Jim Marchant, center, the GOP candidate for Nevada Secretary of State, lost his primary and also underperformed Republicans running for U.S. senator and governor.
John Locher/AP
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John Locher/AP
Jim Marchant, center, the GOP candidate for Nevada Secretary of State, lost his primary and also underperformed Republicans running for U.S. senator and governor.
John Locher/AP
For nearly two years, the political future of Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has seemed somewhere between uncertain and unstable.
In 2020, President Donald Trump called him an “enemy of the people” after Trump lost Georgia and the election. Then Raffensperger, who refused Trump’s request to find votes, faced a primary challenge this year from a Republican congressman who voted not to certify the results of the Jan. 6, 2021 election.
But in this month’s midterms, Raffensperger got the last laugh.
He won his re-election bid by 9 percentage points in a narrowly divided state, while the election denialists running for the same position in Arizona, Nevada and Michigan were all defeated.
“I think what Americans are looking for, Georgians are looking for, they’re looking for people of character,” Raffensperger told NPR the day after the vote ended. “I think people want to see the country move forward.”
What they don’t want, according to a new NPR analysis of voting data, is state election officials denying the 2020 results.
Electoral voters running in contested states for secretary of state — who in most states oversees the voting process — generally did not underperform Republicans on ballots for three other statewide positions: U.S. Senate, governor, attorney general. .
“Voters sent a pretty loud message of denial,” said Trey Grayson, who served two terms as Kentucky’s Republican secretary of state. “The message got out. Voters took that information, processed it and said, ‘We reject those candidates.’ We will reward candidates who will do their job, who will follow the law.”
In the Arizona secretary of state race, for example, Republican Mark Finchem was among the most radical candidates running for one of these statewide jobs. He was endorsed by Trump, is a member of the extremist group Oath Keepers, and his Twitter feed is a sprig of conspiracies.
In an election environment widely seen as Republican-friendly, Finchem lagged behind most other Republicans running for statewide office in Arizona.
As of midday Friday, Republican state Treasurer Kimberly Yee was the top vote-getter for either party, with nearly 1.39 million votes, and if Finchem had kept pace with her, he would have won the secretary of state race. against Democrat Adrian Fontes.
Instead, Finchem managed only 86% of Yee’s total and lost to Fonte by more than 100,000 votes. Finchem also trailed fellow election denialist Kari Lake — the Arizona GOP gubernatorial candidate who also lost — by more than 70,000 votes.
“These were winnable races with the right types of candidates,” Grayson said. Unfortunately, my party, we did not appoint the right people.”
Similar trends emerged in competitive state races across the country.
NPR’s analysis found that the denial candidates for secretary of state in Arizona, Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico and Nevada collected about 90-95% of the votes of the leading Republicans who won votes among the four statewide positions.
On the other hand, Raffensperger and Colorado GOP Secretary of State candidate Pam Anderson, who did not deny the results of the 2020 election, finished with vote totals just 1.5 percentage points below their state’s top Republican.
And in less competitive states like Iowa and Idaho, GOP secretary of state candidates who accepted the 2020 election results even finished leading their state’s polls as of midday Friday.
Democrats have signaled all year that they think Republicans running extreme election-denying candidates would benefit them in this year’s midterms, and in an interview after the voting ended, Raffensperger’s Democratic opponent, Bee Nguyen, told NPR that she had fought especially because he did not deny the results of 2020. .
“We also had a bigger challenge in Georgia, running against incumbents who were not viewed as extremists by Georgia voters,” Nguyen said. “And so going up against that is definitely an uphill battle.”
Grayson said he hopes the Republican candidates going forward take a lesson from this.
“Denial of elections is a signal that maybe you are not able to do this job,” he said. “The data are clear.”
