Trump Won. What Happens to His Election Fraud Movement?
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Park Fair listener, my name is Sarah. And Sarah hath named me Amira. And we hail from the fair city of San Jose, California. This evening, we are backstage at Amira's middle school production of Shakespeare's The Tempest. I am cast in the ensemble as a goddess and a spirit. This podcast was recorded at 1:05 p.m. on Wednesday, November 13th, 2024. And while the world may have altered greatly by the time you cast your ears upon this here pod, I will still be here listening from my cue to go on stage.

Do enjoy the episode, dear listeners. Prospero hath commanded it. Pretty good. That was amazing. I feel like a couple weeks ago I asked, I was like, more theater timestamps. And the people delivered. The people delivered. Oh my gosh, I love that so much. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Deepa Shivaram. I cover the White House. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. And Shannon Bond, who covers how information circulates online, is here with us. Hey, Shannon.

Hey, guys. All right. So today on the show, we're talking about the future of election fraud, lies and conspiracies now that Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election. And Miles, we're going to start with you with your reporting here. It's sort of a wind has been taken out of the sails, air is deflating out of the balloon kind of a situation. At least that's what some election officials are saying. Is that right? Yeah, I've been talking to election officials all week. And, you know, before leading up to the election, I'm from Florida, Deepa, and

The feeling I kept getting leading up to the election as I talked to election officials was that feeling when I was a kid when you knew a hurricane was coming right for where you live and you're doing all this preparation. You really don't know what's coming. And now, but it's like when the hurricane moves at the last second and hits somewhere else and you've been like,

preparing. Your house is like full of sandbags and all this stuff. And yet it's like sunny outside. It's so quiet for most election officials out there. I mean, they're still doing the work of counting. They've got weeks of audits still to come. Things like that. Certification has just begun in many, many localities and it's going to go up to the state level. But on a whole, election officials are looking around and thinking about how different this looks compared to what they were expecting.

I asked Lisa Tolison about this. She's a county clerk in Rock County, Wisconsin. Here's what she said. It's completely different. I was, you know, this time four years ago, I was getting nasty phone calls constantly in my office and we had police protection for a while.

And it's been very quiet. One person at my board of canvas, one observer. In 2020, I had 12 to 15. I don't think quiet was what we were expecting at all. No, not at all. And honestly, I think the important thing to note here is the actual specifics of how the election was run are just not that different from 2024 to 2020 in terms of election officials.

did the same thing. People voted and they counted those votes. The difference is the outcome. I mean, that's what election officials across the board are saying. Donald Trump winning just kind of changed the game around a lot of these narratives. It's really like people did their jobs four years ago. People did their jobs this month. But Shannon, I mean, there are still some elements of this that are kind of still being sorted, right? Yeah. I mean, I think we need to remember that, you know, there's this election denial movement, really, that Trump has inspired over these past four years. And they've spent that time, you know, building up this community, this infrastructure that

around the idea that there is rampant election fraud and that you need to be looking out for it. And so, you know, it was quite striking for them, too, and the idea that they were sort of building up this idea that there was fraud in the weeks ahead of the election, even through Election Day. And Trump himself, you know, I think at one point

posted on Truth Social on Election Day about, you know, fraud happening in Pennsylvania. Then, of course, returns start to come in. And a lot of that talk immediately died down. But we then saw some sort of spins on it happening, right? So there was this particular narrative twist that was happening among folks who, you know, had long been claiming that 2020 was stolen, that the idea was that the 2024 results, Trump's victory, actually validated those

claims. And one of the things people were seizing on, especially in the first days, right, right after Election Day, as ballots are still being counted, was the idea that there were these differences in vote totals and particularly this idea that Kamala Harris did not appear to be getting as many votes as Joe Biden had back in 2020. And so this idea that there were these missing Democratic votes

You saw folks seizing on those and saying, well, look, we were right. Like 2020 was stolen because how could so many fewer Democrats be voting? Now, of course, we all know it takes a long time to count ballots. I live in California where election officials are still counting ballots.

votes. And so what you've seen is in the past week, you know, obviously the number, the total votes for Kamala Harris has actually increased. But there is still this sort of persistent narratives as well as some narratives around certain Senate races like Carrie Lake in Arizona, where you're still seeing people kind of grab onto this idea that maybe this justifies the idea that there was fraud back in 2020 or maybe there was still some problems in 2024.

