Mindy Finn is the Founder and CEO of Citizen Data, a democracy-centric data analytics company. Throughout her extensive career, she has fought to improve politics, polarization, and voting, with prior roles with Mitt Romney, George W. Bush, and Twitter, Inc.
With new information coming out about Fox News' role in advancing election lies, we take this opportunity to look more closely at the lasting impact of election trust on recent elections.
Following a robust analysis of available data and insights detailed in my company Citizen Data’s latest Political Impact Report, we found that while many prominent election deniers did lose in key races in 2022, the threat of election denial remains pervasive. Yet, hope remains for pro-democracy advocates as the breadth of midterm data demonstrates the potential efficacy of electoral reform efforts on curbing candidate extremism.
In 2022, Americans were moved to the polls because of the economy more than anything else. Half of Americans ranked inflation as a top three issue, followed by abortion and immigration, both of which trailed by nearly 20%.
In Wisconsin, Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, battleground states where the most financially-backed challenges between pro- and anti-democratic candidates took place, voters were more likely to cite “protecting elections” as a top issue surpassing “immigration” in some states.
In fact, 61% of these voters said protecting democracy was very important in determining who they voted for during the 2022 General. Notably, it was in these battleground states that the more prominent election-denying candidates lost or underperformed compared to their more moderate counterparts, especially at the hands of Republican voters who instead decided to cast a ballot for a Democrat.
Given these trends rejecting election deniers in many key races, we were surprised to learn after examining all races for Governor, Secretary of State, Attorney General, and U.S. House & Senate nationwide, that almost half of all 2022 general election winners questioned the results of the 2020 election.
Perhaps most concerning, we found that being an “election denier” actually increased a candidate’s vote share somewhere between 1 - 5 percentage points in the general election relative to their counterparts who trusted the results of the 2020 election. This willingness to accept a candidate despite or, in some cases, because of their election denial claims tells us it’s doubtful that the election denial campaign strategy will be thrown out any time soon.
However, we don’t share this news without hope. We also investigated various election reforms that organizations like Unite America, FairVote, Open Primaries, Institute for Political Innovation, and countless others have been pursuing for decades, like Ranked Choice Voting (RCV or Instant Runoff Voting) and eliminating partisan primaries to measure the role they played in curbing extremism like 2020 election denial.
We found that states with Top 2, Top 4 RCV, or statewide RCV were three times less likely to have an election denier win in the 2022 general election compared to states without these reforms in use. Even more encouraging, we found widespread support for these reforms, as nearly 6 in 10 voters nationwide said they would support a reform similar to Top 4 in Alaska in their state.
The alarm must not silence in the wake of high-profile election deniers losing this past election cycle, because as the data shows, this is likely just the beginning. The democracy community must band together to disrupt the potential positive side effects of election denial in the campaign process and support reforms that enable moderation and competition.
Access to the preview version of our Political Impact Report is available at this LINK, and those interested in the full report can submit their inquiry HERE.
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a“ Steel Across America” event ahead of the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11th attacks on the Ellipse near the White House on Sept. 8, 2026 in Washington, D.C. President Trump welcomed 9/ 11 first responders to the Tunnel to Towers Foundation’ s“ Steel Across America” event featuring a 16,900- pound, 21- foot steel beam recovered.
For Trump, even 9/11 is an opportunity
There was a reason organizers of the 9/11 ceremony in Manhattan told President Trump he could not speak at this year’s memorial service.
A good one, it turns out.
Because in a speech he gave on Tuesday in Washington, he did exactly what they were presumably worried about — he made it about himself.
According to The New York Times, Trump had wanted a speaking role at the service, but the National Sept. 11 Memorial and Museum, which oversees the site, said no, as they’ve maintained for the past decade-plus that the venue and event should be nonpartisan.
Trump has long used awful tragedies to either puff himself up, trash political opponents, or sell lies to the American people.
He blamed a deadly plane crash at Washington National Airport last year on diversity, equity and inclusion policies. He blamed Puerto Ricans for the devastation they endured after Hurricane Maria in 2017. He reportedly considered withholding disaster relief after the California wildfires based on the way affected regions voted. In an interview on Fox News meant to commemorate the 75th anniversary of D-Day in Normandy, he used the occasion to slam former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi…with graves of the dead behind him.
And now, as we approach the 25th anniversary of what many New Yorkers consider the darkest day in modern history, Trump has done it again.
He told a rambling, nonsensical story — one he’s told before — about going to Ground Zero just after terrorists flew two commercial jets into the twin towers. In the story, which no one has been able to verify, despite multiple attempts, he says firefighters had to carry him out of One Liberty Plaza, also known as the U.S. Steel Building, because they thought it was about to collapse.
As CNN fact checker Daniel Dale notes, there’s no evidence Trump went into this building, especially at a time when NYPD and NYFD had locked down the area. There’s no evidence that building was collapsing — in fact, it was deemed structurally sound and reopened within two months of the attacks. There’s no evidence he was carried out of it by firefighters.
But the lie isn’t even the worst part. Pretend it was all true — why would the leader of our country, and a New Yorker, decide to make that tragic day about himself?
Because that’s who Donald Trump is. He’s a malignant narcissist.
He’s also, incidentally, a terrible and ineffectual president, who’s made ill-fated decisions that he has to keep defending, and there’s nothing he won’t do to make himself look and feel better.
Within the first two minutes of his speech, he was cravenly using 9/11 to justify and promote his dumb war in Iran — two events separated by 25 years and 6,000 miles.
“And I will tell you, we’re right now fighting because we have a certain nation that wanted a nuclear weapon, they were very close to getting it, and now they have no chance at getting it. They will never have a nuclear weapon. Iran will not have a nuclear weapon. And they’ve been punished greatly. As you know, we’ve really taken it to them.”
As a New Yorker who lived through 9/11, still one of the worst days of my life, I’m utterly sickened by Trump’s crass, political, and self-promotional framing of that awful day.
And I’m relieved he won’t be given a platform to do it again on Friday’s anniversary in lower Manhattan.
Because for Trump, everything is his for the taking, and absolutely nothing is sacred.
S.E. Cupp is the host of "S.E. Cupp Unfiltered" on CNN.