By Yue Stella Yu and Jenna Peterson, CalMatters
In January 2021, seven of the 11 California Republicans in Congress refused to certify the 2020 presidential election results, boosting former President Donald Trump’s false claim that he lost in a rigged vote.
Now, as Trump attempts a return to the White House, only a third of California’s Republican U.S. representatives have pledged to certify the results this November.
Only four of the 12 GOP incumbents — who are all seeking another term — have promised to uphold the election results. Of the three GOP challengers in California’s most competitive districts, two — Scott Baugh in Orange County and Kevin Lincoln in the Central Valley — made the same pledge in response to a CalMatters inquiry. And in California’s U.S. Senate race, GOP candidate Steve Garvey made the commitment in February.
The refusal to commit by most GOP congressional candidates comes as Trump and his allies are already casting doubt on the outcome of the November election, stoking fear among election officials of disruptions and violence. Trump has peddled unsubstantiated claims about widespread voting by non-citizens, argued that Vice President Kamala Harris will only win if the Democrats cheat and questioned the constitutionality of Democrats replacing President Joe Biden at the top of the ticket.
The vote by Congress to count all electoral votes that are already certified by each state is the final step in electing a president. Usually a formality, it was anything but after Trump lost the 2020 election to Biden.
On Jan. 6, 2021, a mob of Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol. Early the next morning, 147 Republican members of Congress voted to object to the counting of Electoral College votes from either Arizona or Pennsylvania, or both.
All 44 California Democrats in the U.S. House and Senate at the time voted to certify the election.
Eight of California’s current Republican members of Congress were in office, but only Rep. Young Kim — who flipped her northern Orange County seat in 2020 — voted to certify the results without casting doubt on the election outcome. “The constitution does not give Congress the authority to overturn elections. To take such action would undermine the authority of the states,” she said in a statement in 2021.
She told CalMatters she plans to uphold the results of this election as well.
Rep. Tom McClintock was the only other California Republican to vote to certify the election. But he said it was because he believed Congress did not have the constitutional authority to reject the electoral votes — not because he didn’t have concerns about how the election was conducted.
In December 2020, however, McClintock was one of four California Republicans in Congress to file an amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court to challenge the election outcome in Pennsylvania, arguing that mail balloting “invites fraud and incubates suspicion of fraud” and claiming that “ballot harvesters” collected ballots with “no chain of custody.” Multiple fact checks found no evidence that there was widespread ballot harvesting or voter fraud during the 2020 election, and courts rejected more than 50 lawsuits Trump and his allies brought to challenge the election results.
McClintock told CalMatters he will vote to uphold the electoral votes for the upcoming election. “Congress’ only role in the matter is to witness the counting of the ballots. Period,” he said.
Young Kim, then a Republican candidate for Congress, during a candidate forum at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library in Yorba Linda, in 2018.Bill Clark, CQ Roll Call via AP Images
In 2022, Congress passed the Electoral Count Reform Act, which made it more difficult for Congress to object to election results and clarified the vote counting process. All California Republican incumbents who were in office at the time voted against it.
But even with that new guardrail, political experts say efforts to overturn the election are to be expected now. That’s a stark departure from a decade ago, said Kim Nalder, political science professor at California State University in Sacramento.
“It’s really kind of horrifying that we’ve normalized this abnormal sort of situation,” she said. “We can’t survive with this level of distrust in our basic institutions, and I don’t know what will give to change that, but something has to.”
Veteran lobbyist Chris Micheli said the presidential election results could be challenged again, partly because of how close polls say the race is in seven battleground states. Both Harris and Trump are preparing legal teams in the case of a challenge.
“It’s definitely a dark period of American history, both what transpired on Jan. 6, but also earlier that prior December, when members of Congress voted against certifying the election of the clear victor in the presidential election,” Micheli said. “Those votes raised the ire of a lot of voters, particularly in California.”
The California Republican Party is confident that the election results will be certified, spokesperson Ellie Hockenbury said in a statement to CalMatters. Still, the party is preparing for issues that may arise.
“To make sure we didn’t leave anything to chance,” she said, the national and state GOP “have invested heavily in an Election Integrity operation to ensure that all concerns are addressed in real time and that Californians can cast a ballot with confidence that it will be received and counted.”
The state Republican Party is firmly behind Trump, who — despite losing to Biden 63% to 34% in 2020 — still won more votes in California than any other state. In a new Public Policy Institute of California poll released Wednesday night, Harris leads Trump 59% to 33% among likely voters. But in the swing congressional districts, likely voters are generally evenly divided.
Rep. Ken Calvert, who represents the 41st District in Riverside County, is the only California Republican member of Congress to commit to certifying the presidential election results this time after objecting four years ago. He also joined in the court brief challenging Pennsylvania’s results in 2020 and advocated for a “thorough investigation” of voter fraud allegations in 2021.
Calvert’s campaign did not say why his position has shifted from four years ago.
Rep. Jay Obernolte, who voted to object to the count, told Southern California News Group in 2022 that he still had “serious constitutional reservations about the things that happened in those two states” — Arizona and Pennsylvania.
Reps. David Valadao and Michelle Steel missed the vote in 2021. Steel said she had tested positive for COVID-19, while Valadao had not been sworn in yet because he also tested positive. However, Valadao said on social media he would have voted to certify the election.
The three incumbents who took office in 2023 will face that decision for the first time if they win re-election. But not everyone is answering the question: Rep. John Duarte — a Modesto farmer facing a fierce challenge from Democrat Adam Gray — is the only one to state his position publicly, telling The Sacramento Bee he would vote to certify the presidential election. (Duarte did not respond to a CalMatters inquiry.)
Reps. Kevin Kiley, Vince Fong, Doug LaMalfa, Darrell Issa and Mike Garcia, as well as Obernolte and Valadao, also did not respond to CalMatters inquiries. Matt Gunderson, a candidate for the toss-up 49th District in San Diego County, did not respond to CalMatters.
Republicans are reluctant to speak publicly about the issue because they’re concerned about losing votes from Trump supporters, strategists say.
“It puts Republicans in competitive districts in a difficult position,” said Jon Fleischman, former executive director of the California Republican Party.
“Of course they’re going to vote to certify the election results, but they don’t really want to inflame the conservative grassroots side either, because they need them for their Get Out the Vote. So this is an issue that’s divisive for Republicans, and so I don’t think they want to talk about it much.”
For Republicans running in swing districts, the answer to whether they will uphold the election outcome depends on which voters they want to court, Nalder said.
“Coming out strongly in support of certification would make sense if the goal was to recruit some moderate voters or some voters from the other party in these close races,” she said. “But if the strategy is more about turnouts amongst their base … it probably makes sense to equivocate.”
For GOP members of Congress in safe Republican districts, however, the calculation is more about their “future in the party,” Nalder said.
“Assuming Trump wins, they will need to have loyalty exhibited within the party, and so having committed beforehand to something that the party maybe goes against later would not be helpful for their political career,” she said.
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