It was one month ago today when Joe Biden was declared the winner of the 2020 presidential race, which means that Republicans have had a full month to acknowledge reality and come to terms with Donald Trump’s defeat.
Just 27 congressional Republicans acknowledge Joe Biden’s win over President Trump a month after the former vice president’s clear victory of more than 7 million votes nationally and a convincing electoral-vote margin that exactly matched Trump’s 2016 tally.
The Washington Post conducted a survey of every current federal GOP lawmaker — in both the U.S. House and U.S. Senate — asking three simple questions.
1. “Who won the election?”
Of the 249 Republicans in Congress, only 27 — just under 11% — acknowledged the president-elect’s victory. And while the vast majority dodged this simple question, two House Republicans — Alabama’s Mo Brooks and Arizona’s Paul Gosar — said Trump won, reality be damned.
2. “Do you support or oppose Donald Trump’s continuing efforts to claim victory?”
Only nine GOP lawmakers said they oppose the outgoing president’s anti-election efforts, while eight explicitly endorsed them. The rest refused to answer or failed to give clear answers.
3. “If Joe Biden wins a majority in the Electoral College, will you accept him as the legitimately elected president of the United States?”
On this, 32 out of 249 Republicans in Congress — nearly 13% — were willing to say they’d accept Biden as a legitimate president after the electoral college vote. Two — Brooks and Gosar again — balked. This is more than just a curiosity. If Trump saw his support on Capitol Hill evaporate, and congressional Republicans started pushing in large numbers for the outgoing president to start acting like a responsible adult, he’d be more likely to change course. But a month after Election Day, that’s clearly not the case, reinforcing a larger truth: to see Trump as the sole problem in this post-election fiasco is to miss the bigger picture. The president’s party is a willing participant in this undemocratic circus, and it bears much of the blame. For his part, Trump demanded over the weekend that someone send him the list of congressional Republicans who acknowledged Biden’s victory — the information wasn’t hidden, and was readily available from the Washington Post — with the outgoing president calling these GOP lawmakers “RINOS,” a reference to “Republicans in name only.” In other words, as far as Trump is concerned, to believe election results is to be a fake Republican.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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