Election denialism loses steam as Trump flip flops on accepting midterm results

The day after Democrats won sweeping victories in the midterm elections, an Arizona county official delivered a stark warning to his fellow Republicans about election denialism — it needed to stop.

The state has been a hotbed of election fraud conspiracy theories. After President Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss, state lawmakers even pursued an audit in Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, that found no evidence of fraud.

“To my fellow Republicans who have been trafficking in these lies for the last six years, you need to stop,” Maricopa County Supervisor Thomas Galvin said at a county Board of Supervisors meeting.

As Republicans grasp for answers following their stunning losses, election officials, voting rights advocates and researchers are watching to see whether Trump will lead the party toward false narratives around election fraud or to accept normal explanations, such as voter dissatisfaction and poor campaign messages.

The path they choose could help determine whether the country moves past an era defined by Trump’s election denial after his 2020 loss. 

But Trump has sent mixed signals.

As the scale of GOP losses became clear last week, Trump initially pledged to accept the results. 

That changed over the weekend. On Truth Social, Trump shared posts from others suspicious of the results. By Monday, he had grown more explicit.

“Does anybody really believe that this ‘Election’ was honest. How could the Polls be so wrong???” Trump wrote in a social media post.

‘180 in an hour’

Polls leading up to the midterms largely favored Democrats, though some understated the level of support for Democratic candidates. 

Trump has long promoted falsehoods about stolen elections and voter fraud. After the 2016 election, Trump claimed millions of people had illegally voted for Democrat Hillary Clinton. 

In 2020, Trump tried to overturn his losses in key battleground states with lawsuits that raised unfounded claims of fraud. His rhetoric eventually led his supporters to storm the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

He also pressured election officials, including a demand that Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger “find” enough votes to overturn his loss in the state.

Gabriel Sterling, a Republican and former longtime official in the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office, publicly denounced Trump’s allegations of voter fraud in the wake of the 2020 election. 

Now a senior fellow at the Secure Democracy Foundation, a nonprofit focused on strengthening elections, Sterling voiced concern this week that election denialism will become a tactic of politicians moving forward.

“I was sort of surprised and pleased about the president’s initial responses,” Sterling said in an interview. “But I also took it with a grain of salt, knowing that he can go 180 in an hour, depending on who he’s talking to.”

Fewer online rumors

Election rumors haven’t gained nearly the same level of traction this year as they did in 2020, researchers of online disinformation say. 

Immediately after Trump’s initial acknowledgment of Republican defeat, only a few committed election denialists were questioning not simply the results but the security of the elections, according to The Election Rumor Rundown, a website by the Center for an Informed Public at the University of Washington.

Kate Starbird, a professor at the University of Washington who studies online disinformation, wrote in a viral social media post last week that the atmosphere in her lab was “giddy” as her team absorbed the possibility that claims of rigged elections may be in the past, “at least for the time being.”

As Trump has moved back toward denialism, however, online conversation around denialism and conspiracy theories has grown. Starbird shared a graph on Monday showing a spike in discussions on X focused on rigged, dishonest or fraudulent elections after Trump posted on his site, Truth Social.

In a Monday interview, Starbird said “hardcore” election deniers have been advancing conspiracy theories for the past week. They have been excited by Trump’s return to the denialism conversation, which she said also drew in additional online influencers.

Still, Starbird said election deniers lack the kind of popular support and infrastructure they’ve enjoyed in the past. Within days of Election Day 2020, protests were already emerging around the results, but that kind of on-the-ground movement is absent this year.

“I’m still pretty confident that the ingredients for a full-fledged election denialism movement are not in place,” Starbird said.

Lawsuits show ‘red line’

Since Election Day, conspiracy theories have not received nearly as much attention from major media platforms as they did following the 2020 election. That year, Trump supporters made wild, false claims about voting machines during TV appearances.

Some of those statements led to massive legal payouts. Dominion Voting Systems, a large manufacturer of election equipment, sued Fox News, alleging defamation by hosts and guests. Fox settled the lawsuit in 2023 for $787.5 million. In 2024, Newsmax settled a lawsuit filed by Smartmatic, which builds electronic voting systems, for $40 million.