The new reality, right, Shannon, is that there is going to be garbage online no matter what is happening. And I think it feels like to me that the difference is whether there's kind of real world impact from all that garbage happening online. And like we are still seeing a lot of the claims being made, but that it doesn't seem to be rising to people actually acting on it in the same way as 2020. I'm curious.

And from both of your perspectives, as folks who covered this so intensely, like not even just the last several months, but like four years plus now of tracking all of this stuff, are you shocked by how this played out in the immediate aftermath of this election? I'm not. I mean, honestly, I think when you actually look at the incentive structures of election denial, the idea of trying to undermine the legitimacy of elections is

if you win an election, you are not incentivized in the same way to lie about those results than if you lose the election. And so I think at the simplest way, I guess it just kind of makes sense a little bit to me. What about you, Shannon? Yeah, I mean, I did wonder sort of what was going to happen if it became very clear, you know, relatively quickly as it did, that Trump won. And I do think we've also seen a little bit of people, you know, in this election, quote unquote, election integrity movement,

You try to claim that the reason that there wasn't a steal, there wasn't a rig this year was because of the work they have done over the past four years. And the other thing I think that's sort of been not surprising to me is that the fact that we do still have people seizing on some of this.

our election system is complicated and it is different from state to state. And there's all sorts of different rules and the counting process is still confusing to people. And so all of that stuff, you know, does sort of create the breeding ground. So it's not surprising to me we're still seeing some of this. But I think the thing that, you know, that Miles really captured, this idea that it's not

translating into actual action, I think a huge part of that is that, you know, you don't have that message from the top, right? Like Donald Trump is accepting, obviously accepting his victory. And so that's not setting the tone for people to really act on these theories that they have. But I do think like,

There's this open question that I'm really interested in and how this changes his views about the 2020 election. I doubt it's going to be some sort of press conference on January 21st where he says, actually, you know, I've changed my mind about a lot of stuff. But as I've been talking to Republicans over the last few days, I've been talking to them.

I think I've gotten a lot of conflicting answers on the expectation on whether Trump is going to find a way to stop talking about 2020 as much as he did previously, because it does kind of take away from the fact that he is going to win the popular vote here in 2024. One would assume that is going to be what he focuses on. But.

But it's really hard to predict Trump, right? And so I'm really curious to see how the narrative around 2020 comes from the top. Yeah. And to be clear, like we should point out that Donald Trump still never admitted that he didn't win in 2020. So, you know, keep that in mind through all of this. All right. We're going to take a quick break and we'll have more in a moment.

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And we're back. And, you know, there are still ballots being counted. There were some conversations, potential concerns about the process being held up, but it doesn't appear that that is happening. No, we're seeing across the board certification has begun in a lot of localities. Georgia, for instance, just certified at the local level across the state. And there were a lot of concerns leading up to this election that people who were emboldened by Trump, Democrats,

would potentially, we saw this in earlier election cycles, would decline to certify or would vote to decline to certify. And we did not see that anywhere in Georgia yesterday. Certification has gone smoothly there and it's gone smoothly across the country. We have not seen any of these fears around certification bubble up. And most experts think that's because Trump won. There is some election conspiracies on the left that are floating around.

But the big difference, Shannon, is that there's no one with political power amplifying them. The scale on how much this has spread, how many people are maybe spreading this information, it's just astronomically different. Yeah, that's right. I mean, we're seeing some of these same dynamics around counting, right, and the idea that there are differences in vote totals and differences in turnout being used by some folks on the left to say, hey, you know, there's something fishy going on here. Where did these votes go? You know, maybe Trump cheated, right?

Which, again, like there's no indication that happened. All election officials and the intelligence community and cybersecurity officials have said this has been a very secure election. But, you know, we are seeing some of that happening. But you're right. It's not sort of taking off in the same way. There have been some individual posts on platforms like X or Meta's Threads or Blue Sky that are, you know, in some cases have gotten millions of views online.

but we're not seeing the sort of broader network effect happening. And, you know, there's a couple reasons for this. First of all, it's

There's this sort of idea that researchers talk about of evidence generation infrastructure. I know that sounds like a mouthful. The idea is that on the right, you know, you've had this whole sort of community of folks who spend their time like digging through to find evidence that, you know, there is something wrong with elections, that there is, you know, issues with counting. You've seen the videos go viral, right? Or the pictures people are taking saying, hey, it's someone pulling a, you know, box of ballots out, right? And, you know, unfairly putting them in or problems with voting machines, right?

