The GOP's Primary Night Playbook: Election Deniers, Rigged Maps and Conspiracy Theories

Rep. Tom Tiffany voted to overturn Joe Biden's 2020 election win in Arizona and Pennsylvania and was the only member of Wisconsin's congressional delegation to sign onto Texas's lawsuit trying to throw out election results in four states, including his own. Tiffany hasn't let up: he's backed an FBI probe into Wisconsin's 2020 election workers and suggested that convicted January 6 rioters could be owed restitution. If elected, he'd personally appoint Wisconsin's top election officials on the state Elections Commission — potentially putting an election denier in charge of who runs the state's elections heading into 2028.

Republican nominee for Wisconsin Secretary of State Jay Schroeder is a documented election denier who's said there's “lots of reasonable doubt” about Biden winning Wisconsin in 2020 and has called the 2020 results “rigged.” His platform is to dismantle the bipartisan Wisconsin Elections Commission and hand its authority to the Secretary of State's office instead — an office that currently has no role in administering elections. Schroeder has also claimed he personally lobbied Trump at Mar-a-Lago about Wisconsin elections.

Fond du Lac County District Attorney Eric Toney ran unopposed for the GOP nomination for attorney general after losing the race in 2022. Toney has made prosecuting election crimes a key tenet of his platform. He's promoted his reputation as “one of the most aggressive prosecutors of election fraud” and sought prison time for five voters who mistakenly registered using a UPS Store address, in a case legal experts called “a real abuse of (prosecutorial) discretion.” One defendant ultimately pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor; the others faced years of legal costs over an honest mistake. Toney hasn't let up: just a week before the primary, he told WBAY he's “prosecuted people for election fraud and sent some people to jail,” and raised unsubstantiated concerns that noncitizens may be registered to vote through the DMV, saying “we just don't know if that's a problem or not.”

Before being elected to Congress, Derrick Van Orden attended the “Stop the Steal” rally in Washington, D.C. on January 6, 2021, and photographic evidence shows him standing on a wall inside the Capitol's restricted area during the riot, despite his denials. He was also named as a plaintiff in Sidney Powell's lawsuit seeking to overturn Wisconsin's 2020 results, though he claims he was not involved in the suit and his name was included by mistake. In Congress, Van Orden is best known for screaming profanities at Senate pages and screaming at his colleagues to “PASS THE SAVE AMERICA ACT NOW.”

Minnesota Republican attorney general nominee Ron Schutz amplified an Elon Musk post suggesting Minnesota's voter fraud must be as bad as its welfare fraud, and blamed “voter fraud in Carver County” on Democrats' “lack of accountability” — even though Secretary of State Steve Simon testified to the legislature that the Carver County case was about a scheme to submit false voter registration paperwork, not fraudulent votes. Schutz has pledged to make “secure elections” a top priority as AG and to personally prosecute noncitizens who attempt to vote, a solution in search of a problem, the same playbook Republicans are running in every other state on this list.

Perennial GOP candidate Tad Jude has made targeting Minnesota's voter rolls the center of his campaign: he's vowed to increase voter purges, require photo ID at the polls, and eliminate Minnesota's 50-year-old vouching system, which lets a registered voter vouch for a neighbor's residency when they lack a utility bill or other document to register on Election Day. Most alarming: he's indicated he'd hand the state's sensitive voter registration data over to the Trump administration — the same data the DOJ is currently suing the state to obtain.

Rep. Ralph Norman advanced to an August 25 runoff against Trump-endorsed Sen. Darline Graham, Lindsey Graham's sister and appointed successor. Norman voted against certifying Biden's 2020 win and signed the Texas amicus brief seeking to throw out the vote in four states Biden won. Days before Biden's inauguration, he texted Mark Meadows begging him to get Trump to declare “Marshall Law” [sic] to stay in power, and just this May, he called January 6 “made up” and “a staged thing from day one.” Norman is also a founding cosponsor of the SAVE Act and has vowed to help kill the Senate filibuster to pass Trump's elections overhaul. Sen. Darline Graham doesn't have Norman's record, but she's not neutral on this either — the SAVE America Act was the first bill she cosponsored upon being sworn into the Senate.

The Supreme Court's Louisiana v. Callais ruling let Alabama gut a court-ordered Black-opportunity district and redraw AL-02 — the seat Democratic Rep. Shomari Figures won in 2024 — about 22 points redder. Republicans moved so fast that mail voting in the original May primary was already underway. The state voided those votes and made everyone vote again yesterday, an unprecedented $4.4 million do-over. Trump-endorsed state Rep. Rhett Marques won the nomination, telling the AP beforehand: “We need to win this seat back for the state and for the country. We need to turn it red again.”