The "Big Lie" Has Become an Albatross for the GOP

Republican candidates running for office anywhere but in the deepest fringes of MAGA world are increasingly faced with a difficult choice: (i) kiss the ring of Der Trumpenfuhrer and parrot his lies lies so as to win the support of his basket of deplorables base and alienate independents and conservative Democrat voters needed to win a general election or (ii) accept objective reality, distance themselves from Trumpism so as to win the independents and conservative Democrat voters needed to win a general election.  In the California recall debacle launched by GOP activists and operatives, LarryElder chose the former and went down to a humiliating defeat.  Granted, Elder was anything but a mainstream candidate, but tying himself to Trump and his lies proved fatal.  Here in Virginia, GOP gubernatoria candidate Glenn Youngkin is trying to hide his obedience to Trump and his toxic bas hopefully his dishonesty is fully exposed and he goes down to defeat like Elder.  A piece in Politico looks at the albatross that the "Big Lie" is becoming.  Here are article highlights:

The best indication that Larry Elder was going down in the California recall wasn’t the polling, although that all swung the wrong way in the final weeks, but his suggestion late in the campaign that Democrats were going to steal the election.

Preemptive excuse-making isn’t a sign of great confidence—the winning side never complains of cheating.

Sure enough, incumbent Gov. Gavin Newsom cruised to a victory made a little easier, as it happens, by Elder’s insistence that Republicans were robbed in 2020 and about to be robbed again. . . . His landslide defeat is the latest evidence that the idea the 2020 presidential election was stolen is poison for Republicans.

It’s not as though Elder, a talk-radio show host with no political experience who was running in a deep blue state and got massively outspent, was going to have an easy time regardless. But when he got pushed by Trump supporters into endorsing the stolen-election narrative, he ran directly into a Newsom political buzz saw linking him with Donald Trump and the Jan. 6 riot.

There may be other costs to come, perhaps up to and including the 2024 presidential election if Trump is the nominee again.

As my colleague at National Review, David Bahnsen writes, the stolen-election narrative is going to be an albatross “anywhere independents and moderates are needed to win an election—the backward-looking focus on the unprovable claims of a 2020 stolen election are toxic, self-defeating, and counter-productive.”

The odds were never in Elder’s favor. Still, polling during the summer showed the recall amazingly close. There was a chance Elder could define himself as an outsider worth taking a flier on, so long as he never lost sight of the fact he was running in a strongly anti-Trump state with an enormous Democratic registration advantage.

In an interview with the Sacramento Bee editorial board in August, Elder seemed aware of his situation. . . . Shortly thereafter, he appeared on a conservative talk-radio program and said he needed “a mulligan,” and related a variety of complaints about the 2020 election.

Although Elder didn’t deserve the abuse he endured during the campaign—getting smeared as an alleged tool of white supremacy and even physically assaulted at a campaign stop—here he’d given his opponents unnecessary ammunition.

If Elder had been running in a Republican primary in a red state, he would have secured his position nicely with his do-over, but he’d driven a nail in his own coffin in the recall.

The choice that was forced on Elder—admit that Biden won the election and alienate MAGA voters, or say it was stolen and alienate voters in the middle—will be faced by Republican candidates around the country for the duration.

That won’t change as long as Trump has an outsize influence on the party. He’s not letting 2020 go, rather is bent on vengeance against those Republicans he believes betrayed him by not embracing his various conspiracy theories.

Since he never admits the fairness of any loss, the number of allegedly rigged and stolen elections will only increase—the recall, Trump said in a statement, is “just another giant Election Scam, no different, but less blatant, than the 2020 Presidential Election Scam!"

This is a cynical and corrosive view of American democracy that, to the extent it becomes GOP orthodoxy, can contribute only to further Republican frustration.

I hope McAuliffe pushes Youngkin on this issue.