There are few forces more insidious to the survival of a democratic republic than top level political figures making fact-free claims that elections are illegitimate because they didn’t like what the people chose. In Maine, unfortunately, the Republicans in the top two slots of the ticket this cycle both have aggressions track records in this regard.
I wrote about former governor (and current GOP gubernatorial nominee) Paul LePage’s extensive history of evidence-free attacks on elections recently in the Maine Sunday Telegram. This was followed by this story on former Second District U.S. Rep. (and current GOP nominee for that office) Bruce Poliquin’s election denial.
One political scientist in the article said: “It’s impossible to sustain a democracy if voters lose faith in the capacity of the system to produce accurate outcomes just because political leaders without any evidence tell them not to trust the system.”
COLIN WOODARD is a New York Times bestselling author and award-winning journalist. He is the author of six books that have been translated into a dozen foreign languages and inspired an NBC television drama. He is currently Director of Nationhood Lab at the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Affairs at Salve Regina University. As State and National Affairs Writer at the Portland Press Herald and Maine Sunday Telegram he won a 2012 George Polk Award and was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in 2016. He is a contributing editor at POLITICO and his work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Economist, Smithsonian and dozens of other major publications.