In the waning minutes of Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate, Gov. Tim Walz hit on a question that has become central to the 2024 presidential race — and to America’s political future more broadly.

Walz, who is Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate, was sparring with Sen. JD Vance, former President Trump’s running mate, over the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters intent on overturning the 2020 election of President Biden.

Walz called the attack “a threat to our democracy,” and one driven by Trump’s refusal to admit defeat. “He is still saying he didn’t lose the election,” Walz said to Vance. “I would just ask that: Did he lose the 2020 election?”

Vance, unwilling to buck Trump’s false claim that the last election was stolen, said he was “focused on the future.”

“That,” Walz said, “is a damning non-answer.”

The next day, the issue was again magnified for voters when a federal judge in Washington released a new court filing from Special Counsel Jack Smith, in which Smith provided the most comprehensive accounting to date of what prosecutors allege was a sweeping criminal conspiracy by Trump and his allies to not just deny the election, but also subvert it.

“When [Trump] lost the 2020 presidential election, he resorted to crimes to try to stay in office,” Smith wrote.

Taken together, the two episodes served as a stark reminder of something Democrats have been eager for voters to focus on in the current race: the former president’s alleged willingness to undermine the will of voters in the last one.

State elections officials, independent elections experts and most Americans agree today that Biden’s victory over Trump was legitimate. Despite substantial efforts to do so by Trump’s backers, no one has produced evidence of substantial voter fraud or election irregularities, and experts have concluded there were none.

Special Counsel Jack Smith speaks about an indictment of former President Trump in 2023.

(Jacquelyn Martin / Associated Press)

Democrats have condemned Trump for his dishonesty and impeached him in the House for inciting the Jan. 6 attack, and Smith and prosecutors in Georgia have indicted Trump for his alleged scheme to remain in power illegitimately.

Trump, meanwhile, has maintained his position that the election was stolen from him, and many Republicans still believe the same. A Washington Post-University of Maryland poll in December, for example, found that 62% of U.S. adults said they believe Biden was legitimately elected. While 91% of Democrats believe it, just 31% of Republicans do, the survey found.

Trump has downplayed the Jan. 6 attack and promised to pardon those convicted in the fray. He also has begun already to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the upcoming election.

As voters begin casting their ballots in the current race, political experts say they will be weighing a host of issues, including the economy, immigration and reproductive rights. But particularly after the last week, they also may be thinking about Trump’s election denial and the fallout from it, the experts said — and for good reason.

“It’s not just about denying 2020,” said Bob Shrum, director of the Center for the Political Future at USC. “It’s about whether or not you are going to uphold the fundamental precepts of democracy.”

“It should be a major issue for voters,” said Richard L. Hasen, director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA Law, “because, really, it was an unprecedented attempt to steal an election.”

More than just denial

After Smith’s lastest filing was released, Trump went into a rage on his social media platform Truth Social, accusing the Justice Department of “COMPLETE AND TOTAL ELECTION INTERFERENCE” and saying he did “NOTHING WRONG.”

Trump called Smith’s case against him a “SCAM,” and suggested that the timing of the filing so close to the election broke with Justice Department rules for avoiding unnecessary political influence.

The timing is in part due to Trump’s own efforts to fight the case. It was on an earlier trajectory before Trump appealed to the Supreme Court — which found in an unprecedented ruling in July that presidents enjoy broad immunity for actions taken as part of their official duties.

Smith’s latest filing is a response to that ruling and a detailed articulation of why Trump’s actions to subvert the 2020 election were taken not in his official capacity as president, but in his private capacity as a losing political candidate — and therefore not something for which he enjoys immunity.

The filing details how Trump allegedly “laid the groundwork for his crimes” well before the election even occurred, including by telling advisors that he would claim victory before ballots were even counted, and how he continued to push his election fraud narrative long after he was told, repeatedly, that no such fraud existed.

Smith wrote that Trump conducted a “pressure campaign” targeting Republican leaders, election officials and election workers in states he had lost in an effort to change the outcomes there — such as when he told Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger that he wanted to “find 11,780 votes,” a margin that would have won him that state.

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger participates in an election forum in September in Ann Arbor, Mich.

