Terry McAuliffe Spreads Another Stolen-Election Conspiracy Theory

T erry McAuliffe is at it again. On Sunday he openly embraced yet another stolen-election conspiracy theory rather than admit that his party legitimately lost an election. This time, it was the 2018 gubernatorial race in Georgia:

McAuliffe claimed that Stacey Abrams should be the governor of Georgia, accusing Brian Kemp (who ran for governor while also serving as secretary of state) of having “disenfranchised” more than 1 million Georgia voters in the state’s 2018 gubernatorial election. “She would be the governor of Georgia today had the governor of Georgia not disenfranchised 1.4 million Georgia voters before the election,” McAuliffe said as he introduced Abrams at a campaign event on Sunday. “That’s what happened to Stacey Abrams. They took the votes away.” Last week, McAuliffe nodded along as Abrams repeated what some have described as her “Big Lie” about the 2018 election.

This is a lie. As we have covered extensively here, there is no evidence of actual Georgia voters being unable to cast ballots in 2018, and certainly not in the numbers needed to make a difference to Kemp’s 55,000-vote margin of victory or even the 8,700-vote margin by which Kemp exceeded Georgia’s runoff threshold. Updating the voter rolls by removing dormant registrations does not “disenfranchise” voters; it is necessary in order to keep the rolls accurate and up to date, as many people move or die every year. For that reason purges of old names from the list is required by federal law, and typically is permitted by federal courts. It is also required by Georgia law. The 2002 Help America Vote Act, the federal enactment that currently governs that process, passed Congress (including a Democrat-controlled Senate) with extensive bipartisan support at a time when McAuliffe was the chairman of the Democratic Party.

This notwithstanding, Abrams has conducted a years-long campaign falsely alleging that the 2018 election was stolen and the product of a “rigged” system. For this she has been lionized and defended by the media and leading Democrats, which is why she is a prominent enough national figure that McAuliffe is doing appearances with her and talking up her stolen-election theories.

It is no surprise that McAuliffe would go this route. He has repeatedly, publicly claimed that George W. Bush “stole” the 2000 election. He has continued to defend that claim during this campaign. As Democratic Party chairman, he ordered a thoroughly bogus forensic “investigation” into crackpot theories that voting machines had stolen the 2004 election for Bush in Ohio. In 2019 he warned darkly on Bill Maher’s show that he feared Russians hacking the voting machines to steal the 2020 election for Donald Trump. Attacking election losses as illegitimate and stolen is McAuliffe’s thing, just as it is for Abrams.

McAuliffe and Abrams are the Democrats’ most notorious living offenders on this score, but they are hardly alone. I detailed at length on the eve of the 2016 election how extensively leading Democrats and their partisans had refused to accept the legitimacy of the 2000 election and, in a number of cases, the 2004 election as well. Some Democratic pundits, such as Paul Krugman, have been especially pernicious repeat offenders. Longtime commentators such as Jonathan Chait and Kevin Drum continue to push regularly debunked claims that the 2000 election was stolen.

Thirty-one Democrats voted, with no justifiable basis, against certifying Bush’s 2004 election, in which he won a national popular majority and carried Ohio by 118,000 votes. They included James Clyburn, now the House majority whip; Maxine Waters, now chairwoman of the House Financial Services Committee; Bennie Thompson, now chairman of both the House Homeland Security Committee and the House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack; Raúl Grijalva, now the chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee; Eddie Bernice Johnson, now the chairman of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee; Ed Markey, now a senator; John Conyers, who served as chairman of the House Judiciary and House Oversight Committees; and John Lewis, who today is the namesake of the Democrats’ current election bill. Democrats who ducked that vote include House majority leader Steny Hoyer, Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra, Senators Ben Cardin and Bob Menendez, and current House Intelligence Committee chairman and lead 2019 impeachment manager Adam Schiff.

Things got worse under Donald Trump, and I have also detailed at length the ways in which leading Democrats and the media pushed at every turn theories that Trump had stolen the White House, even convincing two-thirds of their own party’s voters of the entirely baseless claim that Russians hacked the voting machines to give Trump his victory. Theories of colluding with the Russians to steal the election, never substantiated by evidence after an exhaustive multiyear investigation, were used as a pretext to hamstring Trump’s ability to exercise the customary powers of the office to which the American people had elected him. All manner of elected Democrats boycotted Trump’s inauguration (during which there was street violence that their rhetoric inspired), as they had with Bush’s.

Even the 2020 election wasn’t safe; Democrats tried to go to the House to overturn an election they had lost in Iowa, rather than test their claims in court, and even spun theories that voting machines had stolen a House seat in New York.

The typical rejoinder by Democrats and their partisans to all this is that no individual Democrat ever did anything quite as bad in contesting the legitimacy of an election, calling it stolen and rigged, and seeking to overturn it as what Trump did between November 2020 and January 2021 (and continues to promote today). Which is true enough so far as it goes, but also a lousy defense for their integrity and an outright evasion of their responsibility in creating the climate, over two decades, in which Trump’s antics met with a receptive audience. “We’re just doing what they did” or, worse, “We’re just doing what they would do” is a terrible argument for doing things that are objectively bad. But it is also a very common and foreseeable one. As with so much of the Trump years, Democrats sowed for many years and banked on the fundamental normality and orderliness of Republican voters to avoid reaping what they sowed.

In the real world many Republican voters spent two solid decades watching Democrats pour acid over the essential democratic virtue of accepting defeats and partisan transfers of power. They tried taking the high road in response and saw that this only encouraged the Democrats. They saw an improper campaign to deny Trump the power of the presidency for the duration of his term; they saw Democrats mutilating the rule of law for electoral advantage and the Supreme Court letting them do it. So, an unfortunate number of them gravitated to Trump’s approach: Retaliate in kind, and then some. Democrats complaining that things got worse are forgetting something: This is how slippery slopes work. You push the cart downhill for two decades, and then you act surprised when it picks up speed as the other guy gets in? Give me a break.

It can get worse. But the question is whether people who complain about Trump’s attacks on the system actually care about the system, or are just using them as a partisan club. Anyone who is remotely serious about wanting to restore American confidence in our electoral system and repair the damage caused by people spreading stolen-election lies rather than admit defeat must prove it by opposing McAuliffe in Virginia and Abrams in Georgia. Otherwise, don’t expect anybody to take you seriously.