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      They Insisted the 2020 Election Was Tainted. Their 2022 Primary Wins? Not So Much.

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      Republicans are accepting their primary victories with little concern about the voter fraud they once falsely claimed caused Donald J. Trump’s loss.This spring, when Representative Mo Brooks of Alabama was fighting to win over conservatives in his campaign for Senate, he ran a television ad that boasted, “On Jan. 6, I proudly stood with President Trump in the fight against voter fraud.”But when Mr. Brooks placed second in Alabama’s Republican primary last week, leaving him in a runoff, he said he was not concerned about fraud in his election.“If it’s a close race and you’re talking about a five- or 10-vote difference, well, then, it becomes a greater concern,” he said of his primary results. “But I’ve got more important fish to fry. And so, at some point, you have to hope that the election system is going to be honest.”Mr. Brooks was one of 147 Republican members of Congress who voted on Jan. 6, 2021, to object to the results of the 2020 presidential election. Hundreds more Republican state legislators across the country took similar action in their own capitals. President Biden’s victory, they said, was corrupted by either outright fraud or pandemic-related changes to voting.Now, many of those Republicans are accepting the results of their primaries without complaint. Already this year, 55 of the lawmakers who objected in 2020 have run in competitive primaries, contests conducted largely under the same rules and regulations as those in 2020. None have raised doubts about vote counts. No conspiracy theories about mail ballots have surfaced. And no one has called for a “forensic audit” or further investigations of the 2022 primary results.Republicans’ easy acceptance of a voting system they once slammed as broken exposes a fundamental contradiction in their complaints about the 2020 election. Claims about fraud and stolen elections are often situational — used in some races (against Democrats) but not others (against other Republicans), and to challenge some outcomes (losing) but not others (winning).Mr. Brooks placed second in last week’s Republican primary, but made it into the June 21 runoff.Charity Rachelle for The New York TimesThis phenomenon was on clear display in 2020, when scores of Republicans who repeated allegations about a “rigged” presidential race accepted their own victories based on the same ballots.But the lack of discussion about fraud in this year’s primaries highlights a particular strain of partisanship driving many of the myths about stolen elections.Mr. Brooks offered a simple answer to why he’s not worried about his race: There’s no fraud in Republican primaries, he said.After the Georgia Primary ElectionThe May 24 races were among the most consequential so far of the 2022 midterm cycle.Takeaways: G.O.P. voters rejected Donald Trump’s 2020 fixation, and Democrats backed a gun-control champion. Here’s what else we learned.Rebuking Trump: The ex-president picked losers up and down the ballot in Georgia, raising questions about the firmness of his grip on the G.O.P.G.O.P. Governor’s Race: Brian Kemp scored a landslide victory over David Perdue, delivering Mr. Trump his biggest setback of the 2022 primaries.2018 Rematch: Stacey Abrams, the Democratic nominee for governor, will again face Mr. Kemp — but in a vastly different political climate.“I’m in a Republican primary, and noncitizens don’t normally vote in Republican primaries,” Mr. Brooks said. “In a Republican primary or a Democrat primary, the motivation to steal elections is less because the candidates’ philosophy-of-government differences are minor.”Noncitizens don’t vote in any federal elections in significant numbers, in Alabama or elsewhere, according to a 2020 report from the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. Investigators from both parties have unearthed only minuscule numbers of any type of voter fraud. In recent years, the rare instances of broad fraud schemes that have become public have been engineered by Republicans, including an absentee ballot scheme in North Carolina that led the state’s Board of Elections to order a redo of a House race in 2018.Not all Republicans who spread false claims about the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election considered their own races to be exempt. Some said that “fraud existed” in their own elections and that investigations were needed. Still, they accepted their victories.