Arizona Republicans Refuse To Move Past 2020 — And It’s Hurting Them In 2026

In retirement, Craig Berland has a lot to look forward to. He lives in perpetually sunny Maricopa County, Arizona. He chairs the Republican Party in Arizona’s most populous and most affluent county. He hobnobs with the rich and famous on golf courses and in private hangars, funneling a career in an aerospace manufacturing company’s corner office into a retirement on private jets.

But Berland can’t stop thinking about 2020.

Too many people in his county, he says, are blinded by propaganda. “If they’re watching CNN and MSNBC, all they know is untruth,” he said. “They’ve never heard the truth about Covid-19. They never heard the truth about the 2020 election.”

To this day, Berland is convinced — convinced — that President Joe Biden’s victory in Maricopa County was fraudulent, and he wants everyone to know it. He doesn’t call himself an election denier; once, while dining at Mar-a-Lago, a reporter made the mistake of calling him such. “I said, ‘That’s just absolutely not true,’” Berland recounted. “I know for a fact that the 2020 election in Maricopa County was fraudulent, when it comes to mail-in ballots,” he told POLITICO Magazine, a claim that has been widely debunked.

Berland is hardly alone. Atop the Arizona ticket this cycle, Republicans nominated a string of candidates who called foul on the 2020 election or were actively involved in trying to subvert it. Rep. Andy Biggs, the GOP nominee for governor, challenged electoral results on Jan. 6, 2021 and was later subpoenaed in an Arizona probe. Secretary of State nominee Alex Kolodin — who, if he wins, would oversee the state’s elections — represented clients who challenged the results of the 2020 election, leading to discipline from the Arizona state bar, and filed lawsuits to try to overturn both the 2020 and 2022 elections. And Attorney General nominee Warren Petersen urged then-Vice President Mike Pence to delay certifying the electoral votes.

Where Berland deviates from his party is his eagerness to talk about it. The Republicans on the ticket hem and haw when asked about the 2020 election, saying they’d rather talk about the issues that matter now to Arizonans. Democrats, too, say they’d rather talk affordability and corruption — but can’t help but point out what their opponents said or did in 2020. And strategists on either side see a unilateral focus on 2020 as a millstone around their neck.

“I would be happy to never mention election denial again,” said Gov. Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, in an interview. “But it is a very real thing that still exists, and it’s almost a litmus test in Republican primaries here in Arizona.”

Biden won the 2020 election, and efforts to challenge that result have been repeatedly rejected in court, sometimes by judges appointed by President Donald Trump. Outside of the courtroom, serious investigations have yielded no substantive results: “There was no evidence of fraud in the 2020 presidential election on the magnitude necessary to shift the result in any precinct, let alone any state or the nation as a whole,” wrote former Judge Thomas B. Griffith, a George W. Bush appointee to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, who investigated the stolen election claims alongside two other retired conservative jurors, two retired Republican U.S. senators and a former U.S. solicitor general. “Biden won.”

But the current occupant of the White House hasn't let it go. Trump never conceded his loss in the 2020 race — not in Arizona, not anywhere — and in recent months, he reupped his crusade. In March, his administration subpoenaed 2020 voting records in Maricopa County, following an effort to investigate an election office in Georgia. In hearing after Senate confirmation hearing for Trump administration nominees this year, Democratic senators have asked whether Biden won the 2020 election — and nominees squirm and deflect, unwilling to cross their party’s leader. “We won the presidency three times,” Trump said triumphantly at the Republican midterm convention in Dallas in September.

“A lot of the country wants to move on, frankly, from the 2020 election,” said former Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), who later served as ambassador to Turkey under Biden. “But the problem is the president keeps bringing it up.”

In the two cycles following 2020, Republicans nominated prominent election deniers to statewide office: Kari Lake for governor and Blake Masters for Senate in 2022, and Lake for Senate in 2024. All three races resulted in losses, even as Trump won the state in 2024. “Not only did they shoot themselves in the foot, they shot themselves in the head,” former Rep. Matt Salmon (R-Ariz.) said of his party, offering that those candidates “were far more concerned about alienating the most extreme than they were about winning over the middle.” But Democrats now face a statewide slate of GOP candidates that Democrats believe could endanger the legitimacy of future elections.

