What drives Donald Trump and his movement’s belief in voter fraud and election denialism?

Of course there’s the superficial, and obvious, layer: a sense of aggrievement, a desire for retribution from a man known for never admitting a loss, and a movement that believes him unequivocally. There’s also a slightly deeper ideological sense — frustration from a political party unable to accomplish its policy goals because of an electoral loss. But at the core, research and political theorists (including my colleague Zack Beauchamp) argue, there’s an outright sense of racism and bigotry — the reactionary animus of a conservative white majority that is losing its grip on power, is radicalizing against democracy in a bid to hold on, and leverages voter fraud as a way to explain this change.

In that context, the extreme misogynistic and racist speech on display at Sunday night’s Trump rally in Madison Square Garden was no coincidence. It happened as speaker after speaker warned about the threats nonwhite people pose to the country and its elections.

There was Steven Miller, the extreme anti-immigration hawk, warning that Trump is fighting a system trying to “take away your voice, take away your vote, to take away your right to have your own country.” To vote for Trump is to protect American identity, he said: “America is for Americans and Americans only!” (“America is for Americans” was also used as a KKK slogan in the 1920s.)

There was Tucker Carlson, the far-right former Fox News anchor, warning about a “leadership class” that “despises” Trump supporters’ “values and their history and their culture and their customs, [and] really hates them to the point that it’s trying to replace them.”

And there was Donald Trump Jr. claiming that the Democrats, “rather than cater to Americans,” think “it would just be easier to replace them with people who will be reliable voters.”

These remarks don’t just echo the far-right “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory; they update the GOP’s stolen election narrative with a new villain. While in 2020 it was “urban” voters who were coded as the primary perpetrators of voter fraud, in 2024 it’s immigrants and noncitizens who are the avatars for fraud and would be blamed for another Trump loss.

Trump has made that claim for years (blaming his 2016 loss of the popular vote and 2020 loss in Arizona on noncitizens voting). But this time, it seems, those claims are much more mainstream.

Back in September, during the first and only presidential debate between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump made plain who he would blame for an electoral loss in November. “Our elections are bad,” he said. “And a lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, they’re trying to get them to vote. They can’t even speak English, they don’t know what country they’re in practically, and these people are trying to get them to vote, and that’s why they’re allowing them to come into our country.”

The deep underpinnings of the MAGA movement’s ugly voter fraud rhetoric

An array of Republican members of Congress, GOP activists, and state officials espouse similar beliefs about voter fraud to those promulgated on stage Sunday night, as do a significant proportion of voters — some 85 percent of Trump supporters are concerned about noncitizen voting. Those beliefs, research and polling suggest, correlate with a sense of racial resentment and fear-mongering about a quickly diversifying country that tends to over-index among Trump voters.

In studies and research conducted this summer by the Brennan Center for Justice’s Kevin T. Morris and Tennessee State University’s Ian Shapiro, the authors found a strong correlation between belief and talk of voter fraud in the 2020 election and racialized rhetoric. They found that predominantly Black cities were the focal point of right-wing voter fraud discourse in 2020, as opposed to multicultural or majority white cities; that electoral confidence declined the most among “racially resentful whites” after 2020; and that these “racially resentful white Americans” were especially likely to believe in voter fraud now.

They argue that dynamic exists because these racialized accusations of fraud serve a function for these Americans: They allow them to preserve their sense of superiority over nonwhite Americans and continue to support democracy in theory, while still rejecting electoral outcomes that they don’t agree with. In this way, racialized talk of voter fraud serves a purpose for elites as well.

“By focusing accusations of election fraud on Black individuals and municipalities, elites made their claims more believable to a white audience,” Morris and Shapiro write. “White Americans were more susceptible to these narratives precisely because they leveraged manufactured associations between electoral malfeasance and race.”

In other words, racialized talk of voter fraud exploits white anxiety and fear of change, while reinforcing a political position that boosts the conservative elites who make these accusations.

Under this theory, the arguments that Trump and his allies are making this year make a lot more sense. Per polling out of Michigan State University, Trump voters in this cycle, at least in Michigan, are much more likely to say that the country is “changing too fast, undermining traditional values” than they were in 2016, when researchers first found a strong correlation between aversion to social change and a vote for Trump.

That dividing line is growing even clearer now, with voters who told pollsters that “by accepting diverse cultures & lifestyles, our country is steadily improving” aligning sharply in favor of Harris.

That schism poses a threat to a multiracial, multicultural, pluralistic society.

“At a time when America’s multiracial democracy appears fragile, groups poised to lose power draw on rote narratives linking race and criminality to legitimize their own denial of free and fair elections,” Morris and Shapiro argue.

And on Sunday night, Trump yet again reminded the world he thinks this divide is beneficial. “For the past nine years, we have been fighting against the most sinister and corrupt forces on Earth,” he bellowed. “With your vote in this election, you could show them once and for all that this nation does not belong to them. This nation belongs to you. It belongs to you.”