“We don’t know how much fraud exists or existed because we weren’t able to see,” Representative Scott Perry of Pennsylvania told a local CBS affiliate a week after the 2020 election. Mr. Perry focused on Philadelphia as a source for fraud in the presidential race and called for additional review. He also said he was “humbled” to take his seat in the House.In the Pennsylvania primaries last week, Mr. Perry ran for re-election unopposed. He did not respond to messages left on his cellphone, and his campaign did not return requests for comment.The Republican effort to sow skepticism about elections in racially diverse Democratic cities is a generations-long project, with roots as far back as Richard Nixon’s 1960 defeat against John F. Kennedy. By the time Mr. Trump lost the 2020 election, he and millions of his supporters were primed to believe false allegations about “ballot harvesting” and machines miscounting in America’s populous cities. Mr. Brooks said in an interview that, in Alabama, fraud occurred “in predominantly Democrat parts of the state.”Part of the reason Republican candidates are accepting primary results without talking about fraud is they don’t have Democrats to blame, said Trey Grayson, the former Republican secretary of state in Kentucky.“They’re thinking it’s a primary, it’s our side. We didn’t lose to somebody on the other side who is evil, who’s going to change policy more dramatically,” Mr. Grayson said in an interview. “There’s a tribal, ‘my side’s always right, your side is always wrong. We’re not stealing elections, your side is stealing elections.’”Representative Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina accepted his defeat in the Republican primary on May 17.Logan R. Cyrus for The New York TimesEven candidates who lost this year, either in close elections or decisive defeats, have accepted the results. Representative Madison Cawthorn, who had still been promoting falsehoods about the 2020 election on social media a week before his primary election, conceded and called his rival, Chuck Edwards, the night of his loss.When asked if Mr. Cawthorn had any concerns about fraud in the election, a spokesman for his congressional office declined to comment.In Georgia, the statewide Republican primaries were high-profile contests between Trump-aligned election deniers and officials who blocked Mr. Trump’s attempt to overturn the results. Representative Jody Hice spent much of his campaign railing about Brad Raffensperger, the secretary of state, and his mismanaging elections.Understand the 2022 Midterm ElectionsCard 1 of 6Why are these midterms so important? More

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      At Least Trump Didn’t Get What He Wanted This Week

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      Well, the people have spoken. Sort of.Several major elections this week, and the big story was Georgia. The race Donald Trump certainly seemed to care about most was a Republican primary there involving his enemy Gov. Brian Kemp.Trump, as the world knows, hates hates hates Kemp for insisting on reporting the accurate results of Georgia’s voting in the 2020 presidential race. The rancor runs so deep that Trump’s Save America PAC actually coughed up at least $500,000 toward Kemp’s defeat.Normally, our ex-president sits on his cash like a nesting hen. Must have tugged at his heartstrings to see it being carted away. And to no avail, hehehehehehe. Trump recruited former Senator David Perdue to run against his enemy, and Kemp demolished Perdue by more than three to one.Same story with Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, who Trump told to “find 11,780 votes” after the presidential election and give him the win. Didn’t happen! Yet this week, Raffensperger did so well with Georgia Republican voters that he’s not even going to face a primary runoff.If you’ve got an optimistic nature, here’s a spin you can put on the whole story: Tuesday’s results showed regular Republicans aren’t all still steaming about how the 2020 presidential election was stolen from their man. And they’re not all going to the polls to get revenge.They’re ready to — dare I say it? — move on. No better example than Mike Pence. “I was for Brian Kemp before it was cool,” the former vice president told a crowd near Atlanta.Yes, he really said that. It will be remembered as yet another sign of the wrecked relationship between Trump and his former No. 2. It was also perhaps the only moment in American history when Mike Pence was linked with the word “cool.”OK, that’s enough voter happiness. Back down to Planet Earth. The newly reaffirmed Governor Kemp announced on Tuesday that he and his family were “heartbroken” by the “incomprehensible” school shooting in Texas.Now, Kemp recently signed a bill that will allow Georgians to carry handguns in public pretty much whenever they feel like it — no license or background check required. You’d think — at least wish — that he’d consider a possible link between the wide, wide availability of firearms in this country and the tragic line of mass shooting deaths. Anything can make a difference.Compared with the elementary school shooting in Texas, everything else about this week will be a political footnote. But some of the footnotes are certainly interesting. If we want to pick a theme for Tuesday’s elections, it might be that Donald Trump’s influence isn’t nearly as strong as he thinks it is, and that he may be the only American voter whose chief preoccupation is revisiting the 2020 election on an hourly basis.Getting over it is something Trump can’t abide. Consider the primary in Alabama for a Republican Senate candidate. Perhaps you remember — if you’re very, very, very into elections — that Trump began by backing Representative Mo Brooks, then changed his mind and unendorsed him? Cynics believed Trump had just decided Brooks was a loser, but it’s also possible the congressman had offended our former president by urging voters to “look forward.”That’s the wrong direction to mention when you’re hanging out with the Trump camp.