(Carlos Osorio / Associated Press)

When those efforts failed, Smith wrote, Trump personally set into motion and monitored a brazen plan to send fake slates of electors to Washington to cast state electoral votes for him instead of Biden, who had won them. He continued his “stream of disinformation” on Jan. 6, Smith wrote, falsely suggesting Pence could unilaterally halt the certification of Biden’s victory and motivating his supporters to storm the Capitol.

Hasen said all Americans should read the filing to get a “good picture of the depths to which Trump was willing to go to try to turn himself from an election loser to an election winner.”

Most important, Hasen said, is the number of times it shows Trump ignored evidence that he lost.

“Just in terms of the morality of it, to know that the election was not stolen and to keep claiming it and undermining American democracy is incredibly dangerous and deserving of condemnation,” Hasen said.

Why it matters

Trump claims that a vast majority of Americans feel the 2020 election was rigged. It was not, and they do not, according to polling. However, a sizable minority do feel that way, and many leading Republicans have done little to dispel the notion.

During the debate, for example, Vance downplayed the historic threat of the Jan. 6 attack and suggested that Trump had adhered to democratic standards by ceding power to Biden at his Jan. 20, 2021, inauguration.

“It’s really rich for Democratic leaders to say that Donald Trump is a unique threat to democracy when he peacefully gave over power on January the 20th, as we have done for 250 years in this country,” Vance said.

In fact, Trump refused to attend Biden’s inauguration, making him the first president in 150 years to skip one.

Walz accused Vance of advancing “revisionist history,” and the next day told reporters that it should be “disqualifying” for Vance to not acknowledge Biden’s victory.

Experts said such election denial is indeed a serious issue, and a dangerous thing for Trump and Vance to advance.

Sophia Lin Lakin, director of the Voting Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union, said her organization is involved in dozens of legal actions across the country in advance of next month’s election, from groups that she said are “setting the stage for this narrative that there is something nefarious at play, that there is something questionable, that the results of the election aren’t valid.”

The litigation is clearly part of a broader strategy, largely on the political right and clearly borne out of what happened in 2020, to “launder” legitimacy for later election denial claims through the legal system, Lakin said.

Sean Morales-Doyle, director of the Voting Rights Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, agreed.

“The effort to overturn the outcome of the 2020 election and everything that followed did kind of spawn a whole election denier movement that has proliferated and has been funded and has been pushed forward by not just Trump but a number of other prominent figures, and it has led to a situation in 2024 where there is a much broader, more coordinated effort to undermine faith in our elections, to sow distrust, and to set the stage to subvert the outcome of elections in 2024,” Morales-Doyle said.

That said, both he and Lakin said there is room for hope. Among other things, prominent election deniers who ran for election offices in swing states in 2022 were resoundingly defeated, they noted. And some states have passed new laws since 2020 to shore up election systems and make frivolous challenges to election results more difficult.

Morales-Doyle said he wants people to be aware of election denial and the threats it poses, but also to not get discouraged by it — because the evidence shows American election systems are strong, and thinking otherwise based on misinformation only serves to weaken them.

“The best way to respond to these unprecedented attacks is to buy into democracy, to participate, to go and vote,” he said.

Shrum said Vance was clearly “talking to an audience of one, Donald Trump,” when he wouldn’t answer Walz‘s question about the 2020 election, but that his doing so didn’t do Trump any favors.

“Trump has convinced a substantial part of his base, of the people who are voting for him, that there was something wrong with the election, but I don’t think Americans generally think that,” Shrum said. “In fact, it drives voters away.”

Polling shows that many Americans take a dim view of election denial. One recent Monmouth University poll, for example, found that 58% of Americans believed that an unwillingness to accept election outcomes was a “major problem” for the country.

Republican elections officials are among those expressing concerns.

Late last year, the Johns Hopkins SNF Agora Institute and Gallup released polling that showed that only 40% of Republicans were very or somewhat confident in the accuracy of U.S. elections. Along with the polling, a group from Johns Hopkins and the conservative-leaning think tank R Street Institute released a set of “core principles” for restoring that trust — including having conservative leaders publicly affirm election system security and champion policy changes that build trust.

“As Republican state election officials, we believe in the power of citizens to choose their leaders freely and fairly, and we have faith in the integrity of election systems in place to carry out the voters’ will,” said the group’s members — including Raffensperger of Georgia, Idaho Secretary of State Phil McGrane, Kansas Secretary of State Scott Schwab and Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson. “We are also worried. Our democracy cannot hold if its citizens do not trust that elections accurately reflect the will of the people.”

