The Big Lie: Election Chaos, Political Opportunism, and the State of American Politics After 2020
by Jonathan Lemire
View on GoodreadsPolitico's Jonathan Lemire on the "Big Lie" — the claim that the 2020 election was stolen — as the load-bearing organizing principle of the post-2020 Republican Party, not a passing grievance.
Core ideas
- The lie isn't sincere belief for most of its operators; it's a litmus test that determines who's in and who's out of the movement, which is part of why facts don't dislodge it.
- The down-ballot consequences — secretaries of state, election boards, county clerks — are the book's underdiscussed half; the strategic effort to install election-denial-aligned officials in the actual machinery is more advanced than national coverage suggests.
- Lemire's reporter-access lets him reconstruct specific GOP-leader conversations where the "we know it's not true but we have to live with it" calculation was made in real time.
Published2022
Pages312
ISBN9781250819635
ReadSep 2024