“Arizona is just a close state by nature,” said Democratic Attorney General Kris Mayes, who won her 2022 election by less than 300 votes, the slimmest margin of victory for a statewide race in Arizona history. “For the foreseeable future we’re going to have very competitive races, which is one of the reasons it’s incredibly important to elect people who will stand by the result, no matter what it is.”

Rep. Abe Hamadeh (R-Ariz.), Mayes’ 2022 opponent, still hasn’t conceded. "[Mayes] didn’t win shit,” his campaign tweeted last month.

In the tumultuous days after the 2020 election, Arizona became ground-zero for election denialism. Fox News called the race for Biden in Arizona late on election night, unleashing fury in Trump’s orbit. Though the decision was ultimately correct, several Fox News staffers involved hit the exits — and the network’s primetime news anchor, Bret Baier, still answers questions about the call repeatedly on social media. It was a full week before several other news outlets declared Biden the winner, and three weeks before Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican, acknowledged the same.

Many Republicans — in Washington and in Arizona — refused to let it go. On January 6, 2021, Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) introduced an objection to Arizona’s electoral votes, supported by several other members of the Arizona delegation, including Biggs. Moments later, pro-Trump rioters smashed into the Capitol, with many Arizonans in their ranks, including the horn-wearing, face-painted Jacob Hamsley, the so-called “QAnon shaman,” and Nathan Wayne Entrekin, a then-48-year-old man who dressed up like a military captain from the Book of Mormon and filmed videos inside the Capitol for his mother. (“I made it, Mom. I made it to the top,” he said in one video.) The attack was “schemed up” by several members of Congress, including Biggs, according to Ali Alexander, a right-wing agitator — and Cassidy Hutchinson, a former Trump aide, later testified that Biggs asked for a presidential pardon. Biggs vehemently denies the claims: “All of the allegations are false,” he said. “I do not know why the rumors started, why the media has repeatedly ignored the evidence, or how to state the truth more clearly.”

The smoke eventually cleared, Congress certified the election and Biden was inaugurated as the next president. But allegations of wrongdoing circled in Arizona. Even after county-led audits found no fraud sufficient to change results, the Republican-controlled state legislature demanded an investigation. Ken Bennett, a mild-mannered former Arizona Secretary of State and president of the state Senate, offered to act as liaison between the legislature and Cyber Ninjas, a now defunct cybersecurity firm in Florida that was hired to lead the audit despite little prior experience conducting them. Within months, Bennett grew disillusioned. “Doing the audit the way it happened didn’t solve the problem,” he told POLITICO Magazine. “It didn’t convince either side that they were wrong, and it infuriated the ones that continued to be in the losing position.”

Elected officials from both parties — including Hobbs, then the secretary of state — slammed the audit for a lack of transparency and questioned whether the Cyber Ninjas had the sufficient credentials to deliver a fair report. The final report was delayed when some investigators tested positive for Covid-19. But when the results were released, it upset the partisans hoping it would fuel denialism flames: The audit confirmed that Biden had won, with a margin in Maricopa County that was several hundred votes wider than previously reported.

“While some may be disappointed that Trump lost by a hair, that’s what happened,” Bennett said.

The result didn’t placate the hardliners. We the People AZ Alliance, a far-right group with the tagline “Resistance to Tyranny is Obedience to God,” fought in court to unseal records related to the election. Some of its allies are still convinced the election was stolen, pointing to the group’s audit of 2020 absentee ballots that alleged over 10% of them failed to meet signature verification standards. (The group’s findings were introduced as facts in a 2023 lawsuitby Lake, who challenged her 2022 gubernatorial loss; her case was dismissed by a judge.) Berland, the Maricopa County GOP chair, wishes Biggs and other Republican candidates would talk about the 2020 election even more when Democrats call them election deniers. “If the Biggs campaign doesn’t counter it, it will be to the benefit of the Democrats,” he said. “But there is a counter, and the challenge is education. The facts will speak for themselves.”

