Reported by Al Jazeera
State leaders can hold significant sway over election administration, with implications for the 2028 presidential race.
After Democrats’ stunning blowout in the United States midterm elections , five Republican election deniers have come up short in their races to become governor in top battleground states.
Congressman Andy Biggs in Arizona, Congressman John James in Michigan, State Treasurer Stacy Garrity in Pennsylvania and Congressman Tom Tiffany in Wisconsin all lost their gubernatorial races on Tuesday.
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So too did billionaire Rick Jackson of Georgia, a state that was central to President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential results.
All five candidates had either cast doubt on or voted to block Joe Biden’s victory over Trump in the 2020 election.
Jackson, for instance, had called Biden’s win “totally ridiculous” and criticised Georgia state officials for not complying with Trump’s demands to “find” extra votes.
“Our people really let us down,” Jackson said when he was pressed on the 2020 election during a campaign event earlier this year.
In January 2021, Biggs and Tiffany voted to overturn the 2020 results as members of the US House of Representatives.
Both lawmakers also signed on to a lawsuit that sought to invalidate results in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, all states that Biden won in that year’s contentious presidential race.
James was not in Congress when it came time to certify the 2020 election results. He had unsuccessfully run for the US Senate during that election cycle. He later made a successful bid for the House of Representatives in the 2022 midterms.
That year, he acknowledged Biden’s victory. But he reversed his position in June, when he told podcaster Benny Johnson that the 2020 election was “rigged and manipulated”.
Garrity, who was elected to her current position in 2020, was among the right-wing politicians to campaign with Trump to reverse his election defeat.
She appeared at a rally in Pennsylvania on January 5, 2021, to call on state lawmakers to decertify the 2020 results. A day later, Trump supporters would storm the US Capitol, echoing the Republican leader’s claims of voter fraud.
Tiffany, Garrity…