Ron DeSantis Renounces Trump’s Craziest Election Lie

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has steadfastly refused to acknowledge that Donald Trump legitimately lost the 2020 presidential election. But now he has taken a step closer to acknowledging reality.

“Governor, yes or no question: Do you think the 2020 election was stolen?” asked the New York Times.

“All those theories that were put out did not prove to be true. But what I’ve also said is the way you conduct a good election that people have confidence in, you don’t change the rules in the middle of the game,” DeSantis said. “It was not an election that was conducted the way I think that we want to, but that’s different than saying Maduro stole votes or something like that,” he said. “Those theories, you know, proved to be unsubstantiated.”

There are numerous theories as to why the 2020 election was supposedly illegitimate. None of those theories provide any credible evidence the election result changed as a result of fraudulent votes. But the theories range from claiming the voting machines were programmed to alter the tabulations — the most convoluted of these theories insists that somehow it has to do with the Venezuelans — to less-insane complaints about the courts allowing voting by mail to accommodate the pandemic.

DeSantis renounced the Venezuelan-voting-machine conspiracy but gestured toward endorsing theories that the election was illegitimate because the rules were changed “in the middle of the game” (owing to the global pandemic).

By questioning even the craziest aspects of Trump’s scheme to seize an unelected second term in office, DeSantis is taking a big political risk. Fewer than a third of Republicans think Biden legitimately won the 2020 election, with the remainder either suspecting or firmly believing he stole it through fraud. DeSantis himself voiced suspicions over the vote results. “I tell you, what I’m seeing in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania is troubling,” he said shortly after the election, adding, “You’ll get like a 4 a.m. dump of massive votes for one candidate and almost none for the other, and people look at that and they just scratch their heads.”

DeSantis also publicly floated a plan for state legislatures to override the election result and hand their electors to Trump. “Under Article II of the Constitution, presidential electors are done by legislatures and the schemes they create in the framework,” DeSantis said. “If there’s departure from that and they’re not following the law, if they’re ignoring law, then they can provide remedies as well, so I would exhaust every option to make sure we have a fair count.”

In all likelihood, DeSantis is going to find some position that can reconcile those claims with his renunciation of the Hugo Chávez ghost-machine theory. Trump, of course, will apply merciless pressure to depict even this tiny deviation as proof DeSantis is a RINO. The endless race to the bottom that is the Republican nominating contest will go on, but at least DeSantis has taken a tiny step away from insanity.