Charles H. Stewart, a political science professor and director of the MIT Election Data + Science Lab, said many Americans already understand — at least in broad strokes — that Trump denied the election and worked to reverse the results.

Stewart doesn’t expect Smith’s latest filing or Walz’s debate efforts to swing voters in any major way, but said they “may keep the issue more visible” and increase the “enthusiasm” for voting among those most appalled by Trump’s actions.

Hasen said he hopes more Americans work to understand the full implications of Trump’s election denial, and vote accordingly.

“The question of whether we will have peaceful transitions of power,” Hasen said, “should be one of the top things on every voter’s list of considerations.”

Sen. John Fetterman, D-Penn., on Sunday said that he will continue to “support and follow” Israel after seeing how the Jewish State has been able to humiliate Iran and its proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah.

Fetterman made the remarks on “Fox News Sunday,” telling anchor Shannon Bream that Israel knows best about how to take on Iran and the regime’s proxies.

“Whatever they decide to do in response to Iran, I’m going to support that because Israel will have a better idea of the intelligence and the circumstances on the ground,” Fetterman said. “And that’s why I’m going to support and follow that.”

The Democrat praised Israel for their effective responses against Hezbollah and Hamas that he said left the Iranian proxies “cowering.” 

BIDEN SAYS HE WOULD NOT BACK ISRAELI STRIKE ON IRAN’S NUCLEAR SITE

“I also want to celebrate what Israel has been able to do,” Fetterman said. “They’ve demolished Hamas and now they have humiliated Hezbollah and they are now cowering. And Iran shot, you know, 200 missiles and [Israel] vaporized those. So, Iran now is left exposed and humiliated, and Israel has put them back on the ropes. And I am going to support what they continue to do.”

Iran bombarded Israel with 181 missiles last week in what the regime said was retaliation for the killing of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut, Lebanon, in an Israeli airstrike in September and the killing of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran in July. 

Israel’s anti-missile system intercepts rockets, as seen from Ashkelon, Israel, on Tuesday. (REUTERS/Amir Cohen)

Meanwhile, Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon have traded attacks with Israel since the Israel-Hamas war began on Oct. 7.

Fetterman’s comments come days after President Biden told reporters that he would not support an attack by Israel on Iranian nuclear sites in retaliation for Iran’s missile attack against Israel amid fears that a lethal regional war is around the corner.

Biden said all the G7 leaders on a recent call – France, Canada, Japan, Britain, Italy and Germany – agreed that Israel had the right to “proportionally” respond to Iran’s military strike.

TRUMP SAYS ISRAEL SHOULD HIT IRAN’S NUCLEAR FACILITIES, SLAMMING BIDEN’S RESPONSE

Biden’s response came under fire from former President Trump, who told Fox News correspondent Bill Melugin on Thursday that Biden’s response on Israel attacking Iran was the “craziest thing I’ve ever heard. That’s the biggest risk we have. The biggest risk we have is nuclear.”

Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Saturday called out Western leaders who he said had called for an arms embargo on Israel over its airstrikes against Hamas in Gaza. 

“As Israel fights the forces of barbarism led by Iran, all civilized countries should be standing firmly by Israel’s side, yet President Macron and other western leaders are now calling for arms embargoes against Israel. Shame on them,” Netanyahu said in a statement.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu criticized Western leaders on Saturday, claiming that they are calling for an arms embargo against Israel. (OHAD ZWIGENBERG/POOL/AFP via Getty Images, File)

Question: When did fact–checking become an outrageous abuse of debate moderators’ power?

Answer: When MAGA Republicans decided they didn’t like anyone pointing out that they’re lying.

In a perfect world, it might be enough for political opponents to correct each other’s prevarications and exaggerations. But Donald Trump’s entry into presidential politics, with his incessant flights of fancy and nonstop lying, have completely changed the dynamics. While other presidential candidates have stretched the truth, only one has kidnapped it, bound and gagged it, put it in a barrel and tossed it into the East River.

In the age of Trump, fact-checking has become a necessary service for moderators and other journalists to provide to voters.

Take the first and probably only presidential debate between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, on Sept. 10.

