Three Election Deniers Just Quietly Admitted Biden Won

CNN asked five Republican candidates for governor one question. Three answered it, in writing, without apologizing or explaining, and nobody has made anything of it. That silence is the story.

Last week CNN’s investigative unit sent the same question to five Republican nominees for governor in battleground states.

Who won the 2020 election?

Every one of the five has a record on this. Andy Biggs in Arizona and Tom Tiffany in Wisconsin both voted in Congress to overturn the result. Stacy Garrity in Pennsylvania and John James in Michigan built political careers in states where the loss was contested loudest. Rick Jackson in Georgia launched his campaign with an advertisement depicting Brad Raffensperger, the secretary of state who refused Trump’s demand to find votes, as Judas.

Three of them answered.

Tiffany, Garrity, and Jackson each acknowledged that Joe Biden won the 2020 election, and each committed to certifying the winner of the 2028 presidential election if elected.

There was no press conference and no explanation of when they had changed their minds. They answered a reporter’s email and moved on.

Biggs and James did not respond.

What the answer costs

To understand why three sentences in a CNN questionnaire matter, you have to understand what has been true for the last five and a half years.

In December 2020, the Washington Post asked all 249 Republicans in the House and Senate who had won. Twenty-nine responded. Two hundred and twenty refused to take a position, which is eighty-eight percent of the congressional Republican party declining to answer a question about a completed election.

The refusal outlasted the recounts, the lawsuits, the certification, and the inauguration, and somewhere in there it hardened into a script with a fairly rigid grammar.

On Meet the Press, Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas would concede only that Joe Biden was sworn into office.

Asked by Kristen Welker whether Trump lost, Senator Tom Cotton said that Joe Biden is currently the president, and called the question a gotcha and a game.

And in July of this year, Aaron Peterson, a nominee for a federal judgeship in Alaska, told Congress that President Biden was certified as the winner of the 2020 presidential election and served as the 46th president.

Look at what those three have in common.

Biden was sworn in. Biden is currently the president. Biden was certified as the winner.

All three are passive. Biden gets sworn, gets certified, currently occupies something. In none of them does he win anything. The grammar takes him out as the actor, which is the move you make when you have to concede a fact without conceding what it means.

Three men in three decades of a career do not arrive at the same sentence structure by accident. Somebody worked it out and the rest of them learned it.

The judge

Peterson’s case is worth staying with, because it strips out every excuse available to the others.

He was not running for anything. He was not raising money or facing a primary electorate. He was a nominee for a lifetime appointment to the federal bench, being asked, under the standard questioning any judicial nominee receives, about a settled matter of fact resolved by sixty-odd courts, multiple recounts, and a certified electoral count.

He would not say it.

A man asking the Senate to trust him with a lifetime of factual determinations declined to make a factual determination, because making it would have cost him the appointment. He used the phrase instead.

The phrase exists to demonstrate that a man will say the required thing when required. A patron finds that more useful than any policy position, because a policy position might be sincere and would therefore prove nothing.

The other half of the ritual

The same logic runs through the other thing you notice every time one of them is put in front of a microphone.

Nineteen months into this administration, in the middle of a war that has driven approval to thirty-three percent, with fifty percent tariffs triggering a trade war with Canada, with the national debt at forty trillion dollars, the first answer to almost any question about the state of the country is still Joe Biden.

Every party blames its predecessor. That part is ordinary and anyone pretending otherwise is being dishonest. Democrats blamed George W. Bush for years and it worked for a while.

What is not ordinary is that it never expires. The predecessor excuse has a natural half-life. It is potent at six months and threadbare at eighteen, because at some point continuing to use it is an admission that you cannot fix anything. Normal politicians abandon it on schedule out of self-interest.

This one has not decayed, which tells you it is not being used as an explanation.

It is being used the way the passive-voice sentence about certification is used. As a password. The content does not matter and neither does the persuasiveness. What matters is that you said it, on camera, where the people who track such things could hear you.

And notice that the two halves fit together in a way that should be impossible. Biden is responsible for the condition of the country, and Biden was not legitimately elected. Both are asserted by the same people, often in the same interview, and nobody breaks stride.

You cannot hold those two things as beliefs. You can hold them as passwords.

Why three of them answered

Which brings us back to the questionnaire, and to why it matters more than the usual weekly outrage.

Tiffany, Garrity, and Jackson are running statewide in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Georgia. Their electorates are not primary electorates. And under federal law, a governor certifies the presidential result in their state and transmits it, which means every reporter and every opponent is going to ask them this question repeatedly for the next ten weeks.

They did the arithmetic and concluded that the answer costs less than the dodge.

For five years that arithmetic ran the other way, and it ran that way for one reason, which was that Trump could end a Republican career with a post. No argument about Dominion or suitcases ever held this together. The threat did.

At thirty-three percent, in the ninth month of a war his own senators call a mess, with his party bracing for November, that ability is measurably weaker than it was. And you can measure it precisely, without a poll, by counting how many people will still say a false thing on his behalf when a reporter emails them.

Last week, in five battleground states, the count was two.

What it does not mean

Nothing here is redemption and I am not offering it as such.

Tiffany voted to overturn an election and then said, six years later, in writing, that the election he tried to overturn was won by the man who won it. He has not explained the gap and will not be asked to. Jackson called a public official Judas for refusing to help steal a state and has now conceded that the state was not stolen. Garrity is on the record acknowledging a result her party spent half a decade refusing to acknowledge.

They changed their calculations rather than their minds, and only the first of those is on the record.

But it is still the most useful information to come out of this week, because it establishes what the last five years were actually made of.

Ken Buck, the Colorado Republican, said the thing plainly in 2023 after two candidates for Speaker refused to answer him. If we don’t have the moral clarity to decide whether President Biden won or not, he said, we don’t have the moral clarity to rule in this country.

He was right, and he left Congress, and the men who dodged him became more powerful.

Now three of them have answered the question anyway, quietly, because the cost of not answering finally exceeded the cost of answering.

What you are watching is a price move.

And a price that can move down can move back up, which is why the number worth watching between now and November is not the polling.

It is how many of them are still willing to say it.