ICYMI: GOP candidates add a repulsive new twist to Trump’s big lie (Opinion) [Washington Post]

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT

Washington Post: GOP candidates add a repulsive new twist to Trump’s big lie (Opinion)
By Greg Sargent
February 8, 2022

Key Points:

• It’s hardly surprising to hear that Republican Senate candidates are campaigning on the big lie that the 2020 election was riddled with fraud.

• But at least four of these candidates have added an even more repulsive twist: In inventing widespread fraud in 2020, they go out of their way to emphasize that it took place primarily in urban centers.
  

• In addition to its obvious racial implications, Republicans trafficking in this are following a path blazed by Donald Trump… A more explicit focus on cities, to create a pretext for express efforts to overturn election losses.

• Senate candidates adopting this line are among the most devoted Trump sycophants in the GOP.

• “Our concern is Milwaukee,” Sen. Ron Johnson, who’s running for reelection in Wisconsin, recently said. “This is one of these big Democrat strongholds that just can’t seem to get their votes counted until they know exactly how many votes they need.”

• Former hedge funder David McCormick, who’s running for Senate in Pennsylvania, attacked the “lack of oversight in many of the precincts of Philadelphia.”

• Then there’s Josh Mandel, who’s running for Senate in Ohio. He has called for audits of voting in numerous states, while name-checking their urban centers… Mandel vowed the use of the federal government’s “investigatory power” to examine “what was going on” in Philadelphia, Detroit, Milwaukee and Cleveland.

• Mandel’s full-throated commitment to Trump’s 2020 lies has forced Vance, who’s been tentative on this point, into a mad scramble to fully commit to it as well.

• The best example of all may come from Adam Laxalt, who’s running for Senate in Nevada. Laxalt has lent support to the stolen election myth, while insinuating that the integrity of voting is suspect in counties that include Las Vegas and Reno.
  
• As NBC reports, Laxalt has paired this with an explicit declaration that voting in heavily Republican areas is “legitimate.”
  
• Behold the logical extension of this Trumpist trope: Voting in urban strongholds is suspect; voting in heavily Republican outlying areas is above reproach; and the former justifies more voter suppression to maximize gains from the latter.

• They are unabashedly declaring for themselves and their followers the power to pronounce the opposition’s votes illegitimate in the full knowledge that they were, in fact, procedurally valid.

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