How much did Trump influence Republican candidates in the primaries?
4:50
(CNN) --
New elections.
The same Trump lies.
Former President Donald Trump is injecting his democracy-harming fraud claims into a new election cycle.
This time by urging his friend Mehmet Oz to simply declare that he won too close a race for the Republican Senate nomination in Pennsylvania, a key state in Trump's desperate attempt to steal the 2020 election.
The suspenseful contest between Oz and David McCormick, another candidate claiming Trump's legacy, is the main race of Tuesday's primary round, bringing dire echoes of the 2020 election controversy and omens for 2024.
A situation similar to that of the winner of the Republican primary for governor, state senator Doug Mastriano, who ran a campaign based on Trump's falsehoods about stealing the last presidential election and who could oversee the 2024 White House race in the state if he wins in November.
In a state that could be critical to control of the US Senate, top Republicans express concern that Mastriano could drag the party's nominee to the Senate, while Democratic nominee Josh Shapiro is already shaping the race. warning that the state could fall into the clutches of a dangerous extremist.
advertising
Why it is important that Trump insists on his lies
Trump is interfering in the Pennsylvania Senate race because there is still a chance that Oz, whom he endorsed last month, could lose to the candidate the former president spurned, former hedge fund executive McCormick, when all are counted. the votes.
Trump is frustrated that Oz has to wait for absentee votes and delayed in-person votes to be counted.
Those votes are as valid as any vote cast in person.
But Trump is using the same corrupt playbook he used nearly two years ago to falsely claim that he won a second term.
"Dr. Oz should declare victory. It's much harder for them to cheat with the ballots they just found," Trump wrote on his tongue-in-cheek "Truth Social" on Wednesday.
The former president claimed the Pennsylvania election was a "disaster," making the same kind of baseless claims he conjured up after losing to President Joe Biden.
Americans eager to distance themselves from the former president might wonder why what Trump wrote on a social media platform with a far smaller reach than Twitter, from which he was banned after the January 6, 2021 insurrection for inciting violence, matters. violence.
But Trump's pressure on Oz, who led Wednesday night by less than 1,300 votes out of 1.3 million votes cast, represents yet another attempt to taint the integrity of American democracy simply because it's not working. What he wants.
If the former president had settled into his retirement in Florida, his immersion in the Pennsylvania election would not be as important.
But all indications are that Trump intends to be a major player in November's midterm elections as a launching pad for a bid to win the White House in 2024.
He is showing that, despite putting Washington in disgrace after launching a campaign of lies designed to undermine his electoral defeat, which resulted in an insurrection, he would have no qualms about doing it again.
Trump has demonstrated his power over his supporters since 2020: Millions now believe his fraud falsehoods, while many Republican candidates this year have included them in his campaign messages.
But this new example of interference in Pennsylvania is not history: It is an active effort to delegitimize an election.
And if Oz loses, he could seriously delegitimize McCormick's victory among staunch pro-Trump voters.
Trump's mendacity puts intense pressure on Oz and McCormick to end their race gracefully and for the loser to accept the result, as candidates in America have done for nearly 250 years, to preserve faith in American elections. .
Whichever is the winner, a recount could be triggered automatically if the spread is narrow enough.
Oz, so far, has not heeded Trump's advice to claim victory, appearing to trust the electoral system in a state the former president claimed was corrupt two years ago.
Aides to McCormick, who has previously raised questions about electoral integrity in the state, argue that uncounted absentee ballots — the high-profile votes that Trump falsely claimed in 2020 as proof of fraud — will put him over the top.
Republicans fear Mastriano could hurt Senate chances
Another Republican candidate from Pennsylvania who suddenly has no problem with the Pennsylvania electoral system is Mastriano.
A cynic might conclude that this is because he gave her a big win.
But his victory in the gubernatorial primary means that an outright denier of the 2020 election is now one step away from power in one of the nation's toughest swing states.
Mastriano went on record saying that the 2020 vote was compromised and that the state legislature had the authority to appoint a new list of electors, challenging voters to go to Washington.
So his victory is already setting off alarm bells in Washington.
Add to that the fact that, as governor, Mastriano would have the authority to appoint a secretary of state who would run that state's elections in 2024. Mastriano also got a late endorsement from Trump, who may be on the ballot in the upcoming presidential elections.
This confluence of threats to the state's democracy led Shapiro, the state's current attorney general and his opponent in the fall, to label Mastriano a "dangerous extremist."
And some Republican senators in Washington, salivating at the prospect of getting their chamber back in November, are worried.
"I don't think people want to think about 2020," Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina told CNN's Manu Raju on Wednesday.
Senate Republican Leader John Thune's reaction was a considerable understatement.
The South Dakota Republican said some of Mastriano's remarks are "not ideal."
This is how Trump's failed 2024 election plan could work 5:18
The fear among Republicans is that Mastriano is so radical that he couldn't just emulate Trump by trashing Pennsylvania's electoral system.
He, too, stands to lose big statewide by cutting through with moderate suburban voters, just as Trump did.
He could also stigmatize the eventual Republican candidate for Senate in a seat that could decide the fate of the House.
Thune is confident that will not happen.
"I think hopefully people, when it comes to the fall elections, are very sharp and will be able to tell the gubernatorial candidate from the Senate candidate," he told Raju.
For Trump, however, the calculation is simple.
He backs candidates who strongly support him and pay the price for their support by amplifying his lies about voter fraud.
However, the results of this Tuesday's elections, like other primaries this year, contained a lesson for the former president, if he wanted to learn it.
Whether he endorsed them or not, nearly every candidate was running on Trumpism, the populist "America First" nationalism that now dominates the GOP base.
If Trump forgot about 2020 and focused on that message, and worked exclusively to highlight President Joe Biden's vulnerabilities, including raging inflation and high gas prices that helped send Wall Street down 1,000 points on Wednesday, it could boost significantly his hopes for a new term in the White House.
But that would require him to do the unthinkable: admit he lost.
Donald Trump midterms
