Shadow of doubt: Are Trump candidates changing their election denial tune heading into 2024?

Hanging over the 2024 election are the lasting effects of election denialism that have become popular among Republicans in recent years — but some candidates are changing their tune heading into the next election season to avoid a repeat of 2022.

Republicans had a less-than-expected performance in the 2022 midterm elections, mostly due to the losses of candidates endorsed by former President Donald Trump who defeated centrist GOP candidates in the primaries but went on to suffer defeat at the hands of Democrats in the general election.

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Among the candidates who witnessed a loss were Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake and Arizona Senate candidate Blake Masters, two staunch supporters of Trump who centered much of their 2022 midterm campaigns on Trump’s 2020 loss and the idea that the election was “stolen” from him.

Kari Lake

Lake is now running in one of the most competitive Senate races in 2024, vying for incumbent Sen. Kyrsten Sinema’s (I-AZ) seat with Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ). At the time of her 2022 campaign, Lake parroted several debunked claims by the former president that the 2020 election was stolen.

Now, heading into her 2024 race, she appears to be switching out 2020 election denialism for a focus on immigration and crime, as well as attracting “disaffected” Democrats and independents to help win her Senate bid.

Ross D. Franklin/AP

Though Lake has taken to distancing herself from Trump’s avid election denialism, she is still dedicating much of her platform to promoting the former president. She urged all of the non-Trump Republican nominees to drop out of the race and coalesce around the former president, calling the indictments against Trump an “egregious case of election interference” and defending Trump’s words on Jan. 6, 2021.

While she may have stepped away from promoting false 2020 election claims, Lake is still obsessed with her loss over a year ago — a pathway that could harm her chances next November as it did in 2022.

The former gubernatorial candidate has refused to concede her 2022 election loss to Gov. Katie Hobbs (D-AZ) and continues to push for legal action to challenge and overturn the results. Her most recent attempt was rejected on Dec. 1, after a judge denied Lake’s bid to view ballot affidavit envelopes signed by nearly 1.3 million Arizona early voters.

“Ms. Lake regards the electoral process much like the villagers in the famous fable regarded the goose that laid the golden egg, except that her goose failed to lay the egg she expected,” Maricopa County Superior Court Judge John Hannah said in the court filing.

Lake’s election denialism has become so dominant in her politics that she was warned by Sen. Steve Daines (R-MT), chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, to let go of the past if she wants to have a successful Senate campaign.

“I think one thing we’ve learned from 2022 is voters do not want to hear about grievances from the past,” Daines said in October. “They want to hear about what you’re going to do for the future. And if our candidates stay on that message of looking down the highway versus the rearview mirror, I think they’ll be a lot more successful, particularly in their appeal to independent voters, which usually decide elections.”

It’s possible that losing nearly every court challenge and words from Daines has pushed her to change her messaging. During her campaign launch, Lake largely avoided talking about her 2022 loss, focusing instead on election integrity as a bipartisan issue. Though still aligning herself with Trump, she has made efforts to connect with establishment Republicans ahead of her Senate campaign launch, another sign that she may be looking to tone down her firebrand image.

Blake Masters

Matt York/AP

Masters, who lost his Senate race to Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) in 2022, is running for Arizona’s 8th Congressional District. He took to knocking Biden and expressing concern in several policy areas when announcing his run in October.

“Biden has failed. We need Trump back. We need to stop inflation, Build the Wall, avoid WW3, and secure Arizona’s water future. We need to fight for our families,” Masters said in a post to X.

Similar to Lake, Masters’s campaign for 2024 seems to be taking a step away from election denialism, instead opting to focus on border security, the economy, and water rights issues with California. His website does not mention the 2020 election being stolen on his campaign website but does say that people are sick of the “chaos” and “weaponization of justice.”

Compared to the two other candidates running to replace outgoing Rep. Debbie Lasko (R-AZ) in 2024, Masters has toned down his comments about election fraud — most recently shown during a forum in late November. Masters said Democrats “installed Biden” in 2020 but did not go so far as to outright claim either the 2020 election or his 2022 race were stolen.

“Maybe not third-world but, man, they are second-world,” Masters said of U.S. elections, adding that 2020’s election results were “super messed up” and “not on the up and up,” according to the Arizona Republic.

Regarding 2022, he said, “I don’t know what happened for sure. Maybe it’s just gross negligence.” After taking a “hard look” at his election results, he said, he could not find evidence of fraud. He also said he didn’t sue over his loss to Kelly because he thought it would make Lake’s legal challenges worse, considering Masters lost by a greater margin.

“I don’t like the 27 days of early voting any more than you do, and I wish we had Gov. Kari Lake to do something about it,” he said during the forum.

It is possible this step away from election fraud claims came at a price, as Masters will be without one thing in his House race — an endorsement from Trump. The former president endorsed Abe Hamadeh, an avid election denier, in the 8th Congressional District race, despite supporting Masters in 2022.

Donald Trump

Lynne Sladky/AP

Though his acolytes might be taking a step away from 2020 election denialism, Trump is still moving full steam ahead on his claims about the election. He has toned down his calls regarding election fraud since he was hit with several legal cases at the federal and state level, but he continues to drop a nugget of election denialism whenever he can.

In September, he said in an interview with NBC that he received counsel from multiple people that the 2020 election was not stolen, but he pushed ahead with the claims anyway.

“It was my decision, but I listened to some people,” Trump said. “I was listening to different people, and when I added it all up, the election was rigged.”

“You know who I listen to? Myself,” Trump said. “I saw what happened.”

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Trump continues to parrot election fraud comments in court, most recently claiming that foreign governments changed votes in his Jan. 6 federal election subversion case out of Washington, D.C. Special counsel Jack Smith’s team is pushing back against a request from Trump’s team to search for proof that foreign entities were involved in the 2020 election, stating that it is unnecessary given the prosecution’s thorough interviews with more than a dozen of the Trump administration’s top intelligence officials.

While recently avoiding directly claiming the election was stolen himself, the former president has shared posts or articles on Truth Social that discussed the 2020 election. A recent post on Dec. 9 promoted a story from the Spectator that highlighted instances of “elaborate fraud” in Pennsylvania, a state that Biden won in 2020 and Trump won in 2016.