Trump, GOP candidates persist with 2020 election claims as voters urge moving on

Georgia’s Sterling says Trump’s focus distracts from Iran, Epstein files

President Trump continues to press claims about his 2020 election loss as early voting opens in the 2026 midterm cycle and as Republican majorities in Congress are at risk. Several Republican candidates are echoing those claims even as a September New York Times-Siena College poll found just 1 percent of voters cite election integrity as the top issue deciding their November vote — and as some Republican voters in competitive states tell reporters they want to move on.

In Georgia, Republican Senate nominee Mike Collins launched his first congressional campaign a few months after Trump pressed Georgia’s secretary of state to find enough votes to reverse his 2020 loss. In one campaign ad from that race, Collins falsely claimed that Trump won Georgia and told voters, “Georgians are tired of weak-kneed, spineless politicians who won’t fight for Trump, get to the bottom of 2020 and fix our elections.” The spot ended with Collins firing a long gun into a bin with a “voting machine” label. The Collins campaign did not respond to NPR’s request for comment.

Now running for Senate, Collins has reiterated his position that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. He has also expressed support for compensating some people prosecuted for storming the Capitol on Jan. 6 to disrupt the certification of the 2020 election.

At a farmers market in Alpharetta, a suburb outside of Atlanta, two Republican voters NPR interviewed expressed frustration with the 2020 focus. Lynn, a lifelong Republican who asked NPR to publish only her first name for fear of being ostracized by friends and family for her views, said Collins’s positions worried her. “It bothers me a lot,” Lynn said. “It worries me for him to get elected. It concerns me any time someone gets pulled into those ridiculous looking-back discussions.” She said she had not ruled out voting for Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff.

Austin Sapp, another regular Republican voter at the market, said he believes election fraud does happen and supports Trump’s push to pass a strict voter ID law through Congress. He also said the president should stop relitigating the past. “It is what it is,” Sapp said. “He lost, then he won [in 2024]. Beating a dead horse serves no purpose. What is your platform? What are you going to do for me?”

Just 1 percent of voters in a September New York Times-Siena College poll said election integrity is the top issue deciding their November vote. Gabe Sterling, a veteran official with the Georgia secretary of state’s office, told NPR the 2020 fixation is mostly alive among die-hard activists. “It’s really big with the media and the far edges of both parties,” Sterling said. “Regular humans have given this up a long time ago.”

Sterling said that resurfacing claims about fraud can still be an effective fundraising tool, even though broader voter interest has faded. He noted that some of those activists now hold influential positions on state and local election boards and vote reliably in Republican primaries.

After the 2020 election, Sterling was one of the most visible officials disputing Trump’s false claims. Weeks before Jan. 6, he presciently warned that people could get hurt. He said the current climate feels far from that moment.

Sterling ran this year for Georgia secretary of state, speaking with hundreds of GOP primary voters about the 2020 election. “I would say things like, ‘Georgia has the cleanest voter list in America,’” Sterling said. “We would get some boos and hisses, but I would just keep pounding away, explaining the data and explaining what happened.” It was not enough to win a primary.

In Michigan, GOP Senate nominee Mike Rogers, a former congressman who chaired the House Intelligence Committee, once called Trump’s Georgia pressure campaign “more gangster than presidential” and said Trump deserved blame for the violence on Jan. 6. But during an unsuccessful 2024 Senate bid, Rogers refused in a Detroit Free Press editorial board interview to say who won the 2020 presidential contest. At a local Republican meeting last fall, Rogers claimed his Senate seat had been stolen from him, telling attendees, “Now there were some ballots that showed up at 5:30, I wish I were kidding, in a van, and that swung the election on us, and it happened to be here in Detroit.” After Trump gave a primetime Oval Office address this summer resurrecting debunked claims about election vulnerabilities, Rogers thanked him on social media. Rogers’s 2026 Senate campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

Michigan Republican strategist Jason Roe, a former executive director of the Michigan Republican Party, said many candidates continue to echo Trump’s claims as a condition for his support. “Frankly, I think most of the elected officials that still talk about it, it’s not necessarily a sincerely held belief,” Roe told NPR. “It’s usually at a Republican central committee meeting, throwing red meat to the base.” Roe said throwing red meat is unlikely to work in a general election in a tossup state. “I can’t imagine any Republican in a general election spending any money talking about election integrity or what happened in 2020,” Roe said.

Trump has intervened in primaries based on candidates’ positions on the 2020 election. In Georgia, he declined to endorse a Republican alternative to Collins preferred by GOP Gov. Brian Kemp, citing in part that candidate’s acknowledgment that Trump lost Georgia in 2020. A similar dynamic played out in the Texas primary, where Trump endorsed the state attorney general, who backed his 2020 claims, and that candidate ousted Sen. John Cornyn, who had been seen as more competitive in the general election. “I think we should talk about 2026 and not 2020,” Cornyn told reporters this summer.

Trump said this year he will do “anything necessary” to ensure the U.S. has “honest” elections. He nearly brought legislating in Congress to a standstill earlier this year over his demands for additional voting restrictions through the SAVE America Act, as Republicans tried to reopen the Department of Homeland Security. NPR reported that Trump has also attempted to take unprecedented control of the voting process.

A September poll by the University of California San Diego found that only 49 percent of Americans expect the upcoming midterm elections will be free and fair — a lower share than before the 2024 election. Sterling offered one explanation for Trump’s continued focus on election claims. “It distracts from the Iran war, it distracts from the Epstein files,” Sterling said. “And this is the ground on which they want to fight.” Sterling said Trump appears to be laying groundwork to deflect blame if Republicans lose in November, and that claims about rigged elections could find an audience once again in that scenario.