The 2020 election deniers running in swing states

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Gubernatorial candidates in multiple swing states have questioned the 2020 election results. How worried should you be?

President Donald Trump has spent years making false claims about election fraud, including his refusal to accept that he lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden. Since that election, Republicans who denied or questioned the results have taken positions on local election boards, worked inside election offices, trained poll observers, and sought to influence state election laws.

Now, as we head into the 2026 midterm elections, candidates who have denied or questioned the results of the 2020 election are running for governor and other powerful positions in key swing states. If elected, some could play important roles in overseeing future elections.

Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram spoke with Andrew Kaczynski, senior reporter at CNN who has been reporting on election-denying candidates and what their victories could mean for future elections.

Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Which swing states are having elections featuring candidates who have denied the 2020 election results?

The interesting thing is that we talked about in this article that we did on the five most key swing states is governor’s races. We’re talking Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin and Georgia. These are all states that Trump won in 2016, Biden in 2020, then Trump in 2024. And what we had talked about was how in each of these states, there are candidates running for governor who in four of the cases just outright denied the results of the 2020 election.

How are these candidates in these five races faring? Does it look good for any of them?

With the caveat that we’ve seen some pretty big polling misses already in two of these states, most of these candidates are behind in the polls, but there’s always the caveat that these are states that Trump won in 2024 and 2016. So they’re going to be, they’re true battlegrounds. So anything could really happen in them.

And how much is their dispute or lie about the 2020 election coming up in their races?