Despite Arizona Audit Results, Big Lie Keeps Rolling Along - Horowitz
Tuesday, September 28, 2021
President Donald Trump continues to shamelessly advance and loudly tout the “Big Lie,” despite the results of an audit conducted by a firm hand-picked by his supporters confirming Joe Biden’s winning margin in Maricopa County, Arizona.
“We won at the Arizona forensic audit yesterday at a level that you wouldn't believe," Trump proclaimed at his Saturday night Georgia rally, held one day after the release of the audit results. "They had headlines that Biden wins in Arizona, when they know it's not true. He didn't win in Arizona. He lost in Arizona based on the forensic audit."
The former president is apparently unfazed and certainly undeterred by the fact that this so-called audit led by a team of election conspiracy-believing, Trump supporters found that Joe Biden’s winning margin in Maricopa County was actually a few hundred votes more than the official tally. Mr. Trump believes with some good reason that through blatant falsehoods and mischaracterizations he can keep a majority of Republicans and nearly all of his hard-core supporters convinced that he was the real winner of the 2020 election in the face of a growing mountain of facts that demonstrate he is completely off base and without supplying any credible evidence.
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTIn an effort that gave “burying the lead” a whole new meaning, Trump and some of his supporters pointed to and stretched some of the speculation Cyber Ninjas, the company that conducted the audit, engaged in subsequent to releasing the numerical results of their audit, all of which were persuasively shot down via Twitter in real-time by the Majority Republican Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, who was then backed up by non-partisan election experts.
As even Trump ally, Arizona Senate President Karen Fann, who championed the audit, affirmed, the main takeaway was that the audit confirmed the Biden victory: “Truth is truth, numbers are numbers,” said Fann. “Those numbers were close, within a few hundred.”
Ben Ginsberg, a long-time Republican campaign attorney, put it more pungently, telling the Washington Post, “It is a huge defeat for Donald Trump. “This was a swing and a miss at what he thought was a sure thing, and they missed by a mile. That should have repercussions down the road. This was an audit in which they absolutely cooked the procedures, they took funding from sources that should delegitimize, automatically, the finding. This was Donald Trump’s best chance to prove his cases of elections being rigged and fraudulent, and they failed.”
Given that the wreckage of January 6th did not deter Mr. Trump from continuing to make blatantly false claims that the election was stolen from him, it is not surprising at all that election audit results that blow up his assertions even if they were the outcome of an audit he strongly backed are not causing him to change course. Mr. Trump embraces PT Barnum’s view of the American public: “there is a sucker born every minute.”
The disturbing reality, however, is that the former president’s outsized influence on the Republican party and his willingness to use it to enforce fidelity to the “Big Lie” keeps it front and center in our politics. Mr. Trump is using whether or not a candidate will echo his 2020 election falsehoods as a litmus test for endorsements and many Republican candidates are toeing the line as a result. Even worse, Trump is backing candidates for Secretary of State around the nation who embrace his view of 2020 and vow to act on it, if they are elected their state’s top election official.
The potent brand of poison Donald Trump continues to inject into the body politic remains a clear and present threat to our democracy. The results of the Arizona audit are helpful in slowing his momentum, but unfortunately, the “Big Lie” keeps rolling along.
Rob Horowitz is a strategic and communications consultant who provides general consulting, public relations, direct mail services and polling for national and state issue organizations, various non-profits, businesses, and elected officials and candidates. He is an Adjunct Professor of Political Science at the University of Rhode Island.
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