Even before the polls opened in Virginia on Tuesday, Republican pundits lined up to assure their base that any election resulting in a Democratic victory was supposedly "stolen."
This is now their go-to play in advance of every election—especially consequential ones with a national audience. Sure, Republicans haven't won the popular vote in a presidential contest since 2004 (as GOP Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger notes). And now more than ever, they relish catering to their base voters to the exclusion of absolutely everyone else.
So even as Republicans place their bets on a 50-minus-1 strategy in most elections, they groom their base to believe their views have majority support and they are the victims of disenfranchisement—which couldn’t be further from the truth.
Witness former GOP speaker and now fringe conspiracist Newt Gingrich on Fox News Monday when asked whether a close finish in Virginia's gubernatorial race could signal good things for Republicans.
"First of all, if it's really tight, they'll steal it," Gingrich responded, referring to Democrats. "So you can't afford to have a really tight election. You have to win by a big enough margin that they can't steal it."
Gingrich, once a supposed thought leader in the GOP, is nothing more than a conspiracy theory trash talker now. Desperate to stay relevant, Gingrich is just regurgitating fringe talking points fashioned by coup-inciter Donald Trump and indictee-turned-pardon-recipient Steve Bannon.
On his radio show last week, Bannon didn't just lie, he offered the polar opposite of the truth: projecting the entire sick GOP strategy onto Democrats.
“They’re Democrats. They’re going to try to steal it," Bannon told his audience according to Mother Jones. "They can’t win elections they don’t steal, right? They understand this. This is what they did in ’20. It’s time now to start calling them out.”
Trump started pounding the "steal" drum a couple months ago, when he told a right-wing radio show on Sept. 1, “You know how they cheat in elections. The Virginia governor’s election — you better watch it.”
On Monday, Trump also released a statement underscoring the notion that something untoward was afoot in Virginia.
"I am not a believer in the integrity of Virginia's elections, lots of bad things went on, and are going on," Trump wrote. "Terry McAuliffe is a low-life politician who lies, cheats, and steals," Trump added.
The GOP's constant baseless rants about stolen elections have in many ways had the desired effect. An NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll this week found that nearly two-thirds of GOP voters (64%) said they don't trust elections to be fair, saying they either have very little faith in elections or no faith at all.
Overall, the poll found that 58% of respondents had either a great deal/good amount of trust in elections to be fair, including 86% of Democrats, 60% of independents, and just 34% of Republicans.
But Trump's Big Lie hasn't just stoked distrust among Republicans and GOP-leaners, it has also made them more prone to violence. In a PRRI poll also released this week, 30% of Republicans agreed that "true American patriots might have to resort to violence in order to save our country." That sentiment was particularly high among respondents who believe 2020 was "stolen" from Trump, with 39% of that cohort endorsing potential violence.
The GOP’s perpetual commitment to the baseless “steal” narrative could have some short-term upsides for Democrats, but ultimately it is serving to entirely undermine the nation’s democratic system of government.
On the one hand, regardless of the Virginia results, Republicans are continually depressing some of their voters by incessantly stoking distrust in them. On the other hand, Trump and his henchmen are grooming his voters for violence, which is surely baked into their calculations.
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