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.
A golden tray sits on the Resolute Desk as President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement on American nuclear innovation in the Oval Office at the White House on July 24, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Trump is signing multiple executive orders targeting the nuclear energy sector and easing rules for new reactors and nuclear fuel supply chains.
Trump’s hubris rivals the fallen heroes of ancient Greek mythology
In January, the New York Times asked President Donald Trump if there were any limits on his global powers.
“Yeah,” the president responded, “there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
That was eight months ago, but fortunately Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey” has made ancient Greek literature newly relevant. Before that window closes, I’d like to talk about hubris.
Today, the term mostly means excessive pride or arrogance. That’s part of what the Greeks meant by it too, but the meaning was a bit richer and more specific. Hubris was an insolent or outrageous act that offended the gods, often because the transgressor was claiming abilities or authorities that solely belonged to supreme beings.
Nolan renamed and slightly modified the concept of xenia for the film, calling it “Zeus’ law.” In the director’s telling, mortals should follow the rules laid out by the gods, specifically the requirement to treat strangers with respect lest they be gods in disguise.
In a sense, hubris is the opposite, or at least the rejection, of xenia. The hubris of the suitors, and at times Odysseus himself, invites punishment by the gods and their mortal instruments.
Which brings me back to Donald Trump. His claim that there are no constraints on his personal power to dictate events on the global stage was one of the greatest expressions of hubris ever uttered by a political leader.
Trump’s claim was obviously false when he made it.
He vowed that he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours. He’s proved powerless to make that happen. If he had divine powers to work his will, why would he have balked at implementing his tariffs so often that Wall Street adopted the “TACO trade” term for his deals? “TACO” stands for “Trump always chickens out.”
And why would Trump have made so many embarrassing concessions to China — from rescinding tariffs on Chinese goods to allowing them to buy crucial and incredibly valuable computer chips?
But Trump saw his success at capturing Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro as proof of his ability to launch missiles to the same effect as Zeus’ lightning bolts. Trump believed he was the most powerful man who ever lived.
This is no exaggeration. In March, when the Iran invasion seemed successful, Trump gave a document penned by“Presidential Historian David King” to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan purporting to prove that Trump was “the most powerful person to have EVER walked this planet.” King was, in fact, a businessman and occasional caddy for legendary golfer Gary Player.
King compared Trump favorably to many of history’s most powerful, and often heinous, figures: Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Mao Tse Tung, Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin. Many of these men thought they were the most powerful person in the world, too. And many were defeated precisely because they believed it.
At least Napoleon and Hitler had a string of truly impressive victories before they learned the folly of hubris. The limits on Trump’s power have been exposed by far less august forces than the combined might of the allies in World War II or the fearsome Russian winter.
Iran is a comparatively middling power. But the regime’s ability to absorb punishment while imposing its will on the Strait of Hormuz has proved to be a greater constraint on Trump’s power than his morality or mind. We should note that, at least rhetorically, his morality has not proved much of a constraint. He has repeatedly promised to destroy Iranian “civilization” if the regime refuses to capitulate.
But they haven’t — and won’t anytime soon — because the regime’s tolerance for pain far outstrips Trump’s. The combined fear of skyrocketing oil prices, outrage of Gulf state potentates, diminishing weapon supplies and domestic unpopularity is doing the work that international law, congressional oversight and the collective opinion of foreign policy experts can’t or won’t do.
If I considered Trump more heroic than reason and facts could allow, I would say his Sisyphean predicament has the whiff of Greek tragedy to it. Trump is vexed by the fact that the Iranians won’t honor deals or ratify his countless premature claims of victory — giving new meaning to his vow that his presidency would make people tired of winning. It’s almost like they’re out-Trumping Trump.
Things might have gone better if he’d heeded that great Greek tragedian Sophocles: “For Zeus utterly abhors the boasts of a proud tongue.”
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Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.