Two former Georgia election workers sued former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, a Trump political adviser, for defamation surrounding the 2020 election, and secured a $148 million judgment against him. In early 2025, the women reached a settlement that included undisclosed compensation.

“I think those suits did chastise people and remind potential dangerous elements where the red line is where you can really get yourself in trouble,” Kevin Johnson, executive director of Election Reformers Network, a nonpartisan group that seeks to protect elections from polarization, said in an interview.

Election deniers join administration

At the same time, Johnson added, some election deniers ended up working in the second Trump administration. 

Former U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi said Trump had won Pennsylvania in 2020, though Biden won. FBI Director Kash Patel has refused to say whether Biden won the 2020 election — a stance echoed by numerous Trump nominees who evade offering a direct answer when questioned during congressional hearings.

Since Election Day, some Trump supporters have joined the president in embracing denialism about the midterms. Kari Lake, a prominent Arizona Republican and Trump’s nominee to be U.S. ambassador to Jamaica, wrote on social media without evidence that the “math isn’t mathing here.” Mike Lindell, the former MyPillow CEO, has called for a “full recount” of the midterm elections.

However, nearly all high-ranking elected Republicans have acknowledged the losses, with some putting forward political and policy explanations. 

For instance, Vice President JD Vance, widely expected to run for president in 2028, faulted the war with Iran and hasn’t repeated Trump’s denialism comments.

Sen. Ted Cruz, who will soon be the only Texas Republican in a statewide office, described the election results as a “Watergate-level repudiation.” 

House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, said the “people have spoken.”

Confidence in elections

Election denialism’s more limited reach so far this year among leading Republicans — other than Trump — comes after election administrators spent the past six years attempting to bolster public confidence in elections, current and former election officials said.

Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, a Democrat, said in an interview that election officials had prepared to respond to false claims surrounding the election, not only by rebutting falsehoods but also providing accurate information about elections and the results. In his state, that included going to court if the Trump administration attempted to interfere, he said.

But so far, Simon said, the volume of rigged and stolen election claims in Minnesota doesn’t match what he’s seen before.

“Compared to past election cycles, I have seen fewer examples after this election of people making election denialism claims,” Simon said.

Americans broadly trust elections, according to a survey conducted in September and October by the Pew Research Center. 

Nearly identical percentages of registered voters supporting Republican and Democratic candidates — 90% and 91%, respectively — expressed some level of confidence that elections in their community would be well run. By contrast, 97% of Democratic-supporting voters voiced confidence in 2024, compared to 88% of Republican-supporting voters.

Building trust in elections requires a lot of work in between elections, said Ari Mittleman, executive director of Keep Our Republic, a pro-democracy nonprofit. Over time, the role of election officials has evolved to encompass public outreach.

“Even if their job description largely centers around being an administrator, they now need to be an ambassador for the entire profession,” Mittleman said in an interview.

Ahead of Election Day, Trump and other federal officials declined to flatly rule out forms of federal election interference, raising fears among Democrats and voting rights advocates that the administration would try to disrupt voting or discredit the results.

The Trump administration heavily promoted efforts to root out noncitizen voting. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security arrested dozens of noncitizens over alleged election crimes in the weeks before the election and the U.S. Department of Justice sued dozens of states in an unsuccessful attempt to obtain sensitive voter data to aid its efforts to find noncitizen voters.

The Justice Department also sued California to try to force the state to set aside the ballots of 20,000 individuals the Trump administration said were suspected noncitizens. The DOJ dropped the lawsuit after the Supreme Court rejected the request on the eve of Election Day.

Will ‘fever’ break?

Speaking on the Friday after Election Day, Simon said he remained ready for legal action if necessary. He said he was pleasantly surprised by Trump’s tentative acceptance of the results, but warned that “as we’ve come to know and learn, that could change” — seeming to anticipate the president’s turn toward denialism days later.

Simon said he was not yet convinced the 2026 election would “break the fever” of election denialism, given the looming presidential race in 2028. Election deniers are still incentivized to push false claims for online attention or money, he said.

“My hope is that we can get back to understanding that elections are fundamentally fair and honest and secure,” Simon said.