Former President Trump’s refusal to commit to accepting the results of the 2024 election is putting GOP lawmakers in a difficult situation, especially Senate Republican Whip John Thune (SD) and Senator John Cornyn (R- Texas), who are running to become the next Senate Leader of the Republican Party and have pledged to work closely with Trump.
Both senators, allies of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), opposed Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results.
Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), who is in the running to be Trump’s running mate, repeatedly refused to say Sunday that he would accept the results of this year’s election.
Now other Senate Republicans will face the same question, including Thune and Cornyn, who will have to balance their past positions on Trump’s baseless claims of widespread voter fraud with their ambitions to replace McConnell.
Trump’s allies in the Senate could provide the decisive votes that decide who wins the leadership race, and both Thune and Cornyn have personally reached out to the former president to bolster their standing with their pro-Trump colleagues.
“It’s a hard needle to thread, but it’s possible,” said Brian Darling, a GOP strategist and former Senate aide who has advised GOP lawmakers to recognize that changes to the law during the COVID-19 pandemic have made more Make it easy to vote in 2020 and be aware of controversial changes to voter registration and absentee voting rules before November.
Darling predicted that Trump will likely allege widespread cheating again if he loses to Biden in November.
“We shouldn’t expect anything different from former President Trump in this election than we expect [saw] in the last elections. It will be a lot of the same arguments about how the election will be conducted,” he said.
But the GOP strategist warned that if Trump and other Republicans sound the alarm about widespread voter fraud in the coming months, it could end up depressing Republican voter turnout.
“The only problem this causes for Republicans is that if you cast doubt on the results of an election before it happens, then why would Republicans bother voting? This is something Republicans need to address,” he said.
Thune and Cornyn followed McConnell’s lead in rejecting Trump’s claims of widespread voter fraud in 2020.
McConnell warned on January 6, 2021, moments before a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol, that if Congress tried to overturn the election results, “it would harm our republic forever.”
Thune also openly opposed the effort to block the certification of President Biden’s 2020 victory, promising at the time that the effort was “going down like a downed dog.”
And Cornyn acknowledged that Biden was indeed the “president-elect” on December 9, 2020, a month before Trump’s allies tried to block the certification of the election results on January 6.
Both leaders refused to endorse Trump’s claims that the last presidential election was stolen ahead of the 2022 midterm elections. Instead, they urged GOP Senate candidates to focus on the future.
Now, Thune and Cornyn must decide whether they will continue to be part of the bulwark against baseless allegations of voter fraud when McConnell steps down as leader at the end of the year.
“I believe they should say that the United States has the best electoral system in the world, but it is not always perfect. If there is clear evidence of irregularities, of course we will contest the election, but all Americans must express confidence in our electoral system,” said Vin Weber, a GOP strategist and former member of House Republican leadership.
Republicans are the favorites to regain control of the Senate and have about a 50% chance of maintaining their majority in the House, which would put Republicans in Congress right in the middle of any debate over the validity of this year’s election results.
Lawmakers passed the 2022 Electoral Count Reform Act to reduce the likelihood that a losing candidate would try again to block the outcome of a presidential election when Congress meets to certify it.
This reform, approved as part of a year-end spending package, clarifies that the constitutional role of the vice president when Congress meets in joint session to certify an election is purely ministerial and he or she does not have the right to decide disputes over voters.
It identifies the governor of each state as responsible for presenting the certificate identifying a state’s electors and provides for expedited judicial review of disputes over competing electoral slates.
And it raises the threshold for objecting to a list of electors by requiring at least one-fifth of the members of each chamber – the Senate and the House – to object to a list of electors.
The issue of voter fraud and the question of whether Republicans should accept the results of the 2024 election are back in the political spotlight after Trump refused to commit to accepting the result if he lost.
Trump told The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in a recent interview that “if everything is honest, I will gladly accept the results.”
But he warned that he would not accept the election if he suspected that the results were not honest.
“If it’s not, you’ll have to fight for the country’s rights,” he said.
And he told Time magazine in an interview published last week that how he would react to the results “would depend” on how he perceived the “fairness of the election.”
“If we don’t win, you know, it depends. It always depends on the fairness of the election,” he said.
Now other Republicans face the same questions about whether they will accept the election results, and Republican politicians who want to stay in Trump’s good graces refuse to guarantee the integrity of the system.
Asked by Kristen Welker, moderator of NBC’s “Meet the Press,” at least five times whether he would commit to accepting the election results, Scott, who is running for a spot on Trump’s ticket, refused to answer yes or no. .
“I know the American people – their voices will be heard. And I believe that President Trump will be our next president. It’s that simple,” he said.
Thune and Cornyn urged fellow Republicans to move forward after the 2020 election, warning that claiming widespread fraud without evidence was a political loser.
“I don’t think relitigating or rehashing the past is a winning strategy,” Thune warned ahead of the midterm elections, in which Trump-backed candidates lost key Senate races.
Cornyn agreed with that advice.
“Most voters are concerned about what will happen in the future and not what happened in the past,” he said two years ago.
This story originally appeared on thehill.com read the full story