“Mo Brooks of Alabama made a horrible mistake recently when he went ‘woke’ and stated, referring to the 2020 presidential election scam, ‘Put that behind you, put that behind you,’” Trump said as he retracted his endorsement.The outcome of all this drama was that Brooks got less than a third of the vote, behind Katie Britt, the former chief of staff of retiring Senator Richard Shelby. Since Britt failed to get 50 percent, there will be a runoff. Winner will face Democratic nominee Will Boyd this fall.One addendum — which you should really skip over if you’re feeling even modestly depressed: Both Britt and Brooks are in the gun camp as deep as humanly possible. Britt has ads in which she’s aiming a rifle and promising to “shoot straight.” The N.R.A., which endorsed Brooks, praised his efforts to protect “interstate transportation of firearms.” Those of us in states that are desperately trying to keep gun proliferation under control would appreciate it if he focused his energies on something else.Trump’s biggest election night triumph may have been Herschel Walker, the former football player he backed for a Georgia Senate nomination. But Walker’s competition wasn’t exactly top-notch, and now he’ll be running against Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock, who will probably take note of a few items on Walker’s résumé that Trump overlooked. Including allegations of domestic violence, refusal to take part in debates, and the day on the campaign trail when Walker expressed doubt about the theory of evolution. (If it were true, Walker mused, “Why are there still apes? Think about it.”)On the plus side, there was Walker’s eagerness to spend $200,000 entertaining people at Mar-a-Lago. Nothing, it appears, raises the former president’s enthusiasm for a candidate like a willingness to make Donald Trump wealthier.All told, reporters found that seven of the Republicans Trump endorsed this year spent a total of more than $400,000 in campaign money at the resort. So yeah, our ex-president lost a lot politically this election season. But he gained a chunk of cash.Maybe he’ll use some of it for tips when he speaks on Friday at the N.R.A.’s three-day convention in Houston.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Who won, who lost and what was too close to call on Tuesday.

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      Ever since former President Donald J. Trump lost in the state of Georgia during the 2020 presidential election, he has sought revenge against the Republican incumbents there whom he blamed for not helping him overturn the results. On Tuesday, Mr. Trump lost in Georgia again, with his endorsed candidates losing in their Republican primaries for governor, secretary of state and attorney general.But those weren’t the only races that voters decided on Tuesday. Here is a rundown of the winners and losers in some of the most important contests in Georgia, Alabama, Arkansas and Texas:Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, won his primary despite Mr. Trump’s best efforts against him.The Georgia governor who stood up to Mr. Trump, Brian Kemp, easily defeated a Trump-backed challenger. Mr. Kemp will face Stacey Abrams, the Democratic nominee, whom he narrowly defeated four years ago.Chris Carr, Georgia’s attorney general, also defeated his Trump-backed challenger, John Gordon, to win the Republican nomination for that office. Mr. Gordon had embraced Mr. Trump’s election lie and made that a key part of his appeal to voters. Herschel Walker, the former football star and a Trump-backed candidate to represent Georgia in the Senate, defeated a crowded field of Republican rivals. In Georgia, one House Democrat beat another House Democrat in a primary orchestrated by Republicans. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene won the Republican primary for her House district in Georgia.In Texas, a scandal-scarred attorney general defeated a challenger named Bush. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a former White House press secretary under Mr. Trump and the daughter of former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas, won the Republican nomination for governor of Arkansas.Representative Mo Brooks made it into an Alabama Senate runoff after Mr. Trump pulled back his endorsement.In Texas, a Democratic House runoff between Representative Henry Cuellar, a Democrat who opposes abortion rights, and his progressive challenger, Jessica Cisneros, an immigration attorney, was too close to call. (Results are being updated in real time here). More

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      When Will We Get Election Results in Georgia?

