In the years since the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, Donald Trump never once backed down from the lie that caused it: That the 2020 election had been stolen from him, and Joe Biden‘s presidency was illegitimate. Running a comeback campaign to secure a second term in 2024, he primed his supporters to once again challenge the democratic process in the event of another loss, all while spewing more misinformation about everything from “post-birth” abortions to pet-eating immigrants, none of which had any basis in reality.
But now that Trump has defeated Vice President Kamala Harris and started appointing a Cabinet, some disappointed Democrats are turning to the kind of conspiracies they had long condemned from MAGA influencers. Most strikingly, some have pushed the unfounded claim that Trump or the GOP may have stolen votes from Harris, beginning to solidify a “BlueAnon” truther movement with parallels to the far-right QAnon extremism that Trump has routinely elevated from within his base.
These rumblings began last Tuesday as election night results moved steadily in favor of Trump, who for the first time in three national contests was on track to win not just the electoral college but the popular vote. (His past underperformance of Biden and Hillary Clinton by this metric inspired many of his false accusations of fraud and voting by undocumented migrants.) Because many ballots had yet to be counted, particularly in blue west coast states with mail-in voting, and Harris trailed Biden’s totals, highly visible social media users began to raise questions about 15 or 20 million “missing” votes, and called on Harris not to concede. These misleading posts were viewed millions of times.
Even as Harris continued to receive more votes through the following week, closing the popular vote gap with Trump, the depressed Democratic turnout saw thousands of Dems signing a Change.org petition demanding an “investigation and recount” of the 2024 election, citing the erroneous “15-20 million” figure and arguing, “The election results DO NOT add up, and it seems that they were somehow tampered with illegally.”
During the week in which the 2020 vote was tallied, Trump, his team, and Republican officials and members of Congress sowed doubt in the results as they went against him. The party’s amplification of election misinformation was a critical factor in the violence that erupted on Jan. 6. Harris and the Democrats, by contrast, have not acknowledged the conspiracy theories brewing in the aftermath of the 2024 matchup — though determined bad actors have made inroads with liberals anyway.
By the weekend after the election, misinformation and engagement-farming social accounts were sharing false reports that the Harris campaign was presently engaged in efforts to force a recount. “BREAKING: Kamala’s campaign says They can Overturn Trump’s Election Victory with a Recount,” read one unsourced post on X, formerly Twitter, from a verified account with nearly 200,000 followers. Harris has in fact conceded the race and said nothing about a recount. But by Tuesday afternoon, according to X metrics, the bogus headline had been viewed 21 million times and received 84,000 likes. (It also has also received a Community Note marking it as false.) And while certain clickbait accounts used Harris’ diminished turnout compared to Biden’s to suggest that Trump cheated this time around, right-wing misinformation peddlers used it to retroactively argue that 2020 must have been stolen from Trump.
Another strain of election denialism from liberals concerns Starlink, a satellite-based internet communications system owned and operated by the private aerospace company SpaceX — whose CEO is billionaire Elon Musk, one of Trump’s most important backers who is likely to have outsized power in the new administration. TikToks speculating that Musk could have used Starlink to alter vote totals and rig the election made the rounds, with a few influencers wondering if this was the mysterious “little secret” Trump teased at a rally in the closing days of the campaign. (Actor John Cusak was among those looking for information online as to whether Starlink “is connected to voting.”) There is no evidence that the satellites could interfere with voting machines, which are disconnected from the internet during the voting process to prevent hacking — though Musk himself has misleadingly claimed that these highly secure machines are vulnerable to cyberattack.
Suspicions were further raised by the fiery breakup of a decommissioned Starlink satellite as it reentered Earth’s atmosphere over the U.S. on Saturday night. “It’s almost like Elon Musk cheated in the election and destroyed the evidence,” mused one popular X user the day after. Others saw a potential coded reference to Starlink in a line from Harris’ concession speech: “Only when it is dark enough can you see the stars,” she said in the address to her supporters and the nation on Wednesday afternoon, prompting one TikTok user to write, “I don’t think this is over yet.”
The Starlink conspiracy theories also proved to have traction on Threads, Meta’s alternative to X, which counts among its users plenty of Democrats outraged that Musk remade the latter platform into a premiere destination for Trump hype and MAGA propaganda. “The whole Starlink thing isn’t conspiracy theory, it’s actually real,” wrote one self-identified liberal mom in a post sharing one of the conspiracist TikTok videos. The same user then sketched out a scenario in which a GOP election fraud scheme is uncovered: “FBI raids and arrests Musk,” she imagined. “Trump plays dumb but will only walk away clean if offered a full pardon, which is granted.” QAnon communities, too, often indulge in predictions of political enemies being charged and punished for crimes of corruption.
While such implausible explanations of Trump’s win (and fantasies of his downfall) are no doubt an expression of shock at Harris’ loss, a contingent of BlueAnon Democrats have flirted with alternate realities since July, when Trump was grazed in the ear by an assassin’s bullet at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. In the wake of that attempt on his life, skeptical liberals produced elaborate but inaccurate analyses of the shooting as they sought to prove it had been a staged or “false flag” operation carried out by Trump allies in hopes of increasing his odds of election. When Trump appeared at the Republican National Convention two days later with a bandage on his wounded ear, conspiracists shared close-up images they falsely claimed as evidence that the injury wasn’t real, including a video altered to make it seem as though Trump had worn the bandage on the wrong ear. (The right’s own conspiracy theories around the incident tended to focus on the failures of the Secret Service to adequately protect Trump.)
That more Democrats — if not elected ones — are now succumbing to the comforts of election denialism as Trump returns to the Oval Office indicates the potential realignment of an already polarized America: What if both sides are disconnected from the facts, and continue to move in opposite directions? It’s an outcome that social media networks, swamped year after year by misinformation, seem ill-equipped to address. As it is, they may only serve to accelerate a national divorce.
From Rolling Stone US
