For the past few years, Republicans have largely stood by as various figures have sought to raise their profiles in the conservative movement by advancing baseless allegations of voter fraud — from Trump-aligned lawyers such as L. Lin Wood, Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani to MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell.
An apparent obstacle to the party taking action: Such figures were saying much the same thing as Donald Trump (and some were directly working for him, to advance his stolen-election cause in public and in court). So the GOP simply offered its own watered-down reasons for questioning the 2020 results, while sidestepping the actual claims made by Trump and these emerging thought leaders.
Now one of them has trained his “stolen election” claims on a new target — and a Republican, at that: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
On his show Tuesday, Lindell indicated that he’s going to turn his crack team of voter-fraud investigators on DeSantis’s win in the 2022 midterms. The purported reason? The margin of victory was just too big — particularly in Miami-Dade County. (The unstated but more likely reason? DeSantis is a growing threat to Trump.)
Lindell previewed his case on air after initially pausing while he got some advice from his lawyer about what he was about to say. (Lindell is being sued over his false claims about voting machines in the 2020 election.) He went on to repeatedly reference “Dade County” even though it has been called Miami-Dade County since 1997.
“I don’t believe it,” Lindell said, of DeSantis’s win there. “So it’s just going to show everybody — just like we always tell you about Democrats where they stole their elections … I’m going to find out if Dade County — what happened there.”
In an interview, Lindell told the Bulwark that “a Republican hasn’t won Dade County like DeSantis did,” calling it a “deviation” and saying he wanted to find out “if there was problems with the election, things with the machine or whatever.”
This claim — as is typical of Lindell — has virtually nothing behind it.
It’s true that it’s rare for a Republican to win Miami-Dade County. But despite the county’s blue status in most recent elections, elections there have swung substantially over the past quarter-century.
In fact, Republicans have won the county in four other statewide races since 1997: the 1998 and 2002 governor’s races, when Jeb Bush won; the 2004 Senate race, when Mel Martinez narrowly carried it; and Sen. Marco Rubio’s (R-Fla.) win alongside DeSantis this year.
Most of those took place about two decades ago, of course. Then the county seemingly shifted toward Democrats, with Republicans taking less than 40 percent there in most top-of-the-ticket races in the 2010s. But Miami-Dade County has always been capable of huge swings and has proved willing to vote for the right kind of Republican.
For example, even as Bush carried it in 1998, the GOP actually lost Miami-Dade County in the Senate race that same day by more than 56 points. Bush also won it despite the GOP having taken just 38 percent there in the previous presidential election.
Perhaps most importantly, Miami-Dade appeared to drift back toward the GOP even before DeSantis’s win. While Trump didn’t win the county in 2020, he did take 46 percent — the best showing for a Republican at the top of the ticket since 2004. Trump also shrank his deficit in the county from 29 points in 2016 to just seven points in 2020.
Trump literally went from the worst showing for a Republican in the county since 1998 to the best one since 2004 — the same guy, in a span of just four years. And he did so even as the GOP lost ground nationwide. This massive “deviation” didn’t raise Lindell’s suspicions.
It remains to be seen how hard Lindell pushes this rhetoric against DeSantis, but the effort would be in keeping with Trump’s halting attempts to go after his would-be usurper as the party’s leader. DeSantis’s 19-point victory bolstered the case he could make in challenging Trump in 2024 — that he, unlike the former president, is a winner. So it follows that questioning it, no matter how baselessly, would serve Trump’s purposes.
This would also mean, of course, targeting the politician who looks like the GOP’s most formidable candidate in 2024. And the shift in the margins might seem superficially plausible to the many people who have been duped into believing false accusations based on far less.
If nothing else, perhaps this might instill some courage in certain Republicans to do something about this guy.
