The Big Lie, Con't

As I've said several times before in The Big Lie series of posts, the entire point of GOP election lies is to weaken Democratic candidate wins and paint them as cheaters, fraudsters, and crooks in order to justify invalidating those wins and giving the offices to Republicans. In Florida a special election this week for the late Rep Alcee Hastings' seat was won overwhelmingly by Democratic candidate Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick. Her Republican challenger, Avowed racist Confederacy fan Jason Mariner, is now refusing to concede his 60-point loss and is demanding an investigation into "election fraud".

It didn't generate much in the way of national attention, but there was a congressional election this week. In Florida's 20th congressional district, voters elected Democrat Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick to succeed the late Rep. Alcee Hastings, who died in April 2021.

It was not expected to be a competitive contest — Democrats heavily outnumber Republicans in this South Florida district — and it wasn't. President Joe Biden won Florida's 20th with 77 percent support, and Cherfilus-McCormick won the special election with 79 percent support.

But as the CBS affiliate in Miami reported, the unusual part of this story was the response to the outcome from the representative-elect's Republican rival, who hedged on conceding the race.

Now they called the race, I did not win, so they say, but that does not mean that they lost either, it does not mean that we lost," said Republican Jason Mariner. Several hours before the polls even closed, Mariner filed a lawsuit alleging there is a problem with the ballots in Palm Beach and Broward Counties.

The defeated GOP candidate, who didn't quite reach 20 percent of the vote, added, "[W]e'll also have some stuff coming out that we've recently discovered."

Time will tell what's included amidst the "stuff," and Cherfilus-McCormick will be sworn in whether Mariner concedes or not, but the larger concern is that such responses will become common in Republican politics.

Donald Trump, of course, stands out as the biggest sore loser in American history — he went to breathtaking lengths to overturn the will of his own country's voters — but as regular readers may recall, he wasn't alone.

In the state of Washington, for example, the Republican who badly lost the state's gubernatorial race refused to concede, pushed bogus voter fraud claims, and "attempted to sow doubts about the election results" — despite losing by more than 545,000 votes.

 

Expect more races to be challenged like this.

 

Even worse, expect races like this to be overturned and awarded to the Republican.

 

Even far worse, expect people to simply accept the overturning as needful and just.

 

"Any Democrat win is illegitimate" is the 2022 GOP motto.