For a few hours on election night, President Donald Trump struck an unfamiliar note: acceptance of Republican losses.
As the scale of the Democratic wave came into focus, Trump said he was “absolutely willing” to accept the results, crediting Democrats with running strong races against weak Republican candidates.
It was a striking, but ultimately temporary, departure for a president who has spent more than a decade peddling baseless claims of widespread election fraud when he loses. Trump spent his first two years back in office using nearly all the levers of the federal government to try to undermine long-established voting procedures and preemptively cast doubt on the midterms, insisting Republicans could lose only if Democrats cheated.
By Monday, Trump was back to his old habits.
“Does anybody really believe that this ‘Election’ was honest,” he asked on Truth Social, questioning how Democrats had amassed so many early votes and claiming the numbers made it “impossible” for Republicans to win.
The reversal underscored the whiplash among some of MAGA’s loudest voices, who have long promoted a sprawling catalog of false theories: illegal immigrants voting en masse, “deep state” Democrats manufacturing votes and foreign adversaries hacking machines to flip results.
But after last week’s Republican rout and Trump’s short-lived conciliatory tone, those allies turned on one another — trading a once-united chorus of fraud claims for a bitter round of infighting.
Live map: House districts Trump won by double digits shift toward Democrats in midterms
Some longtime advocates of Trump’s baseless claims of voter fraud appeared ready to concede defeat and regroup for 2028, including Trump adviser-turned-podcaster Steve Bannon and retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who pushed for martial law after Trump lost in 2020.
But others were already raising conspiracies about the 2026 midterm results — and seeking donations from supporters.
Trump’s false claims about the 2020 election gave rise to a multi-million-dollar cottage industry of conservative figures and groups who have spent years dedicated to the idea that the election was stolen, that fraud is rampant, and that tighter restrictions on voting are necessary, despite the fact that fraud cases are quite rare. Last week’s Democratic wave marked an inflection point for the movement. While there are signs of its waning influence inside the GOP, the reaction to the midterms blowout shows why the “voter fraud-industrial complex” isn’t likely to end anytime soon.
In response to CNN questions for this story, a White House official said the Trump administration has been clear that “anyone who illegally votes in our elections will be held accountable.”
Some of the loudest voices who pushed Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was fraudulent quickly revved up the stolen-election messaging machine last week and questioned the legitimacy of the 2026 election, too.
Mike Lindell, the former MyPillow CEO and prominent right-wing conspiracy theorist , called for a “full recount” of the midterm elections, claiming irregularities in a social media post that also included a link for supporters to donate.
Kari Lake, a Trump ally who lost races for governor and Senate in Arizona, claimed last week that “the math isn’t mathing” in Iowa, where Democrats were projected to win multiple statewide offices.
And Tina Peters , a former Colorado clerk who went to prison for crimes related to efforts to overturn the 2020 results and was released in June, falsely claimed the midterms were “the most severe security breach our country has ever seen,” and also posted five fundraising pitches in the 72 hours after the polls closed.
“Please give like our country depends on it,” Peters wrote. “IT DOES.”
As claims of midterm fraud gained traction, one of the movement’s most influential organizers was notably skeptical.
Cleta Mitchell, who runs the grassroots Election Integrity Network, an organization that grew out of the groundswell backing Trump’s 2020 fraud claims, has largely stayed out of the growing chorus. For years, she has helped lead the Trump-aligned push to remake election administration and her coalition has deep ties to Trump’s government, with some members holding key posts.
Asked by CNN this week about allegations the election was fraudulent, Mitchell said she hasn’t seen evidence to support it.
“I have no reason to think that,” she said. “It doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, I suppose. But somebody needs to come up with some data to show me that’s possible.”
Bannon, the populist commentator and strategist who told CBS News in October that a “core belief of the MAGA movement is we won the 2020 election,” has not entertained questions about the legitimacy of last week’s election on his “War Room” podcast, according to a CNN review. Bannon served four months in prison for refusing to testify to Congress about the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, which was fueled by false claims of voter fraud.
“People should not be complaining about a stolen election,” Bannon said Sunday.
And less than an hour after Trump posted his midterm fraud claims Monday, conservative political commentator Megyn Kelly fired off a terse rebuke : “Just stop.”
Even one of the most prominent former purveyors of Trump’s claims of voter fraud was sharply critical.
