“‘Donald Trump and his supporters had their day in court and failed to produce substantive evidence to make their case.’”
This is an excerpt from a 72-page report titled “Lost, Not Stolen: The Conservative Case that Trump Lost and Biden Won the 2020 Presidential Election.”
The report from some prominent conservatives analyzes the many debunked fraud claims that former President Donald Trump has made regarding the 2020 U.S. presidential election, and is signed by some top Republicans and election law experts.
Among those who signed off on the report are retired federal appeals court judges Thomas B. Griffith, J. Michael Luttig and Michael W. McConnell; former Solicitor General Theodore Olson, who served under former President George W. Bush; former senators John Danforth and Gordon Smith; longtime Republican election lawyer Benjamin Ginsberg; and veteran Republican congressional chief of staff David Hoppe. Each one has been elected as a Republican, been appointed to their office by a Republican, or is otherwise associated with the GOP.
“Once they had lost, Trump and his supporters had an obligation to recognize that the election debate was over,” the report states. “Questions of election legality must be resolved dispassionately in courts of law, not through rallies and demonstrations.”
After Joe Biden was declared the winner of the 2020 election, a group of Trump supporters infiltrated the U.S. Capitol on Jan 6, 2021 following a Trump rally, as Congress was meeting to certify Biden’s electoral vote victory. The attack on the Capitol complex briefly disrupted that democratic process, and led to millions of dollars worth of damages and more than 140 injuries and five deaths. The incident is being investigated by a bipartisan House committee, which has been holding public hearings over the past several weeks.
The “Lost, Not Stolen” report highlights Nevada, a state that Biden won in 2020, as one notable example of baseless fraud claims.
According to the report, Trump and his legal team called Nevada “the big treasure trove of illegal balloting,” but were not able to produce evidence to support such a claim. The Nevada secretary of state, a Republican, highlighted just 100 cases of potential fraud out of the 1.4 million votes cast in Nevada during the 2020 election. Biden won Nevada by more than 33,000 votes.
Still, Trump has made false claims of widespread voter fraud as recent as this week. And he is not alone.
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In a series of polls compiled by Politifact since the election, a majority of self-identifying Republicans do not think Joe Biden was “legitimately elected.”
One poll from Quinnipiac conducted six months after the election indicated as many as two-thirds of Republicans (66%) agree with the false claim that Biden was not legitimately elected.
The “Lost, Not Stolen” report comes as Biden’s overall approval rating is slumping. A RealClearPolitics average of polls shows Vice President Kamala Harris with an approval rating of just 38.7%, which is only marginally lower than Biden’s average approval rating of 42.2%.
See also: Most Democrats want an alternative to Biden in 2024, poll finds
Worsening public sentiment comes as Biden and the White House are dealing with a surging inflation problem. According to June CPI data, inflation climbed to a 41-year high of 9.1% in June.
