Trump said, “The only way we’re going to lose this election is if the election is rigged.” At the time, polls showed that he was likely to lose.

After the election, the ranks of those claiming fraud "were swelled by new recruits radicalized by the Covid lockdowns, which many of the Stop the Steal organizers, including [Amy] Kremer, had also rallied against," Homans reports. "Those protests had also drawn in a cohort of far-right evangelical leaders, who had portrayed the lockdowns — which imposed prolonged restrictions on church attendance — as a secular elite campaign against Christians." Another recruit was Doug Mastriano, now the Republican nominee for governor or Pennsylvania and a central figure in Homans' story.

"Jan. 6 marked the explosive end of the self-described Stop the Steal movement — but it also marked a sort of rebirth," Homans writes. "It had showed direct action of even the most extraordinary scale to be, for now, a dead end. Many of the participants in the protests and the Capitol riot returned home and redoubled their efforts to work inside the system rather than just hurling themselves against it." After voting rules were eased during the pandemic, often by bipartisan agreement, there was a backlash of laws that made them more restrictive.