There just is not that same kind of content being produced on the left. There's also on the left, there's just not the same kind of network of these high profile influencers and partisan media outlets who are then willing to take these claims and amplify them and that we've seen so developed over the past four years.

You know, when I spoke to researchers at the University of Washington who have been studying election fraud, the way they put it is there's just no left wing equivalent of the 2020 stop the steal mobilization effort. And that's the thing. I mean, 2020, that was what was so extraordinary about 2020 was Trump's actions, not the idea that there's a portion of the population who denies election results. That has all.

always existed in a small faction in American elections. If you have elections, there's going to be some portion of the population that has an issue with how they were run. I mean, we did see this a lot in 2004, in the 2004 presidential election. There were a lot of conspiracy theories that year about voting machines in Ohio, for instance, but you didn't see John Kerry coming out and saying that and saying, I will not concede to George W. Bush. What one expert said to me one time was that, you

the population will always believe conspiracy theories. It's just a question of whether you have political elites parroting those things. And that's how you get to the place where we are right now, where more than a third of Americans question, you know, the election integrity. Well, yeah, I mean, Shannon, to your point in their story that you had that came out this week on NPR was, you know, folks who were spreading that hashtag, right, of asking Kamala Harris not to concede. Like, I definitely woke up on Wednesday morning and saw that

In a flood of my, you know, feed on X of people being like, my ballot was never counted. Like, how come Democrats aren't talking about this? And then, you know, literally hours later, she conceded the race. And in your reporting, I mean, those hashtags, even the number of hashtags that were being tweeted out declined.

That's right. And that just shows you like how important it is and that tone is set from the top and the role really ultimately that Trump played in the 2020 Stop the Steal movement that is like the major, major difference here. And, you know, I think that's probably encouraging, right, in terms of we're thinking about like

You know, how do we deal with the fact, as Miles says, like there's always going to be some portion of the electorate that is distrustful of things or that might be spreading rumors and conspiracy theories. You know, I think it's important to know it really does make a difference. The people with the biggest megaphones, what they are saying, what they are deciding to encourage. That being said, though, I mean, one in three Americans being distrustful of the process, like even though it's like maybe amplified at the top, you know, sort of a situation, it still affects everyone.

So many people, both on the left and on the right. Yeah. And as we talked about, you know, this idea that you've had Trump set that tone and then you have had this entire sort of cottage industry pop up, right, of people who are more or less like professional election deniers.

You have folks who go out and do like events across the country, you know, drawing people to come and hear them speak. You have folks like Dinesh D'Souza, the right wing commentator, who was one of the people, you know, making these initial claims last week about the idea that there were these supposed missing votes proved that 2020 was stolen. You know, he made a documentary about, you know, alleged ballot mules in 2020, sort of claiming to prove fraud back

then. You know, he has written books like there are people who do kind of make money off of this, have figured out ways to monetize election denial. And I don't think the idea that that Trump won in 2024 is going to stop, you know, some of these folks from continuing to try to monetize that message. But I will say, I do think that there's a portion of that population that is kind of distrustful right now in elections that election officials see at least

anecdotally in the last week, they do see the quiet right now as a huge portion of it is because Trump won. But I think they're also saying we've been working on this for four years, trying to educate people. And I think when you look at how people feel about the election system, so much of it goes back to what the candidates say. Think about, you know, early voting is a good example. In 2020, Republicans were

very distrustful and wanted to vote on Election Day. This time around, Donald Trump and other Republican candidates say, no, go vote early. And you saw Republicans do that. And so I think a portion of that distrust is malleable at this point. I think it's a question of how much is actually baked in versus if this idea of election denial just became a little bit less mainstream or even less talked about. I think it's unclear at this point how much of that population would still keep believing these things.

All right, Shannon Bond, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. Let's leave it there for today. I'm Deepa Shivaram. I cover the White House. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.

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