President Donald Trump has spent years making false claims about election fraud, including his refusal to accept that he lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden. Since that election, Republicans who denied or questioned the results have taken positions on local election boards, worked inside election offices, trained poll observers, and sought to influence state election laws.
Now, as we head into the 2026 midterm elections, candidates who have denied or questioned the results of the 2020 election are running for governor and other powerful positions in key swing states. If elected, some could play important roles in overseeing future elections.
Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram spoke with Andrew Kaczynski, senior reporter at CNN who has been reporting on election-denying candidates and what their victories could mean for future elections.
Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
Which swing states are having elections featuring candidates who have denied the 2020 election results?
The interesting thing is that we talked about in this article that we did on the five most key swing states is governor’s races. We’re talking Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin and Georgia. These are all states that Trump won in 2016, Biden in 2020, then Trump in 2024. And what we had talked about was how in each of these states, there are candidates running for governor who in four of the cases just outright denied the results of the 2020 election.
How are these candidates in these five races faring? Does it look good for any of them?
With the caveat that we’ve seen some pretty big polling misses already in two of these states, most of these candidates are behind in the polls, but there’s always the caveat that these are states that Trump won in 2024 and 2016. So they’re going to be, they’re true battlegrounds. So anything could really happen in them.
And how much is their dispute or lie about the 2020 election coming up in their races?
Not a ton, but what we did see was when we did this story, pointing out that at least in four of the key states, these are candidates that outright denied the election. When we reached out to three of them, they immediately gave us statements saying they would accept whoever won in their states in 2028. They would certify the winner. They said that Biden did win in 2020.
So we’ve seen election denial is kind of a liability, it would seem for these candidates. Just to give you the example of Michigan, John James has been down by five or six in some of the polls. He was somebody who originally got elected in a swing seat in 2022 as a member of Congress after he had two failed Senate runs. And he was like, “Yeah, of course Biden won in 2020.” And then when he ran this time, he actually went the other direction when he maybe was trying to get Trump’s endorsement. There’s a rally where he said that Trump won Michigan three times, which obviously did not happen.
So you have a situation where it is probably a liability. A couple of these candidates are running from him, but at least two of them, Andy Biggs and John James, didn’t say that Biden won in 2020, didn’t say they’d certify the winner, and didn’t really give us a comment at all on that. But three of them said they would certify the winner.
Do you see this as part of a broader effort on the part of this administration, or the Republican Party more broadly, to sort of legitimize the Big Lie into our institutions, into even election administration, which there’s been lots of reporting about? Or is it just a coincidence? Are there so many election deniers now that, inevitably, some of them are going to be running for office in key battleground states?
I think it’s more the latter. It was just so thoroughly embedded in the Republican Party in 2020 and Trump had such a stranglehold over the party. But in 2022, many of those big election denier proponents that he backed, they did lose. So I do think it’s more of a liability for these candidates, but. It’s also why Trump supports a lot of them.
We’ve got a lot of candidates who deny the results of the 2020 election running for office in 2026. We’ve got people who deny the results of the 2020 election administering our elections in various key battleground states. We’ve got the Supreme Court fighting with lower courts about what maps they can use. We’ve got the president trying to redraw the rules around mail-in voting.
What do you think this all amounts to for President Trump? Is this about the midterms? Is this about 2028? Is this just a pastime of his?
It’s a pastime. It all runs through the fact that he thinks, or is lying, that he won in 2020, and this is all just a part of it. It’s all part of the same delusions about mail-in voting or fraud, or this or that. There’s an example of Andy Biggs, who’s running for governor in Arizona. He was a huge, huge stop the steal proponent and he was like, The governor could have de-certified the results if they wanted to, and that couldn’t obviously happen. And that’s what Trump likes. John James, who said it at a rally with Trump: He won Michigan three times.
Trump just likes that. Trump likes the candidates who lie and say that he won in 2020. It’s just like a pastime of his trying to find this fraud that doesn’t — like, obviously it exists. Obviously people do commit voter fraud at very low levels, but never has it been shown that it ever is on a large scale or enough to change the election.
Do we have any sense of whether the frustration people have with Donald Trump, and his real policies, can overcome all of the shenanigans we’re seeing around our elections so far this midterm season?
Yes. I think if we have really close races in the House, Senate, governor, that’s where I think some of this stuff could come into play with people denying the election, saying they won, trying to throw out ballots or this or that.
Election fights, that’s where things could get into a shit show. But I don’t think we’ll be talking about this if [Democrats] win by pretty good sized margins. And obviously Trump can say whatever he says, but the results will be the results — it’s like that.
