Trump's stolen election lie is on the ballot in 2022, thanks to these candidates - NBC News

“The single biggest issue — the issue that gets the most pull, the most respect, the biggest cheers — is talking about the election fraud of 2020’s presidential election,” Trump said last week at a rally in Iowa, again pushing the lie that a second term was stolen from him and that Joe Biden is not the legitimate president.

The issue is particularly animating campaigns for secretary of state — the office that in many states oversees elections — in electoral battlegrounds that narrowly backed Biden over Trump in 2020 and will be hotly contested again in the 2024 presidential election.

In Arizona’s race for secretary of state, Trump has endorsed Mark Finchem, a state legislator who promoted a partisan review of Maricopa County’s election results that reaffirmed Biden’s victory.

“We’re no longer looking at candidates who are attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 election,” Bee Nguyen, a Democratic state representative and candidate for secretary of state in Georgia, said of Republicans running in 2022.

“We have people who are running explicitly on the platform that the election results would have turned out different if they were in power in 2020, and I think it’s going to be up to the voters in the place where they do elect their election officials to say, regardless of party, it’s not acceptable to politicize the elections,” Larry Norden, director of the election reform program at the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice, said.

“Nobody understands the disaster of the lack of election integrity like the people of Georgia, and now is our hour to take it back,” Hice told the crowd after Trump invited him on stage at his rally last month in the state.

Trump also is backing Kristina Karamo, a Detroit poll challenger during the 2020 election, for secretary of state in Michigan, where Democratic incumbent Jocelyn Benson and Gov.

A Yahoo News/YouGov poll in August found that two-thirds of Republicans believe the last election was stolen from Trump.

Steve Bannon, the former Trump adviser who hosts a podcast with a large right-wing audience, has described a candidate’s position on the 2020 election results as a “litmus test” for 2022.

Mandel, a former state treasurer, also has called for 2020 election reviews in all 50 states, including Republican-controlled Ohio, which Trump won by 8 points

“If we don’t solve the Presidential Election Fraud of 2020, Republicans will not be voting in ʼ22 or ʼ24,” Trump said in an emailed statement Wednesday