Since the 2020 election, millions of Republican voters have accepted former President Donald Trump’s false claim that the presidential election was stolen from him. And now, here in 2022, many Republican politicians have capitalized on this lie and have won elections of their own.
This election cycle, FiveThirtyEight is tracking the views of every Republican candidate for Senate, House, governor, attorney general and secretary of state on the legitimacy of the 2020 election. And now that we’re halfway through the primary season, we can say definitively that at least 120 election deniers have won their party’s nomination and will be on the ballot in the fall.
How did we arrive at that number?
Categorizing candidates’ stances on the legitimacy of the 2020 election is not a straightforward exercise. Sure, some Republicans openly state the race was stolen, while others (a much smaller number) have unambiguously accepted the legitimacy of President Biden’s victory. But many have tried to walk a fine line between the two — for example, by accepting the results but still expressing concern about mass voter fraud, or by winking at the idea that the election was stolen without saying so outright. So we’ve ended up putting candidates into one of six categories:
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