The Next ‘Stop the Steal’ Movement Is Here

The election is rigged. Democrats are already working to steal the election from Donald Trump, and the results are going to be illegitimate. That is, unless Trump wins. This is the message that has been percolating through segments of the online right. Over the past several weeks, conservative figures ranging from the fringe to the mainstream have been priming their audiences to declare fraud should the election not go their way. “The Democrats are rigging the 2024 election just like they did in 2020,” Laura Loomer, a right-wing troll and Trump ally, posted on the messaging app Telegram earlier this month. “From illegal voter registrations in Arizona, to widespread mail-in ballot fraud and encouraging democrats to flood the polls with illegal alien voters, they’re setting the stage to steal key swing states.”

Democrats “will be stealing Wisconsin and Michigan,” Owen Shroyer, the far-right host of the Infowars show War Room, said on air last week. “I’d say that’s all but guaranteed at this point.” He then moved on to question why results might not be available on Election Night as they were in years prior to the rise of mail-in ballots (which take more time to count and process), a common right-wing line intended to further call the election’s integrity into question. The idea is that it’s supposedly fishy that votes now take longer to count, as though election fraud is something that cannot be done rapidly, but must be carefully aged like a delicate French cheese.

Even by the standards of the fringier segments of the right, Loomer and Shroyer are known for saying outrageous and polemic things. Still, more mainstream figures are also trying to more gently push the idea that election-security flaws may exist that could jeopardize the results. Fox News’s Jesse Watters accused Democrats of “trying to make elections less secure” on a segment during his show earlier this month. On Infowars, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene claimed that voting machines were changing voters’ intended ballot choices in a reliably red, mostly rural county in Georgia. “I will be working to investigate this issue and ensure the integrity of our elections in Georgia,“ she later posted.

The claims fall into several rough categories that range from soft attempts to undermine the credibility of the election to outright conspiracy theories: that there are voting irregularities that suggest something is amiss, that the time it will take for results to be tallied is suspiciously long, that Democrats are encouraging explicit voter fraud, that a scheme is afoot to let noncitizens vote and potentially sway the election. But there is no evidence that the election is being rigged.

Given that the MAGA right seeded election denialism after Trump lost his bid for the presidency in 2020, such claims are not surprising. Some kind of “Stop the Steal” redux has long seemed almost inevitable. Less obvious is what the downstream impacts will be. Claims that noncitizens are voting have already led to the erroneous removal of registered voters from the polls, as seen in Texas, but other effects are less clear. Intelligence officials have warned that they anticipate violence around the election. But what does that actually look like, especially if Trump loses?

In 2020, a series of escalating protests in Washington, D.C., culminated in the attack on the Capitol after the turn of the new year. January 6 was energized and encouraged by right-wing protests against COVID-era lockdowns at statehouses across the United States. A protest of hundreds of MAGA supporters had already happened in D.C. by this time in 2020. They served as dry runs for the big one.

This time around, nothing like that has happened in the lead-up to Election Day. Although the past year has seen notable far-right mobilization and activity, and Trump attracts large crowds at his rallies, the fervor hasn’t reached the levels it did in 2020. There haven’t been practice protests across the country that could build up to a massive moment. A January 6–style event is possible, but it would require an abrupt shift in energy, and the will to mobilize would have to materialize almost immediately. And such mobilization would have to happen in a world where people have seen the consequences of January 6, understanding that they could face prosecution and convictions as well.

The right “can’t create momentum out of thin air,” Hannah Gais, a researcher at the Southern Poverty Law Center, told me. Still, even if there isn’t energy in the streets, there is momentum online to reject a Trump loss, and that probably is going to escalate. This rhetoric will likely be translated into violence, just not the Capitol-riot kind. Gais fears that the spike in violent rhetoric encouraged by claims of election fraud could spur unpredictable, isolated instances of violence across the country, instead of large, organized ones.

The intelligence community is similarly worried. In a memo reported on by Wired, the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis is concerned about an increased “risk of violence against government targets and ideological opponents,” heightened by the election season. According to the report, analysts have seen online discussions “preparing for future violence against public officials and federal agents.” Now more and more people, especially on the right, are openly fantasizing about subjecting their enemies to violent retribution, and in some cases, are actually already doing it.

Last week, a man punched a poll worker after the official asked him to remove his MAGA hat to comply with electioneering laws. Today, hundreds of ballots were destroyed after ballot drop boxes were set on fire in Portland, Oregon, and Vancouver, Washington.

Other recent political violence has been even more concerning. Earlier this year, a man in Pennsylvania beheaded his federal-employee father and called on others to kill federal employees. A man in Arizona planned a mass shooting at a rap concert in an attempt to start a race war before the election. These events happened months ago, before the election was in full swing and before people started making unfounded claims about it being rigged. Should Trump lose on November 5, Loomer, Shroyer, Greene, and the like are laying the groundwork for very dark things to happen.