- By Marc Sandalow | Special to The Examiner |
- Oct 14, 2022 Updated 4 hrs ago (SFExaminer.com)
The front page of last week’s Washington Post screamed out a warning about the future of American democracy.
“A majority of GOP nominees deny or question the 2020 election results‘’ read the headline.
The analysis that followed claimed 291 Republicans — a majority of those running in November for a House, Senate or key statewide seat — are “election deniers.’’ The story quoted experts cautioning that Republicans have “institutionalized’’ the practice of rejecting election results they don’t like, posing a grave threat to the country’s democratic principles.
One of the 291 is San Francisco’s own John Dennis, a Republican who is fighting a quixotic battle to unseat House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, something he has done four previous times and failed.
I reached out to Dennis to find out what autocratic madness he was up to. Did he really believe that Congress should have overturned the will of the people on Jan. 6, 2021, heeding President Donald Trump’s insistence that members refuse to certify the election results?
The short answer is no.
Like many Republicans, he questions the outcome. Dennis says he has spoken to “lawyers on the ground’’ who lead him to believe that there were enough “shenanigans’’ to have changed the election’s outcome, a suspicion multiple investigations have failed to validate.
“I find it really hard to believe that this guy (Biden), who didn’t campaign, who was clearly not at his best — and his best wasn’t great — and is now in serious cognitive decline … had the attraction to get people to go out in vote in enough numbers to beat Trump,’’ Dennis said.
However — and it’s a big however — Dennis doesn’t deny the outcome. He does not believe Congress had reason or the authority to deny Biden the presidency.
“They had no choice,’’ Dennis said.
“Read the rules. Congress has no choice in that they cannot go back and (undo) what the states sent them. They have a procedure.’’
Doesn’t that put Dennis in the same camp as Vice President Mike Pence who was ridiculed by Trump as a coward, I asked? What would he say to the mob of Trump supporters who stalked the vice president and built gallows bearing his name on the Capitol mall?
“There are dopes out there,’’ Dennis said.
It is important to distinguish between the willfully ignorant fringe of the Republican Party, who, stoked by Trump, are willing to abandon democratic norms, and disappointed conservatives such as Dennis who can’t believe that Biden could legitimately win an election.
The former are a genuine threat to a republic that rejects mob rule and the arbitrary enforcement of law. The latter are in the same camp as Democrats who complain that Trump could never have been elected in 2016 without the help of Vladimir Putin or perhaps James Comey.
What makes Trump and his closest supports so dangerous is their refusal to accept an election they’ve lost no matter the facts nor the outcome of multiple appeals.
They demanded recounts after Biden was declared the winner, and the recounts showed Trump lost. They demanded voter fraud investigations, and the investigations found nothing that would change the results. They appealed the outcome in court, and 61 judges ruled against them. They made their case to Congress, and Congress certified Biden as winner.
Nevertheless, Trump refused to concede, did not assist in the transition, refused to attend his successor’s inauguration and continues to praise as “patriots’’ the mob that stormed the Capitol.
There are legitimate concerns, as the Washington Post story suggests, that election deniers will once again try to overturn results in 2024 if they do not triumph. But they do a disservice when they fail to distinguish between those who deny and those who merely question.
Dennis acknowledges he is skeptical of the 2020 vote, but that doesn’t make him the sort of zealot who threatens the future of the Republic.
“You didn’t see me in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6,’’ he noted.
Dennis presumes he is labeled a denier because he tweeted out praise for the movie “2000 Mules,’’ a documentary made by conservative author Dinesh D’Souza, which used questionable cell-phone data to assert that “mules’’ were used to drop off potentially stolen ballots in key battleground states. The data has been widely disputed and the movie’s findings debunked by multiple nonpartisan fact checkers.
It is in some ways the mirror image of Democrats who parrot dubious claims made by liberal filmmaker Michael Moore.
The body of the Washington Post story was carefully worded, noting that the 291 Republicans “have denied or questioned,’’ the elections outcome. There is a big distinction between the two. I question every referee’s call that goes against my team. That doesn’t mean I deny the defeat when they lose.
It is a distinction not only lost on most readers, but even the Post’s own headline writers who labeled a chart showing all 291 candidates as “Republican election deniers.’’
Dennis took no umbrage to the characterization.
However, the candidate, who has lost by an average of 66 percentage points to Pelosi in his previous four efforts, said he took exception to the Post’s characterization of his race as uncompetitive.
“Don’t they know,’’ he said with a knowing laugh, “That the fifth time’s a charm.’’
Marc Sandalow is associate director of the University of California’s Washington Program. He has written about California politics from Washington for nearly 30 years.