“For anyone who believes his bulls—, ask yourself, has he ever prosecuted ANYONE from the 2020 election???” former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a former MAGA staple-turned Trump skeptic, wrote on X in response to Trump. “That ought to make some of you very angry especially those of you who lost personal money, personal life relationships, and even went to prison for Trump as you fought against the 2020 election.”
In Arizona’s Maricopa County, which became ground zero for right-wing election lies after Trump lost in 2020, Republican Board of Supervisors member Thomas Galvin urged Republicans to stop embracing voting conspiracies.
“To my fellow Republicans who have been trafficking these lies for the last six years — you need to stop, because you have led to the destruction of the Republican Party here in Arizona, and frankly around the country,” Galvin said the day after the election.
“Hopefully, this is a wake-up call to all those grifters,” he added.
Mitchell remains one of the most prominent voices in the sprawling “election integrity” movement she helped build in the aftermath of Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election. Her network commands a nationwide following, tens of millions in funding and close administration ties.
Brendan Fischer, director of strategic investigations at the Campaign Legal Center, said Mitchell sits at a “unique intersection” of the funding and grantmaking worlds.
“She helps direct funding to the election denial movement while also building the organizational infrastructure at the state, county, and local levels that has turned election deniers into an important political force since 2020,” Fischer said.
But the broader MAGA election fraud ecosystem has, at times, faced ridicule, even from fellow Republicans, for its failure to substantiate its sweeping claims. Another round of unproven accusations after Republicans’ midterm losses threatens any credibility she has tried to build.
“You shouldn’t be shooting your mouth off if you don’t have the facts. And a lot of the data is not even public yet,” Mitchell told CNN.
“I’ve said repeatedly, don’t make claims unless you can prove it. And if you can prove it, claim your million bucks,” she said in reference to Trump $1 million offer the week before the election for tips leading to voter fraud convictions.
Still, Mitchell drew the line at challenging Trump’s own midterm fraud claims.
“I’m not going to badmouth the president,” she said. “Good try, but not going to happen.”
Many Republicans questioning the election results have pointed in particular to Texas, where Democrats won a Senate seat and the governor’s mansion for the first time in decades.
“This election is rigged,” Wayne Allyn Root alleged on his podcast last week. The conservative commentator has promoted voter fraud claims and urged Trump to take federal action over elections. “There’s absolutely something rotten in Texas. The vote totals aren’t off. They’re literally impossible,” he falsely claimed.
Democrat James Talarico’s 5.4 million votes outperformed Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris’ Texas vote total of 4.8 million. But the total number of votes in Texas in the midterms was nearly 1.5 million fewer than the 2024 presidential election — it’s just that Republican Ken Paxton, who faced numerous controversies , underperformed Trump’s 2024 total by 2.1 million votes.
One of the issues for Trump allies claiming widespread election fraud is in many of the states like Texas where Democrats racked up victories last week, Republicans controlled every statewide office.
Peter Ticktin, a lawyer and boyhood friend of Trump’s who unsuccessfully urged the president to seize federal power over elections by declaring a national emergency, has long leveled baseless claims that voting machines in 2020 were corrupted by foreign nations.
He argued in an interview last week that the same thing happened in the midterms.
“It’s just exactly what I predicted, knowing or believing that the machines would be in place,” Ticktin told CNN. “Because this is their dream result.”
There’s no evidence that voting machines in the US have been compromised or that any results have been changed by foreign powers or others — even after an investigation of voting machines inside the administration led by Kurt Olsen , who held posts at the White House and Justice Department.
While Ticktin has been a staple on conservative media over the past year — especially after he successfully lobbied for a state pardon for his client, Peters — the lawyer said he got a cold shoulder when he reached out to Bannon about fraud last week.
“I can tell you with him, I advised him via text and he basically said stop. Which kind of means don’t send me any more,” Ticktin said.
Bannon did not respond to CNN’s request for comment.
It’s not yet clear how aggressively the Trump administration will pursue its voter fraud crusade next year — or if the midterms will rein in the administration’s sweeping efforts around election integrity.
On Election Day, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said in multiple interviews that DHS planned to conduct a post-election investigation, auditing “voting logs” to look for noncitizens and other ineligible voters.
But Mullin has said little publicly about it since the midterms, after months of making election fraud and noncitizen voting a signature issue — and becoming one of the administration’s most prominent voices on it.
