Ceding Ground to MAGA on Contentious Topics Is a Losing Strategy

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Culminating in the Big Lie and a failed bid to overturn the result of his 2020 loss to Joe Biden, Donald Trump has spent more than a decade trying to undermine US democracy. 

Without ever presenting a shred of credible evidence, and relying on outrageous, easily disprovable allegations, he has claimed that various elections Democrats have won were “rigged” or “stolen.” 

Instead of disavowing his lies and standing up for democracy, Republicans have embraced the president’s conspiracy theories and election denialism. These have become core tenets of the belief system of MAGA voters. Even GOP lawmakers who know better have latched onto these accusations for two big reasons: to help them pass new voter-suppression laws under the guise of “securing elections” and to lay the groundwork for refusing to accept future election results they don’t like. 

While Democrats have spoken out against these efforts, they have largely shied away from saying anything that might be construed as questioning the integrity of US elections themselves.

It hasn’t always been that way.

Pre-Trump, the election integrity space was occupied not only by those who highlighted the GOP’s systemic voter suppression but also by experts who warned about the security of voting machines… and with good reason, because there is ample evidence that they are scarily vulnerable to hacking. 

To be clear, we are not talking about the crackpot theories that Trump and his supporters spout. 

Real experts have demonstrated that voting machines can be hacked. In addition, there are legitimate concerns that domestic or foreign actors might try to do so. 

And it’s not just the voting and vote counting equipment that could be manipulated but, equally important, voter rolls. 

For example, the Senate Intelligence Committee determined in 2018 that “cyber actors affiliated with the Russian Government conducted an unprecedented, coordinated cyber campaign against state election infrastructure.” 

It found that “Russian actors scanned databases for vulnerabilities, attempted intrusions, and in a small number of cases successfully penetrated a voter registration database,” adding that these efforts were part of a “larger campaign to prepare to undermine confidence in the voting process.” 

WhoWhatWhy has covered these issues extensively and our award-winning investigative work focused on the 2018 election in Georgia was cited by some of the world’s biggest and most prominent news outlets.

Of course, it is important to note that the people who highlighted these vulnerabilities did not allege that elections were “stolen” or “rigged.” Take that Senate Intelligence Committee report, which explicitly states that the investigators had “not seen any evidence that vote tallies were manipulated or that voter registration information was deleted or modified.” [Emphasis added]

That all changed in 2020 with Trump’s Big Lie. 

All of a sudden, the election integrity space was flooded with MAGA true-believers, whose unfounded claims drowned out the actual experts who were voicing legitimate concern. Even worse: In order not to lend credibility to Trump’s outrageous accusations, many experts stopped talking about it.

The result is that the few experts who kept beating that drum were frequently ostracized.  

That is what WhoWhatWhy intern Quinlan Forrest found in his story covering the Election Truth Alliance (ETA). 

We believe that it is a mistake to vacate the election integrity space. Real vulnerabilities continue to exist, and we now have an administration that seems much more likely to exploit them than to do anything to fix them. 

Maybe it has become more complicated to talk about these issues, and maybe it’ll take more nuance going forward, but abandoning them just because they are grist for MAGA lies is the wrong strategy. 

And election integrity isn’t the only thing Democrats and their allies don’t talk about anymore. 

There are various topics related to health and nutrition that seem to be taboo because a kook like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is now running the Department of Health and Human Services.

But again, abandoning such important issues to MAGA and MAHA figures is to leave matters of great importance in the destructive hands of fact-averse propagandists and assorted kooks. Not everything Trump and his enablers and Kennedy Jr. and his followers believe is false.

For example, it’s true that far too many people in the US are obese and living unhealthy lifestyles. This isn’t surprising when you consider that the average American now consumes more than half of their daily calories in the form of ultra-processed foods. This, in turn, costs the health care system a lot of money — about $173 billion annually. So obviously it would be good to find solutions that go beyond drinking raw milk. 

It’s also (literally) vital to keep having conversations about vaccines… not because they are causing autism or because the risks outweigh the benefits, but because they are an important part of public health. It is understandable that, considering the well documented history of pharmaceutical companies who prioritize profits over patient health, concerned parents might have questions about vaccine recommendations and mandates. Willingness to engage with and answer those questions shouldn’t have anything to do with partisan politics.

The bottom line is that there can’t be sacred cows in medical science or a sense that experts are afraid to draw “the wrong conclusions” just because they may lend surface credibility to something the MAGA crowd is talking about. 

For example, everything related to COVID-19 should be studied extensively. The emergence of the pandemic had the potential to radically change society and kill untold millions. Front-line medical experts, working with inadequate information, were tasked with stopping the spread and the dying. As with similar pandemics in the past, we need to understand exactly what happened, what we got right, and what we got wrong. 

But there has been a real deficit of reputable investigations, and we believe it is in part because experts are worried that some of the stuff “truthers” have advanced with regard to the pandemic may not be entirely wrong.

That’s a short-sighted approach for many reasons, not least because if it appears that the government isn’t being forthcoming and transparent, it will only embolden agenda-driven conspiracy theorists. 

And these are topics people of all stripes really care about, so it’s foolish – and dangerous – to yield the public discussion space to the shrill and ill-informed. 

In fact, it’s more than ever crucial to engage on these issues rather than concede them to Trump and his supporters. 

Now, you may disagree with some of the above, but we have an even better example: Jeffrey Epstein. 

Reports of the crimes he committed gained more traction initially with MAGA adherents than anybody else. Sure, this was probably because they also believed that the Clintons were behind a massive child trafficking operation and drank the blood of kids, but that doesn’t change the fact that there was a “there” there in the original Epstein allegations. 

However, hardly any news organizations (or Democratic lawmakers) wanted to be involved because they feared being associated with the “crazy” conspiracy theorists. 

Now imagine what would have happened if Biden’s administration had aggressively pursued the Epstein case back in 2018 and released all of the documents. 

In that event, the Democrats would have controlled the narrative instead of allowing Trump to pretend that he wanted to make the Epstein files public while hypocritically claiming there was a massive cover-up going on.

What if the Democrats had done the popular thing and assembled a fact-based case against a system in which the rich and famous get away with the most heinous crimes? Oh, and what if they had actually “believed women,” which is another thing they are supposed to care about? 

Sure, the Democrats are all over Epstein now, but, in the wake of their earlier reluctance to speak out, that looks a tad opportunistic. After all, where was that enthusiasm when Biden was in the White House and they controlled Congress?

Nowhere to be seen, that’s where. 

What we are saying here is that, now more than ever, Democrats cannot shy away from wading into contentious topics, and they cannot afford to dismiss the legitimate concerns of tens of millions of Americans just because such people also support Trump and are willing to entertain the possibility of wildfire-igniting space lasers.

Over the past month, we have used this space to highlight the work of some of the participants in our Mentor Apprentice Program (MAP), which allows aspiring journalists to try their hands at real reporting. For example, we wrote about this story on international students self-censoring out of fear of repercussions, and about this series on how “Operation Metro Surge” in Minnesota has traumatized students but also taught them to get involved. If you are interested in MAP or want to support journalism education, please contact us here.