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      While there are multiple close races across the country on Tuesday, it is not expected that any will result in the kind of protracted tabulation seen in Pennsylvania, where votes in the Republican Senate primary are still being counted. But the night could still run late in some states.In Georgia, primaries for governor and Senate appear unlikely to be close. Harder to forecast is the Republican primary for secretary of state, where Representative Jody Hice is challenging the incumbent, Brad Raffensperger.Similarly close races are possible in Alabama, where Representative Mo Brooks is facing challengers in the Republican Senate primary, and in Texas, where multiple runoff elections will be decided.But none of those states have a law like the one in Pennsylvania that prevents local election officials from processing absentee ballots before Election Day. In addition, voting by mail is not as popular in states voting on Tuesday as it proved to be in the Pennsylvania primary.Early in-person voting has surged in Georgia — accounting for more than 850,000 votes over three weeks. That should help election officials tabulate full results relatively early on election night.But keep in mind that extremely close races can lead to prolonged counting that may extend into the morning, delaying a final call. More

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      Scorned by Trump, Mo Brooks Rises in Alabama Senate Race

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      Mr. Brooks, a hard-right representative, seems to be making an unlikely comeback in a Senate race in which the Trump endorsement may not determine votes of Trump supporters.CLANTON, Ala. — Two months ago, Representative Mo Brooks, whose hard-right credentials were unblemished, seemed to be imploding in the Alabama Republican Senate race.Under a rain of attack ads, polls showed him falling behind two rivals. Former President Donald J. Trump humiliated Mr. Brooks by rescinding an earlier endorsement.But Mr. Brooks has staged a compelling comeback, with recent polling putting him in a statistical tie for the lead in a tight three-candidate race ahead of the primary on Tuesday.In a twist of fate, the Brooks bounce-back appears to be driven by voters who identify as “Trump Republicans” — another bit of evidence, after recent primaries from Nebraska to Pennsylvania, that the former president’s political movement may no longer be entirely under his command.“Brooks may be surging just at the right time,” a conservative talk radio host, Dale Jackson, said over the Birmingham airwaves on Friday.Mr. Brooks — who appeared at Mr. Trump’s Jan. 6 rally before the siege of the Capitol, where he goaded election deniers to start “kicking ass” — has returned to contention not only despite Mr. Trump’s fickleness, but also in the face of opposition by Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader. A super PAC aligned with Mr. McConnell has funneled $2 million to a group attacking Mr. Brooks in television ads.In 12 years as an arch-conservative in the House, Mr. Brooks has bucked party leadership, which won him no fans among Senate Republican leaders. Mr. McConnell and his allies would prefer a different replacement for the open seat of Senator Richard Shelby, 88, who is retiring. Alabama’s deep-seated conservatism means that the Republican nominee is all but assured of winning in November.Katie Britt, a lawyer and former aide to retiring Alabama Senator Richard Shelby, is currently leading in polls for the seat Mr. Shelby is vacating. Sean Gardner/Getty ImagesA polling average by Real Clear Politics showed Katie Britt, a former aide to Mr. Shelby, in the lead with 34 percent, Mr. Brooks with 29 percent and Mike Durant, a military contractor and Army veteran, with 24 percent. If no candidate consolidates more than 50 percent on Tuesday, the top two advance to a runoff on June 21.“Slowly but surely, conservatives are figuring out I’m the only conservative in this race,” Mr. Brooks said in an interview. He called Mr. Durant “a John McCain-type of Republican” and Ms. Britt “a Mitch McConnell-establishment, open-borders, cheap-foreign-labor, special-interest-group Republican.”A poker-faced former prosecutor, Mr. Brooks nonetheless seemed to savor, at a couple of campaign appearances on Friday, his comeback from March, when he was polling in the teens and Mr. Trump abandoned him. The former president accused Mr. Brooks of having gone “woke” because he had urged a crowd, months earlier, to put the 2020 election “behind you.”Mr. Brooks, 68, “is the least woke person in the state of Alabama,” said Terry Lathan, a former chair of the Alabama Republican Party, who is a co-chair of the Brooks campaign.In style and experience, there are strong differences between the stolid Mr. Brooks and the energetic Ms. Britt, a lawyer whose first digital ad featured her marriage to Wesley Britt, a former University of Alabama football star — no small credential in a state where the other senator, Tommy