It’s not absurd to keep asking GOP leaders who won the 2020 election

When George Stephanopoulos asked Johnson on “This Week” to acknowledge that Joe Biden had won the election and Donald Trump lost it, Johnson complained that the ABC anchor was playing “a gotcha game.” He went on, “You want us to litigate things that happened four years ago when we’re talking about the future.” Sen. JD Vance (Ohio) had used the same dodge a few days earlier, during the vice-presidential debate.

On a second pass, Johnson said, “Joe Biden has been the president for four years. There’s not a question about this, okay?” He added 185 words on all the topics this exchange was keeping him from addressing. At no point did he say that Trump lost or Biden won.

What’s absurd is not the question but the fact that it has to be asked. All Johnson had to do to be able to move on to the topics he prefers was tell the truth, which can be done succinctly: Biden won. (He could have added an “unfortunately.”)

One reason the 2020 question keeps getting asked is that Trump himself won’t drop the subject. He recently claimed he won Michigan in 2020. He did not. A few weeks ago, he even said that only fraud had kept him from winning California.

The people Trump has gulled into thinking he won in 2020 are wrong about a lot of things, but give them credit for this much: If Biden really had taken the electoral votes of several states where Trump won more legal votes, they would be right to be obsessed about it. What doesn’t make sense is the line that Republican politicians so often want to take: Maybe the election was stolen and maybe it wasn’t, but let’s talk about more pressing issues.

Vance has in the past used another tactic to keep his distance from Trump’s most outlandish assertions: changing the subject to other complaints about the 2020 election. A month before Trump picked him as his running mate, Vance said, “I don’t see any reason to think that Dominion voting machines switched ballots.” But many Republicans still saw the election as illegitimate, he said, because of covid-era changes to election rules and social media companies’ suppression of news stories unfavorable to the Democrats.

This argument lets the Republicans who advance it call the election “rigged” without making swing voters worry they are dangerously detached from reality. But it can’t possibly justify throwing out the duly cast votes of millions of Americans, which is what Trump and his allies tried to do after the 2020 election. Nor can it justify Trump’s repeated claims that he really won the election (by a “landslide,” he has sometimes said).

This pseudo-sophisticated case — the pretense that Trump is just raising important questions about voting procedures and online content moderation during the 2020 election — collapses under the slightest pressure. Vance himself seems to have grown tired of having to insist that Trump didn’t not win the election. The day after his debate, he said, “Yep,” with no further explanation, when asked whether Trump had won.

Modern parties usually abandon presidential candidates who lose. Trump’s barrage of falsehoods about the election saved him from that fate and helped him cruise to the Republican nomination. The larger voting public, in 2022, seems to have held Republicans’ indulgence of 2020 mythology against them. In a recent poll, 63 percent of respondents thought Biden had won legitimately in 2020.

Only 30 percent of Republicans agreed. No wonder Republican politicians don’t like having to talk about it. At least through the end of this campaign, they seem to have concluded, they are stuck with the lie. A fantasy about 2020 has the potential to cause them to lose another election in 2024.