What if Republicans just stop conceding when they lose?
Learning the Trump lesson.
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On Tuesday, conservative Dan Kelly lost — and lost convincingly — to liberal Janet Janet Protasiewicz in his bid for a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court.
He, um, didn’t take it well.
“I wish that…I would be able to concede to a worthy opponent,” Kelly told his supporters. “But I do not have a worthy opponent to which I can concede.”
He went on (and on):
This was the most deeply deceitful, dishonorable, despicable campaign I have ever seen run for the courts. It was truly beneath contempt….My opponent is a serial liar. She’s disregarded judicial ethics. She’s demeaned the judiciary with her behavior. This is the future we have to look forward to in Wisconsin.
Kelly’s refusal to concede is not an isolated incident. Instead it’s part of a growing trend of Republicans who, in the wake of Donald Trump’s insistence that the 2020 election was stolen from him, have followed his lead.
Consider:
In Arizona, 2022 gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake continues to insist she actually won the race — despite a series of legal defeats and zero actual evidence to back up her claim. As recently as March 31, Lake was claiming she had found a “smoking gun” in the race.
Ryan Kelley, who finished fourth in the Michigan Republican governor’s primary, refused to concede — insisting that the results were “predetermined.”
The Republican nominee for Maryland’s attorney general position refused to concede his defeat despite trailing by several hundred thousand votes. He claimed that “many odd and suspicious incidents were reported by poll watchers.”
In Arizona, Senate nominee Blake Masters took several days after the race had been called to concede — insisting that “we are going to make sure that every legal vote is counted.”
Look. Politics is a copycat business. Once something works, politicians fall all over themselves to recreate it for their own benefit.
And the reality of Trump’s refusal to concede defeat to Joe Biden in 2020 is that it did work. The base of the GOP rallied behind him, believing, unquestioningly, his conspiracy theories and lies about the election. The party rallied, literally, on January 6, 2021 — a living testament to the success of Trump’s efforts to fool people on a grand scale that the election was somehow stolen.
And, they’ve stayed loyal to Trump! He is, at present, the clear frontrunner for the Republican nomination in 2024 — a bid fueled in no small part by his continued insistence that he actually win in 2020!
(Sidebar: The success of Trump’s refusal to concede directly erodes Americans’ trust in our political process and the results it produces. Which undermines democracy and makes it harder for the nation to have a peaceful transfer of power. It is an unquestionably bad thing for the health of this country.)
Why then, from the perspective of an ambitious politician like Lake, concede defeat — ever? The base of the party has shown it likes the idea of someone willing to fight a result that wasn’t what they wanted. Far from abandoning a politician who refuses to concede, the Republican base elevates them.
Elevates them to, potentially, being Trump’s vice presidential pick in 2024 — in the case of Lake.
Lake won a straw poll at the Conservative Political Action Conference in March of potential 2024 running mates for Trump, taking 20% of the overall vote.
And, Trump appears to be interested in Lake as well. As Axios reported last month:
Former President Trump is strongly considering picking a female running mate — and sees Kari Lake as a model for his vice presidential pick, according to people who discussed the topic with him.
Lake, for her part, denied interest in the VP job — while also promoting the falsehood that she won the 2022 gubernatorial election.
“We’re flattered, but unfortunately our legal team says the Constitution won’t allow for her to serve as Governor and VP at the same time,” she tweeted from her campaign account.
The successes of Trump and Lake after they refused to concede an election are a telling indicator of the current mindset of the Republican party — or at least a big chunk of its base.
They seem entirely willing to believe in an alternate reality pushed to them by politicians who don’t want to be tainted with the mark of defeat. Objective facts are of little concern to them. All that matter is that, somehow, they were the victims of a deep and wide fraud perpetrated by Democrats.
Which brings me to 2024 — and, in particular, the 2024 presidential election.
Given everything we know about Trump — and everything he has said about 2020 — I struggle to see how he ever leaves either the primary or the general election race if he loses.
Can you imagine a scenario where Trump bows out — gracefully or not — once it’s clear that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has the majority of delegates to be the GOP nominee? Or where Trump concedes to President Joe Biden (or any other Democrat) if it’s obvious that he’s lost the electoral college count?
If anything, that scenario seems more remote today than it did even in the days after the 2020 election. Trump has spent much of the last two years doubling and tripling down on his false claims of election fraud — and growing increasingly wrapped up in the notion that he is the subject of a massive targeting campaign by the federal government.
Need evidence of that? Watch his speech post-arrest on Tuesday. Or check out his Truth Social post from Wednesday in which he urges Republican and Congress to “DEFUND THE DOJ AND FBI UNTIL THEY COME TO THEIR SENSES.”
It’s virtually impossible then for me to imagine Trump conceding defeat — in any form — come 2024. And, by then, he’s likely to have a slew of copycats — all of whom are hoping to reap the same political rewards he has by refusing to ever admit that they lost.
In short: The dangers to democracy we saw on display after the 2020 election haven’t gone away. They’ve actually gotten worse.
This has been the essential tension between Trumpism and our society based on norms, customs, laws etc.
How does it handle someone who's response to every request is "Make Me".
The Republican "Base" are now enemies of democracy. I am constantly shocked by the way people I would have once told you were solid, serious, engaged individuals with whom I disagreed on how things should be done but also respected as people of integrity and intelligence, who have descended into this insanity. They really are the frogs in the pot set at simmer, who got boiled without realizing it. The water in the pot being the propaganda and fantasy pushed by Limbaugh and then Faux Snooze.
But the thing that really bothers me is that they had to essentially be ready to believe the bullshit to begin with, which means in too many cases, they were actually scumballs when I thought otherwise.