This project is the culmination of months of tracking and careful work from many members of the FiveThirtyEight staff. They tracked all primary candidates in governor, senate, House, attorney general and secretary of state races before the 2022 Midterm elections and followed if they’d made statements about the outcome of the 2020 election. Leading into the midterms, we had a dataset that could allow us to visualize how many candidates believed 2020 was a “stolen” election and which state and office they were running for.
If you step back, the takeaway is stark and we put it in a headline: 60 percent of America would be able to vote to someone who was an election denier on election day. (The headline is actually dynamic and as candidates clarified or came out with positions, this percentage adjusted.)
We used a scrollytelling approach to explore the dataset with the reader, rather than creating something that showed every category from the outset.
We also sorted the denier categories according to where they fell in our forecast:
The end of the project allows users to check their state for other election deniers on the ballot. The table also includes a link to download our data and a link showing where we established their stance on the 2020 election.