Brad Raffensperger reminds National Review Online readers that former President Donald Trump wasn’t the first politician in recent memory to dispute election results.
To many people, President Donald Trump’s effort to overturn an election may have seemed unprecedented. Many members of the media have cast Trump’s efforts as unheard of. But sitting in Georgia, it was impossible to watch the events after November 3 without seeing the unmistakable signs of the Stacey Abrams playbook: Don’t concede. Say you were cheated. Allege voter irregularities. File lawsuits. Get witness testimony. Raise money. Repeat.
The parallels in their statements alone are compelling enough. After losing by 55,000 votes in November 2018, Abrams said: “This is not a speech of concession. Concession means to acknowledge an action is right, true or proper. . . . I cannot concede.” After losing by a slimmer 12,000 votes, President Trump told the crowd gathered in Washington, D.C., on January 6 that “we will never concede. It doesn’t happen. You don’t concede when there’s theft involved.”
On January 6, President Trump said his supporters should “fight like hell” and that “if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” Abrams said just a few weeks ago about elections legislation in Georgia that “we are at war, fighting to protect our democracy from domestic enemies at this moment.”
President Trump made unproven allegations of widespread voter fraud his main focus. Members of the media understandably fact-checked the conspiracy theories and made a habit of adding “without evidence” to their reporting.
Abrams, on the other hand, pointed to unproven claims of “voter suppression” to explain her loss in Georgia. However, there has been little to no fact-checking from mainstream outlets of her claims. She has not been pressed to provide evidence and there have been no “without evidence” tags on her continued claims that her election was stolen, even though the “evidence” submitted by Trump and Abrams was the same — inaccurate witness statements that did not stand up to even basic scrutiny.