The Biggs, Kolodin and Petersen campaigns did not return requests for comment for this story.

Democrats blame Republicans for keeping Arizona in the past. “The 2020 election, sadly, is our broken record,” said Democratic Secretary of State Adrian Fontes. “Unfortunately, there are some folks out there who lack any sort of creativity, they lack any sort of evidence, and they’re frankly quite pathetic in reaching back to that same old lie and trying to gain personally from it.”

Hobbs, the governor, recalls a moment in late 2020, when Ducey signed papers to certify the election. Hobbs, then the secretary of state, heard Ducey’s phone ring: It was “Hail to the Chief,” a ringtone Ducey had previously said he set to know when Trump called.

“He looked at his phone. He silenced it. He put the phone down and proceeded to certify the election results,” Hobbs recalled. “I can’t say that Andy Biggs would do the same thing. If he’s the governor, Arizona is the first swing state with an election denier in charge.”

Republicans and Democrats alike say they want to move on from the shadow of the 2020 election that has plagued the state for over six years.

“People in Arizona want to focus on the future,” said Jay Feely, a former Arizona Cardinals kicker now running as a Republican in Arizona’s battleground 1st District. “They want to focus on this election. They don’t care about talking about past elections and adjudicating past elections, and that’s what my focus is.” He didn’t volunteer who won the state in 2020, though when pushed in other interviews he has conceded that Trump lost.

Still, an interview rarely goes by without a question related to 2020 — and as long as it matters to Trump, it’s going to matter to the MAGA base.

“If I could wave a magic wand and make these questions go away, I would. But we can’t. It’s baked in,” said an Arizona Republican strategist working on competitive elections this year who was granted anonymity to discuss the issue candidly.

Some Arizonans warn that Democrats risk over-indexing too much on an election from six years ago — at least if it’s at the expense of addressing the economic concerns that are dominating the midterms.

“You can overplay that hand, and some candidates around the country who don’t want to talk about current issues sometimes do,” said Flake, the Republican former senator. “But if you tie election denial to everything else — the unpopularity of the Trump administration right now — and tie it to Republican refusal to challenge the president on virtually anything, whether it’s a war in Iran or tariffs or just some of the silly things the president does, like trying to rename bodies of water or put his names on buildings and institutions, then voters connect the dots.”

When an Arizona-based pollster asked voters in August if they would prefer politicians stopped discussing the 2020 election, nearly 7 in 10 of Arizona’s likely voters responded that they wanted the issue to die. Some may suggest that means Democrats should avoid pressing the issue. But Mayes’ pollster, Democratic stalwart Celinda Lake, pushed back on that notion. “It’s a terrible question,” she said of the Noble poll, because it focused on the history of election challenges instead of the future. “[Mayes’] message tests very, very well, which is, ‘I’m going to protect your right to vote. Nobody’s interfering with your right to vote. Nobody’s going to interfere with vote-by-mail in my state,’” Lake said. “It’s not historic in voters’ minds; it’s current.”

Democratic elected officials are preparing for potential challenges to this year’s election. Berland, the Maricopa County GOP chair, said his group is already indexing voter rolls and will consider litigation if they find irregularities like deceased or out-of-state voters who allegedly cast a ballot. In preparation, Mayes and Fontes speak on a regular basis about their plans, and both are bracing for a potential bevy of post-election lawsuits. Hobbs said she has an “election protection team” in place.

“We have a president of the United States right now who has openly mused about how he wishes he had called out the National Guard during 2020, and who has been demanding that states turn over their voter rolls, and who is trying to undermine vote by mail,” Mayes said. “So the effort to undermine our elections is already underway. I think we need to be clear about that.”

But as long as Trump keeps bringing it up, the shadow of 2020 never is far away. “We can’t escape it,” said another Arizona GOP strategist working on a competitive race. “We can tell people we want to move on, but that doesn’t stop it from coming up over and over and over and over.”