For nearly two years, we’ve heard election conspiracy theories spouted by Donald Trump and his allies that are obviously false and truly insane, but you at least have to give points for creativity to whomever came up with the idea that Venezuelan voting machines were changing tens of thousands of votes.
Today, Trump promoted what might be the dumbest and laziest election conspiracy theory yet. “Something Stinks In Georgia,” reads the headline of a Substack post written by former Newsmax personality Emerald Robinson and promoted by Trump’s Save America PAC. “The GOP primary numbers are funny because the votes were rigged.”
Trump blasts out article that claims Kemp’s 50 point victory in the Georgia GOP gubernatorial primary was due to voter fraud. 400,000 Mules? pic.twitter.com/2udbJiGxgX
— Jonathan Swan (@jonathanvswan) May 31, 2022
The crux of Robinson’s post:
On Primary Day in Georgia, Kemp gets 74% and Perdue gets 22%. Nobody in any election in America gets 74% of the votes. Ever. It doesn’t happen.
Obvious fraud.
But the thing that Robinson claims never happens actually happens with regularity. Aaron Blake points to a 2009 study that “found that about 1 in 10 Senate incumbents took less than 75 percent of the vote in their primaries. Many faced token or no opposition, but it does happen — very regularly.”
Just to take a few examples: In 2020, GOP senator Ben Sasse won 75 percent in Nebraska’s Republican primary. In the March 2022 Texas primaries, more than a dozen House races saw one candidate win at least 70 percent of the vote, including some Republicans, such as Chip Roy and Dan Crenshaw, who had drawn the wrath of Donald Trump over the 2020 election. Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick carried close to 77 percent of the vote, while Governor Abbott carried nearly 67 percent in his race against Allen West.
Marjorie Taylor Greene carried 70 percent of her district at the same time Brian Kemp was re-nominated statewide with 74 percent of the vote. A conspiracy theory about Georgia that tried to account for Greene’s victory would at least have the virtue of being entertaining.
The boring truth is that Trump’s endorsement carries some weight and was likely enough to account for J. D. Vance’s eight-point win in Ohio’s five-way Senate race. Trump’s endorsement is certainly responsible for Mehmet Oz’s 920-vote lead in the Pennsylvania GOP primary where more than 1,300,000 people voted. But a Trump endorsement isn’t magic: Just look at Roy Moore’s 2017 victory in Alabama; or at Madison Cawthorn’s 2022 loss with Trump’s endorsement and Cawthorn’s 2020 victory without Trump’s endorsement; or the Trump candidates who lost gubernatorial primaries in Nebraska and Idaho this year. Trump himself likely understands the limits of his own power: If he thought his endorsement was worth 20 points in Ohio’s gubernatorial primary, he would have endorsed one of incumbent governor Mike DeWine’s two GOP opponents.