The ‘Stop the Steal’ Movement Isn’t Letting Up
So much for “Stop the Steal.” For the past several months, Donald Trump and his most prominent followers had been seeding unfounded claims of a rigged election. Democrats “are working overtime trying to sign people, illegally, to vote in the election,” Trump said on Newsmax in September. He would repeat versions of this through Election Day. “A lot of talk about massive CHEATING in Philadelphia,” Trump posted on Tuesday afternoon. “Law Enforcement coming!!!” Not even 12 hours later, he was onstage declaring victory.
All of the people who voiced concerns about “election integrity” and voter fraud are suddenly no longer worrying about it. “Can’t stop smiling,” Laura Loomer, the right-wing troll and Trump ally, posted on Wednesday morning, after confidently claiming last month that “the Democrats are rigging the 2024 election just like they did in 2020.” On Election Day, War Room, Steve Bannon’s internet show, spread the claim that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers in Arizona and Pennsylvania were told not to wear uniforms or badges to the polls, “as it could scare illegals from voting.” Once Trump seemed poised to win Arizona, War Room was thanking the state.
Since the rise of the “Stop the Steal” movement in 2020, in which widespread election denialism culminated in the insurrection at the Capitol, the right has put considerable time and money into building an army of poll watchers and rewriting election laws. Now “Stop the Steal,” or the Big Lie as it’s sometimes called, has been discarded to the bin of past right-wing obsessions, such as MS-13 and Sharia law. It seems like a collective waste of time; Trump won outright and didn’t ever need to sow doubt. But “Stop the Steal” 2.0 was hardly a bust. It was never just about election denialism.
As in 2020, Trump and other election deniers this year relied on a range of claims, including rigged voting machines and mail-in-ballot fraud. But this time around, they went especially heavy on alleging that Democrats were mobilizing noncitizens to unlawfully vote and swing the election in their favor. “Our elections are bad, and a lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, they’re trying to get them to vote,” Trump said during the presidential debate in September, reiterating a Truth Social post he’d made earlier that day about how “THE DEMOCRATS ARE TRYING TO ‘STUFF’ VOTER REGISTRATIONS WITH ILLEGAL ALIENS.”
Trump and his loyalists framed these voter-fraud allegations as yet another way in which immigrants are making your life worse—stoking the animus that defined his campaign. The energy fueling the conspiracies has had real-world consequences. As the NBC News reporter Brandy Zadrozny has written, allegations of noncitizens casting ballots has resulted in GOP attempts to purge the voter rolls, disenfranchising some citizens in the process. The allegations have also led to Latino voting activists being targets of anti-voter-fraud raids.
Even before the results came in, claims about noncitizens affecting the election were an obvious ruse. An analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice described noncitizen voting as “vanishingly rare,” and state investigations have uncovered almost no instances of it. The Trump campaign gave up the real game when asked by NBC News about his comments regarding noncitizen voting. Instead of telling the news outlet that Trump was just concerned about election integrity, a spokesperson said, “President Trump will secure the border and secure our elections so that every American vote is protected.”
The full effect of unfounded claims about noncitizen voters may only materialize once Trump returns to the White House. He campaigned on securing the border and mass deportations, and “Stop the Steal” has given him a new talking point to justify the antagonization of immigrants. It’s not a redundant one either. It’s generally difficult to disparage immigration without sounding racist: These people are okay, but those people aren’t. Trump and other conservatives have tried to focus on crime committed by immigrants as a way to sidestep this, but that is less of a dog whistle than a bullhorn. The supposed threat of noncitizen voters offers a work-around. It is an attempt to “justify any mass-deportation agenda,” Caleb Kieffer, a senior analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center, told me. Now draconian anti-immigrant policies don’t have to be about racism, bigotry, or white nationalism. They are about election integrity.
The election has ended without any evidence of widespread rigging, but the energy animating this new version of “Stop the Steal” is still going. In the aftermath of Trump’s victory, some of his fans online started cheering for the impending mass deportations. To this day, many of his followers believe that the 2020 election was stolen from them. “People need to go to jail,” the Blaze Media host Auron MacIntyre wrote on X yesterday morning about what he claimed were voting irregularities in the 2020 election, barely more than a day after the Associated Press had declared Trump the 2024 winner. The so-called election-security concerns about 2024 aren’t going to let up either. There will always be more elections, and thus ever more reason to kick out immigrants.