His department has been the engine for the administration’s hunt for voter fraud over the past two years, marshaling an array of investigative resources and scrutinizing voter rolls from dozens of states. But internal documents and sources indicate heavy involvement from the White House every step of the way.
Harmeet Dhillon, who led the Civil Rights Division at the Justice Department, resigned last week. Dhillon was a public face of Trump’s voter fraud crusade and had relentlessly worked to pressure states to hand over their unredacted voter rolls to be audited for noncitizens, suing 30 of them to no avail.
Dhillon was not involved in more recent election efforts before the midterms, like the Justice Department’s unsuccessful lawsuit, blocked by the courts , that demanded California segregate 20,000 ballots of voters the administration claimed could be noncitizens. DOJ withdrew the lawsuit this week.
Attorney General Todd Blanche told reporters Thursday that DOJ’s voter fraud investigations would continue, but suggested no new probes had been opened since Election Day.
“We are actively and will continue to investigate election integrity cases, criminally and civilly,” Blanche said. “That wasn’t expected to start or stop no matter what the results of the election were last week, and that’ll continue.”
A collection of conservatives who questioned the security of US elections, fought the 2020 results or promoted Trump’s false claims that widespread fraud rigs elections against Republicans still work across the administration in influential posts.
John Solomon, publisher of the conservative site Just the News, was named head of a White House transparency task force this summer, which was behind the declassified documents underpinning Trump’s July primetime address in which he claimed China interfered in the 2020 election. While Solomon has argued that US voting machines have vulnerabilities that threaten to compromise elections, he acknowledged this summer he had not uncovered any evidence the 2020 election was stolen.
Solomon told CNN on Wednesday he does not expect the next batch of documents, which the task force will release in the coming weeks, to pertain to elections. He did not rule out the release of more election-related documents before the end of the year, when the task force is slated to end.
Asked whether he had found evidence of any votes being changed in the 2020 election, Solomon reiterated that the intelligence community had found no such evidence.
Ticktin told CNN that he’s concerned the Trump administration will pull back on its push against supposed election fraud. He argued that Trump’s initial reaction accepting the results came before the president had heard all of the evidence.
At the same time, Ticktin said Trump was the one person who could get him to stand down.
“If he ever said to me, ‘Peter, I don’t want you to even bother with any of this anymore,’ you know, I would obey,” Ticktin said. “It’s not for me to question why. But he doesn’t know what I’m doing yet.”
Longtime targets of MAGA election fraud activists say they hope the midterms will provide a powerful rebuke against the right-wing election conspiracy movement, which they see as a shameless cottage industry, according to interviews with election officials, voting company executives, and others.
A prominent Michigan Republican, who requested anonymity to speak candidly, said the resounding Democratic victories could shrink the election conspiracy crowd. The Republican noted that Anthony Forlini, who spread Trump’s claims of rigged elections and was the GOP nominee for Michigan secretary of state, conceded after losing his race.
“The margins were too big to explain away,” the Michigan Republican told CNN. “What’s left lives mostly online, and some of it is people who raise money off every loss.”
The conversation is now on X and YouTube because top voices questioning election results have been shunned by mainstream conservative TV outlets – which paid big legal settlements for promoting false claims that voting machines rigged the 2020 results.
Fox News paid $787 million to settle a defamation case filed by Dominion Voting Systems, and is still fighting a case from another company, Smartmatic. (Fox denies wrongdoing.) Newsmax and One America News settled separate defamation lawsuits with both Dominion and Smartmatic.
“When you have a landslide election with this result, even the grifters realize they won’t get any traction,” a source involved in election fraud litigation told CNN, describing the movement as the “voter fraud-industrial complex.”
“They are losing a lot of their clout, but I don’t think it goes away,” the source added. “They might come back in two years, if they sense an opportunity.”
If they do try to reconstitute ahead of 2028, it could be an uphill climb.
Republicans lost key state offices that oversee or can influence the mechanics of elections. Democrats captured secretary of state offices in Georgia and Ohio, and held seats in Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona and Nevada.
Those Democrats will be at the helm during the 2028 presidential election cycle. Michigan’s Secretary of State-elect Garlin Gilchrist told CNN one of his goals in office is to keep election denialism “untenable and ridiculous.”
“The voters of this country rejected election denialism outright… we sent a strong message that there is no place for people who do not respect the will of the voters,” Gilchrist said. “The voters were unequivocal.”
CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan and Hannah Rabinowitz contributed to this report.