Tuberville, is a former Auburn University football coach. Ms. Britt, 40, presents herself as a committed social conservative. Campaign ads feature her calling to get “kids and God back in the classroom” and, while striding through a girls’ locker room, accusing “crazy liberals” of wanting to let boys in.A poll on Thursday for The Alabama Daily News and Gray Television showed likely voters who identified as “traditional conservative Republicans” favored Ms. Britt and Mr. Durant over Mr. Brooks.But Mr. Brooks won the support of a plurality of voters who identified as “Trump Republicans” — 35 percent, up from 26 percent in an earlier survey.The race has seen millions of dollars spent on negative ads attacking all three candidates that in many ways have shaped the turbulent peaks and valleys of their campaigns.In particular, opinions of Mr. Durant and Ms. Britt, who as first-time candidates are less well-known, have been battered by assaults over the airwaves.The anti-tax Club for Growth, which supports Mr. Brooks, has spent $6 million in the state on ads, including one barraging Ms. Britt — the former head of an Alabama business group — as “really a lobbyist” who supported a state gas tax increase. One ad flashes a tweet from Donald Trump Jr. in 2021 — back when his father still liked Mr. Brooks — calling Ms. Britt “the Alabama Liz Cheney.”The share of voters with a favorable view of Ms. Britt dropped six points in the recent Alabama Daily News poll, compared with a survey in early May.Mr. Brooks, already a known quantity, better withstood attacks and is slightly above water in terms of favorable and unfavorable opinions with voters.“The story of the numbers in a way is that everyone at this point has an image that is pretty close to the water line,” said John Rogers, a strategist for Cygnal, which conducted the Alabama Daily News polling.Mike Durant, a former Army pilot, is currently trailing the other two top contenders for the Alabama Senate seat. Charity Rachelle for The New York TimesIt is Mr. Durant, a former Army pilot who figured in the 1993 “Black Hawk Down” incident in Somalia, who seems most battered — and most upset — by the blasts of negativity on the airwaves. In March, he was leading in polls. Now he is struggling to make it into a runoff, after being accused of weakness on gun rights and fighting off a false claim that he doesn’t live in Alabama.In politics, “the only thing that matters is how much money you’ve got and how low you’re willing to go,” he said with disgust on Friday. “It’s very, very disturbing. I hope it will backfire.”Mr. Brooks’s time in the barrel took place in the spring. A super PAC favoring Ms. Britt, Alabama’s Future, dredged up clips of the congressman disparaging Mr. Trump in 2016. “I don’t think you can trust Donald Trump with anything he says,” Mr. Brooks said back then. Another outside group, calling itself No More Mo, ran an ad in the Florida media market that includes Mar-a-Lago, which blared that Mr. Brooks was “a proven loser” and “Trump deserves winners.”Mr. Trump withdrew his endorsement of Mr. Brooks shortly after.His stated reason was that Mr. Brooks had gone wobbly on election denialism by urging voters to focus on future races. Mr. Brooks revealed in response that Mr. Trump had pressed him for months after Jan. 6 to illegally “rescind” the 2020 election and to remove President Biden, and that he told Mr. Trump it was impossible under the Constitution.Despite the Trumpian snub, Mr. Brooks continues to falsely maintain that the election was stolen from the former president, a view widely held by Alabama Republicans.On May 12, Mr. Brooks was subpoenaed by the House committee investigating the violence on Jan. 6, 2021. On that date, Mr. Brooks, wearing body armor, had asked the roiling crowd of Trump supporters gathered near the White House, “Are you willing to do what it takes to fight for America?” Cheers erupted. He went on: “Will you fight for America?” Not long after, the protest became a riot and the Capitol was breached.On Friday night, Mr. Brooks appeared in Clanton at Peach Park, a popular roadside fruit and ice cream stand adorned with pictures of beauty queens posing with peaches, for an outdoor screening of the movie “2000 Mules.” The film is the latest conservative effort to promote the myth of widespread fraud in the 2020 election. The Georgia State Elections Board last week dismissed some claims central to the movie.“What we’re going to see tonight is a reaffirmation of what we already know,” Mr. Brooks told a sparse crowd.Awaiting the start of the film, Apryl Marie Fogel told Mr. Brooks that she had been an undecided voter, but had made up her mind to support him.Ms. Fogel is the host of “Straight Talk with Apryl Marie” on Montgomery talk radio. She told Mr. Brooks that on her show that day, “We all agreed that it’s going to be a runoff between you and Katie and that you have picked up steam.”There was speculation on air, she said, that Mr. Trump would re-endorse him.Mr. Brooks paused, his face a mask.“That would be interesting,” he allowed. More