The media’s double standard in coverage of election denial was on full display at a campaign rally with President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris in Virginia on Tuesday. Despite Biden starting his speech by denying the results of the 2021 Virginia gubernatorial election and calling Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic candidate who lost by two points, the “real governor,” the event received relatively little media attention.
The media instead focused on the presumptive Democratic ticket’s promises to restore “reproductive rights” and veto any national abortion ban, which is improbable in the current political climate.
However, this blatant election denial by the leader of the Democratic party went largely unreported, while any hint of the same behavior from a Republican would undoubtedly be condemned and used as evidence of insurrection.
This double standard is not new.
Any time a Republican challenges election results, the media is quick to shame them as a threat to democracy. Yet, when a Democrat like Stacey Abrams did the same in Georgia’s gubernatorial race in 2018, there was no backlash, and she even received a cameo on a popular TV show. The Republican National Committee’s RNC Research social media account posted a 24-minute supercut of Democrats denying elections over the last 25 years, showcasing a pattern of behavior from the left that goes unreported and unpunished.
The trend began in 2000 when a few hundred votes in Florida decided the presidential election. Conspiracies about hanging chads, the Supreme Court, and Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris were rampant, leading to widespread doubt about the legitimacy of the results. In 2004, the conspiracy theories were even more far-fetched, blaming electronic voting machines and the CEO of Diebold, a Republican, for John Kerry’s loss in Ohio.
2008 and 2012 were deemed legitimate because the Democrats won, but in 2016, the narrative changed once again, with false accusations of Russian interference and James Comey supposedly stealing the election from Hillary Clinton.
In 2018, we saw more of the same with misleading claims about Brian Kemp stealing the Georgia gubernatorial election from Stacey Abrams. But the ultimate hypocrisy came in 2020 when any questioning of the election results was met with accusations of being a dangerous insurrectionist.
Now, with Biden casually denying the results of the Virginia election in 2021, the media seems to have no issue with it, choosing to ignore it in favor of discussing abortion rights.
In fact, here is 24 straight minutes of Democrats denying election resultspic.twitter.com/gDnNqfruWD
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) January 23, 2024
This biased behavior from the media is concerning, to say the least. The 24-minute supercut of Democrats denying election results is only going to continue to grow as more and more examples come to light.
It’s no secret that the media has a blatant double standard when it comes to election denial, and if things do not go the way the White House wants in November, expect this pattern to continue and intensify.