Evidence-free claims of attempts to “steal” elections from Republican U.S. Senate candidates in Arizona and Nevada have emerged online despite the candidates exceeding expectations in both races.
Republicans took control of the Senate on the back of a decisive presidential election victory by President-elect Donald Trump over Vice President Kamala Harris. Trump appears poised to win the popular vote and has won all of the swing states that have been called so far.
As of Thursday evening, Republicans had a 53-seat majority in the Senate with the two seats in Arizona and Nevada still up for grabs, according to the Associated Press. Arizona and Nevada’s presidential election are also yet to be called, although Trump has a clear lead in both states.
In Arizona, Democratic U.S. Representative Ruben Gallego was leading Republican Kari Lake on Thursday by just over 50,000 voter, or around 2 percent of the vote total. Incumbent Democratic Senator Jacky Rosen was leading by a little more than 13,000 votes in Nevada, about 0.9 percent of the vote.
While the final results are far from certain, it is clear that the Republican candidates in both states performed better than polling suggested. The bulk of pre-election polls showed the Democratic candidates with comfortable leads, including some surveys that suggested double-digit advantages.
Regardless, conspiracy theorists have already emerged on social media to put forward unfounded claims that any loss by the Republican candidates must be the result of fraud.
Newsweek reached out for comment to the campaign of Brown, Rosen, Lake and Gallego via email on Thursday evening.
Robert Beadles, a businessman and right-wing activist with a history of pursuing unfounded election fraud claims, wrote that he “can’t wait for the investigations and prosecutions into all the election fraud in Nevada to begin” in a Thursday post to X, formerly Twitter.
Beadles claimed in a subsequent post that the reason Brown was trailing Rosen was a mysterious “they” had “flooded the system with enough illegal votes days after the election to take the lead.”
“Prominent Nevada election denier Robert Beadles claims without evidence ‘they’ are stealing the Senate race from Republican Sam Brown – referring to the process of counting legally cast mail ballots,” Reno, Nevada journalist Ben Margiott wrote in response to Beadles. “Unclear why ‘they’ also allowed Trump to win.
Similar unsubstantiated claims were made about Lake’s race against Gallego in Arizona. Mike Adams, a self-proclaimed “Health Ranger” who was described by Chicago Health magazine as a trafficker “in conspiracies and supplements,” claimed without evidence that the “fraud” was “obvious.”
“The obvious fraud in Arizona needs to be challenged in the courts, RIGHT NOW. Senate seats at stake,” Adams wrote on X. “And there’s other fraud in House seats, in other states. The Dems ALWAYS steal the down-ballot races in the days after the election.”
None of the Senate candidates in Arizona and Nevada appear to be supporting the “stolen” election claims. Even Lake, who followed up her support for Trump’s false 2020 election fraud claims by launching similar baseless claims about her loss in Arizona’s 2022 gubernatorial election, was yet to make any fraud claims in the hours and days after this year’s election.
“There is an extremely committed band of election deniers who are convinced Dems are stealing the Senate races in Nevada and Arizona but somehow forgot to steal the presidential,” wrote senior Politico legal affairs reporter Kyle Cheney.
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