President Trump is still talking about the 2020 election — even as early voting is underway in this midterm cycle and the Republican majorities in Congress are at risk.
And while many Republican candidates, even in some critical tossup races, still back the president's baseless claims about election integrity, some GOP voters say they are ready to move on.
In Georgia, Rep. Mike Collins, the Republican nominee for Senate, 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 said, "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.
Now as Collins runs for Senate, he 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.
"It bothers me a lot," said Lynn, a lifelong Republican voter in Georgia, who asked NPR to publish only her first name for fear of being ostracized by friends and family for her views. "It worries me for him to get elected. It concerns me any time someone gets pulled into those ridiculous looking-back discussions."
At a farmers market in Alpharetta, a tony suburb outside of Atlanta, Lynn said she could have easily voted for the other two Republicans who ran in the primary. Now she has not ruled out voting for Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff, in part because of Collins' positions on the 2020 election.
The Collins campaign did not respond to NPR's request for comment.
Finishing a plate of grits at the farmers market, voter Austin Sapp said he regularly votes for Republican candidates, believes election fraud does happen, and supports Trump's push to pass a strict voter ID law through Congress. He also wishes the president would move on from relitigating 2020.
"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?"
"Regular humans have given this up"
Just 1% of voters in a September New York Times-Siena College poll said election integrity is the top issue deciding their vote this November.
"It's really big with the media and the far edges of both parties," said Gabe Sterling, a veteran official with the Georgia secretary of state's office. "Regular humans have given this up a long time ago."
After the 2020 election, Sterling was one of the most visible officials disputing Trump's false claims. Weeks before Jan. 6, he presciently warned people could get hurt. He says that feels far from the climate now.
Sterling says while resurfacing claims about fraud can still be an effective fundraising tool, the 2020 obsession is mostly alive among die-hard activists only.
That is not insignificant though. Some of those activists now hold influential positions on state and local election boards. They also vote reliably in Republican primaries.
Sterling spoke with hundreds of GOP primary voters as he ran for secretary of state this year. He stood firm in his defense of Georgia's elections and felt like he did sway people. It was not enough to win a primary.
"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."
Why some candidates still back Trump's claims
In primaries elsewhere, some onetime critics of Trump's claims have come to embrace them.
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 while making an unsuccessful 2024 Senate bid, in an interview with the Detroit Free Press editorial board, Rogers refused to answer who won the presidential contest in 2020. Then at a local Republican meeting last fall, Rogers claimed the Senate seat was stolen from him, according to a video of the meeting obtained by NPR.
"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," Rogers said at the time.
And after Trump gave a primetime Oval Office address this summer resurrecting debunked claims about election vulnerabilities, Rogers thanked him on social media.
Rogers' 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, says many candidates still see echoing 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 said. "It's usually at a Republican central committee meeting, throwing red meat to the base."
Throwing red meat is likely not a strategy to win a tossup state in November, however.
"I can't imagine any Republican in a general election spending any money talking about election integrity or what happened in 2020," Roe said.
How the 2020 fixation could still shape the midterms
And yet Trump is still talking about it, potentially to the detriment of his own party's bid to keep their majorities.
In Georgia, Trump declined to endorse a Republican alternative to Collins preferred by popular GOP Gov. Brian Kemp. One reason Trump cited was that candidate correctly saying Trump lost Georgia in 2020.
A similar scenario played out in the Texas primary, where Trump endorsed the controversial state attorney general, who backed his 2020 claims. That candidate ousted Republican Sen. John Cornyn, who was seen as more formidable in the general election.
"I think we should talk about 2026 and not 2020," Cornyn told reporters this summer.
The president 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 more voting restrictions through the SAVE America Act, as Republicans tried to reopen the Department of Homeland Security. Trump has also attempted to take unprecedented control of the voting process.
Georgia's Sterling sees one motivation behind Trump's continued focus on elections.
"It distracts from the Iran war, it distracts from the Epstein files," he said. "And this is the ground on which they want to fight."
A September poll by the University of California San Diego found that only 49% of Americans expect that the upcoming midterm elections will be free and fair — lower than before the 2024 election.
Sterling says Trump seems to be laying groundwork to deflect blame if Republicans lose. If that happens, claims about rigged elections could find an audience once again.
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