Some Trumpers went bonkers after ABC News’ David Muir corrected one of the former president’s most egregious and dangerous falsehoods — that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were abducting pets and eating them. Muir noted that Springfield’s city manager said there were no credible claims of pets being “harmed, injured or abused by individuals within the immigrant community.”

“But the people on television say their dog was eaten by the people that went there,” Trump insisted in the course of a rant that launched a kajillion memes.

There is not a single television interview of any Springfield pet owner claiming their cat or dog was stolen and eaten by immigrants. There was a news story about a woman killing and appearing to eat a cat, but she was born in and lived in Canton, about 175 miles away from Springfield. (She was reportedly charged with “disorderly conduct by reason of intoxication,” among other offenses.)

In any case, Muir didn’t just have a journalistic obligation to call Trump on his race-baiting lie. He had a moral obligation to do so because that kind of incendiary claim can get people killed. Springfield has yet to recover from Trump’s collective character assassination.

In the first and only vice presidential debate last week, Ohio Sen. JD Vance picked up where Trump left off, blaming “illegal” immigrants in places such as Springfield for overwhelming schools and hospitals and driving up the price of real estate. Moderator Margaret Brennan of CBS News correctly noted that the Haitian immigrants Vance was alluding to are, in fact, here legally. Most have what is called temporary protected status, a designation that the Biden administration has expanded.

“Margaret,” Vance complained, “the rules were that you guys weren’t going to fact-check, and since you’re fact-checking me, I think it’s important to say what’s actually going on.”

He went on for a moment, but what’s actually going on is far too complicated for a debate sound bite, and the moderators soon cut both candidates’ microphones, which was allowed by the rules.

Trump supporters blew their lids.

“F you CBS — how DARE YOU,” posted the conservative firebrand Megyn Kelly, who was axed by NBC News in 2018 for suggesting that there was nothing wrong with white people wearing blackface for Halloween. Kelly, who herself famously tangled with Trump as a debate moderator for Fox News, also once insisted that Santa Claus cannot possibly be Black because he “just is white.”

The F-word, by the way, is apparently Kelly’s go-to response in defense of Trump. After the world’s most popular singer endorsed Harris, Kelly responded, “F you, Taylor Swift.” Elegant! I can’t wait to hear what she says about Bruce Springsteen’s recent Harris endorsement.

“‘Fact check’ has become just another word for censorship,” was the headline on a recent New York Post column by Douglas Murray, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute.

This makes no sense. Censorship implies suppression of speech before it is aired. In a broadcast debate, a candidate actually has to spout the lie before moderators can correct it.

Murray condemned Muir and fellow moderator Linsey Davis for failing to contradict Harris when she claimed that Project 2025 is “a detailed and dangerous plan … that the former president intends on implementing if he were elected again.”

“They must have known that the big Democratic boogey man ‘Project 2025’ has nothing to do with Donald Trump or his campaign,” Murray wrote, presumably with a straight face.

This is such bald-faced lie that I would be remiss if I did not fact-check Murray myself.

Project 2025 is a 900-page blueprint for a second Trump administration by the right-wing Heritage Foundation. At least 140 former members of Trump’s first administration are involved, CNN has reported, including six former Cabinet secretaries. It calls for, among other things, abolishing the Department of Education and Head Start, ending efforts to combat climate change, undermining the independence of the Justice Department, effectively enacting a nationwide abortion ban, and dismantling what MAGA Republicans call “the deep state,” known to those in the reality-based community as “government.”

A recent analysis by the nonpartisan Brookings Institution said that parts of Project 2025 “are more closely aligned with a white Christian nationalist worldview than a traditional, conservative education policy agenda.”

Once Project 2025’s radical plan to overhaul the executive branch became widely known and the public reacted negatively, Trump pretended as if he’d never heard of it. And the conservative, Trump-promoting New York Post would very much like you to believe that untruth.

As it happens, most Americans think debate moderators should fact-check. According to a June survey by Boston University’s College of Communication (my graduate school alma mater), more than two of every three Americans surveyed said “moderators should point out factual inaccuracies” in candidates’ statements during debates.

The survey did find a partisan discrepancy: While 81% of Democrats supported fact-checking in real time, 67% of Republicans did.

Gee, why do you suppose that is?

@robinkabcarian