After months of incessant allegations of electoral fraud, fake ballots and hacked machines, after days of watching Fox News and Newsmax and browsing Facebook and Parler, Sandra, 60, was convinced of one thing.
“If Trump doesn’t win, I won’t vote again,” said Sandra. “Why what good would that do? What good did it do? “
With unprecedented false claims of a stolen election, President Donald Trump urged thousands of his supporters to carry out a violent Capitol insurrection last week – attacking police, looting and robbing buildings, and even building a gallows.
In the small town of Weatherford, Texas, what these claims did to Sandra is much quieter. But for the country and the Republican Party, it can be just as damaging. Trump and the Republicans who repeated their lies about large-scale electoral fraud broke Sandra’s faith in almost everything: in most Republicans, in the electoral system, in the vote, in democracy and in the country itself.
Now, Sandra trusts only one person: Donald Trump, who has just made history after suffering a second impeachment. And if he’s not on the ballot, she doesn’t plan to vote again.
Sandra wrote to me in a tantrum one day, in late November last year, after reading a story I wrote about Trump that she considered partial. She had never looked for a journalist before, she said, but – “I was mad that day.”
“This election is so wrong,” she wrote to me. “You know that too.”
I received a lot of emails like that. But to me, Sandra, whose surname is being withheld for privacy reasons, looked different in some way – less angry and more distressed, almost heartbroken. I asked her to tell me what she thought was “wrong” about the election, and she listed a litany of different electoral conspiracies, all of which were contested.
Then she said: “After this election, I am 60 years old and I will not waste my time in 4 years to vote on whether the party will steal.”
“I pray for the United States,” Sandra wrote to me. “But don’t believe it anymore.”
Sandra and I have talked many times since she first emailed me in November, over the phone, text and Facebook. It is not clear how many voters like her exist. But the second round of elections in Georgia this month, which handed over Senate control to Democrats, showed some warning signs for a party that wanted to use Trump’s electoral fraud allegations to bring voters to the polls.
Sandra has no doubt that the Georgia election was also stolen. And that only solidified his conviction: “What you’re saying is that nothing is fair, so why vote? They will steal it every year now. “
It was the morning after the presidential election that Sandra plunged for the first time into a vortex of right-wing electoral disinformation – from which she never left. At Fox News, she heard theory after theory about widespread fraud in undecided states. On Newsmax, there were reports of Dominion voting machines changing votes from Trump to Biden. On Facebook, there were stories of election workers who stopped counting votes.
Sandra is almost as involved in the misinformation as many of the Trump supporters who invaded the Capitol. However, more than angry, she feels powerless. And hopeless.
Unlike a small slice of Republican voters, Sandra is adamant that she does not support the violent unrest that Trump incited in the Capitol building last week, although she also does not think Trump has anything to do with them. But, like that little segment, she doesn’t understand how it is possible that Trump lost.
“We could have lost the presidency – Biden could have won, I don’t see how, but he could have – and I would be fine,” she said. “But having it stolen is not right. This is not right.”
Sandra lives with her daughter outside Fort Worth. In the beginning, in 2016, she says, she didn’t even like Trump. The way he spoke, the fact that he was once a Democrat – all of which made her not trust him. But he proved that she was wrong, she says. She saw the boom in the economy, especially for her late husband’s construction business. Trump, she said, “proved that he really cared.”
On weekends, Sandra works 12-hour shifts at a nursing home where a dozen residents, she says, died of coronavirus. On weekdays, she sometimes takes shifts in the cafeteria of a local school.
In her spare time, she spends hours immersed in a right-wing news ecosystem. When Fox anchors, especially Chris Wallace, started attacking her, she started watching Newsmax. She even joined the now suspended Parler app, tired of sharing videos on Facebook and posts that were deleted.
When Sandra talks about the presidential election, it may look like she is talking in code, jumping from one electoral falsehood to another: electronic ballot box algorithms, reams of invalid ballots, rally sizes, dementia, Benghazi rewards, a note on the chair Mike Pence at a funeral, a conspiracy to forgive Hillary Clinton. For her, they are all common knowledge – there is no need to explain any of them.
“Because if it hadn’t happened, where they closed everything – all states closed, they went with the vote, I could have lived with it,” she told me, referring to a false claim that the shifting states “shut down” counting votes to manufacture ballots.
“What I think they did – there were invalid ballots left and right over there, and the machine was crooked to get out. With foreign countries – Texas did not. This is what scares me. “
Sandra’s husband died three years ago in a strange construction accident, and she is still mourning him. In the days after the election, the more Sandra heard about dead people voting, the more she started to wonder. She checked the state’s electoral register and didn’t find her husband’s name, but thinking about it still upsets her.
Sandra still thinks it could happen at any time, in any future election – the name of her beloved husband, used in a fraud scheme to defeat the president he loved.
She checked her own online vote as well, just in case she had moved to Biden. It was possible, Sandra thought, that her decision to vote in 2020 had really hurt Trump.
Sandra and I talked and texted a few times over the past month. I spoke to her after news, such as Trump’s defeat at the Supreme Court. But it was on Sandra’s Facebook that I could see more clearly how electoral misinformation was affecting her.
Sandra’s friend, Brenda, is even more involved in the world of electoral falsehoods, including the extremist conspiracies sold by QAnon. When Sandra faltered about the election, Brenda was there, pulling her friend back as she rocked in and out of the universe where Trump could still win the election.
At first, a few days after the election, when the media declared Biden’s victory, Sandra was discouraged.
“Well, friends, I’m tired of watching the news,” she posted on Facebook. “Even with Fox going to the left, I’m done. I don’t think Trump will win when you have cheaters like the left…. I’m getting ready for the hell Biden can throw at us. “
“Don’t give up,” Brenda wrote back. “Trump will win. I know it is difficult, but it was what needed to happen for us to see corruption. Go see the video I posted about the sting operation. “
Sandra posted more electoral disinformation: screenshots of Parler, a Change.org petition to “retell or revoke” the 2020 election with 2.5 million other signatories.
Two weeks later, she was starting to lose faith again. “I’m not sure what’s going on,” she posted. “I worry that Trump is not able to be honest with this election.”
But the far-right articles Brenda sent her reassured. Five days later, she posted an InfoWars video called “Learn why Trump knows he’s won and why Biden is so scared.” In it, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones predicted that the Supreme Court would hand Trump a massive victory, based on a “bat signal” that he said court conservatives sent through the appointment of court judges. “Boom, the election is at stake,” said Jones.
“Trump is so smart,” wrote Sandra after watching the video, sharing it with her followers. “He has this.”
In the coming weeks, the Supreme Court would reject several Trump electoral challenges. In late December, Brenda was hopeful, posting on the competing boards of voters at the Electoral College. Sandra was also, somewhat, imagining that Trump could win a victory through a challenge on January 6. But she was also simply exhausted.
Brenda posted that Vice President Mike Pence canceled his trip abroad. “Something big is going on,” she said. “Enjoy the show!” It included a popcorn emoji.
“I hope,” replied Sandra. “I’m tired of waiting for the show.”
When Sandra thinks about the election and the state of this country, she thinks about her 18-year-old grandson, who proudly voted for Trump for the first time in November.
“It makes me so sad,” she told me. “It hurt my grandson to see this happen.” He is unlikely to vote again, Sandra said.
“He just says it is a waste of time – they are going to steal all the elections from now on.” ●