Huffington Post

Like everything else Trump has done as president, his entire scheme to steal the election is not meant to succeed in reality — reality, in this case, being judged by actual courts and judges. It is, rather, intended to succeed on television or social media by making his supporters believe that Trump lost due to fraud and not think of him as a loser. So far, it is working. The majority of Republicans state a belief that the election was rigged against Trump. (It wasn’t.) And nearly every Republican Party politician has either backed Trump’s false allegations of mass voter fraud or refused to accept that Biden won and is now president-elect. The reason why is because of the nature of the Republican Party, which is actually just a hollowed-out shell filled by the ever-mutating conservative movement. The conservative movement, born out of the 1964 Barry Goldwater presidential campaign and brought to power by Ronald Reagan in 1980, is openly antagonistic to Republican Party regulars and opposes any evidence of cooperation or appeasement with the enemy: Democrats. To appease the movement, Republican politicians must pay strict attention to the far-right fringe of their party in order to stave off the looming threat of primary challenges. Once Trump conquered the party in 2016, Republicans seeking to avoid right-wing primary challenges had to adapt to his neo-personalist style of rule. This meant supplementing support for extremist right-wing policies and rhetoric with obsequious fealty to Trump and his family members. (With the only exception being when Trump suggests using the government to distribute wealth in an equitable manner.) In 2020, this means echoing Trump’s false claims of fraud as he tries to steal the election ― or at the very least not rejecting them as the dangerous absurdity they are. Republicans now face a litmus test of endorsing a belief that the 2020 election was unfair, a position that undermines the necessary peaceful transfer of power that American democracy would not exist without.