One-hundred and eight-five Republicans running for House, Senate and governor seats in this year’s midterm elections have denied the legitimacy of the 2020 election. According to FiveThirtyEight’s forecast, more than half of them have at least a 95-in-100 chance of winning their races.
Transcript
Kaleigh Rogers: In the midterms this year, 185 Republicans running for House, Senate, and governor seats are election deniers — they’ve either said the 2020 election was stolen or took legal steps to overturn its results. Of those 185 contenders, 122 of them – or 66 percent – are clear favorites in their races. As of Tuesday, Nov. 1, FiveThirtyEight’s forecast gives them better than a 95-in-100 chance of winning — they’re what we call “Solid R.” And while Republicans overall are projected to do well in the midterms, a bigger share of election deniers are in races they’re very likely to win, compared with Republicans overall. In fact, less than half of all GOP candidates are running in Solid R races.
Election deniers running for House seats have the best odds – 69 percent of those candidates are in Solid R races. Among the seven election deniers running for governor, only two — Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey and Idaho Gov. Brad Little — are running in Solid R races. And of the eight election deniers running for Senate, only three have better than 95-in-100 odds.
Look, complaining about the results of an election after the fact is basically an American pastime, but this is something unprecedented. Hundreds of candidates on the ballot are refusing to accept the outcome of a democratic election two years after it happened, and some actually tried to overturn the results. Now, it looks like a lot of those candidates will be sitting in Congress and governors’ mansions next year, and that leaves a lot of questions around what could happen if we have another election dispute in 2024.
