Former President Donald Trump is increasingly endorsing candidates for state and national office who align with his views on election integrity, according to a review of the nearly 90 endorsements Trump doled out since leaving office earlier last year.
Of the 41 candidates Trump endorsed since the off-year election on Nov. 2, 36 had either taken decisive action to side with Trump on election integrity or had received an endorsement featuring an explicit reference to their stance on the issue.
That makes for a rate of nearly 90 percent in the seven weeks since Nov. 2, a sharp increase from the Trump endorsements leading up to that date. Of the 48 candidates Trump endorsed between Jan. 25 and Nov. 2, roughly half met the same criteria on election integrity.
The focus on election integrity is no surprise considering that the issue has taken on paramount significance for Trump from the early days of the aftermath of the 2020 election. The former president devoted a large portion of his first public speech since leaving the White House to the issue and has not toned down his scrutiny of election irregularities since.
“It’s, I think, the number one issue,” Trump said at a rally on Nov. 5. “There has been a lot of cheating in elections over the years, but it’s never been like this. They just went crazy. And they did because they had no idea that we were going to get so many votes.”
Trump has endorsed nine of 147 Republican members of Congress who voted on Jan. 6 and Jan. 7 to object to the counting of the presidential electors from Arizona and Georgia. The former president has also endorsed a number of state-level lawmakers. In most cases, he made explicit references to the candidates’ stance on election integrity in his formal endorsement statement. In cases when he did not, the candidates have made their position on the issue clear on their campaign websites.
In Michigan alone, Trump has endorsed 10 candidates for the state’s legislature as well as the Republicans running for secretary of state and attorney general, all with direct references to their strong stances on election integrity.
“Super Lawyer Matthew DePerno is running for Attorney General in the Great State of Michigan. He has defended the Constitution for 20 years, and has been on the front lines pursuing fair and accurate elections, as he relentlessly fights to reveal the truth about the Nov. 3rd Presidential Election Scam,” reads a typical election-integrity-related endorsement from Trump.
