The New Election Denialists Can’t Cope with Trump 2.0

The Washington Post / Tricia Romano

17:43 JST, December 8, 2024

First, the voters noticed that women around the country seemed to have woken up at 4 a.m. with a strange feeling. A vibe shift, if you will. When they grabbed their phones, they saw the news: Donald Trump would be president. Again.

They also noticed that many people in their mentions in TikTok videos could not find proof that their votes had been counted or even received. They thought: Why were so many states red for president but blue downballot? Did Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites tamper with the votes somehow?

Something didn’t seem right. The math, they said, “wasn’t mathing.”

On the heels of an unorthodox 2024 election season, there’s a new brand of election denialism on the left. Appalled by the outcome – and thrown for a loop by the speed of its conclusion – some Kamala Harris supporters have clung to all manner of theories that the truth is being hidden from them. Like the QAnon-obsessed insurrectionists that came before them, they are seeking clues in photos, words, numbers, vibes, even the stars.

If the news or the government wasn’t going to give them the answers they sought, there were myriad psychics, mediums and astrologers to turn to. Some had long been posting that they didn’t see a clear election outcome or Trump ever taking office. Before the election, these soothsayers were offering lifelines of hope.

Now, they are buoys in a surging sea of hard-to-swallow outcomes, as each day brings news more horrifying than the next: Kash Patel, a man who believes in the “deep state,” to be the director of the FBI; Matt Gaetz, in, then out, as attorney general pick; a “compromised” Tulsi Gabbard in charge of intelligence agencies; and just about anything Musk is doing.

MSNBC’s and CNN’s ratings have dropped drastically in the month since the election, and liberal Americans are getting their news from other sources. Cue the TikTok election denialism posts with captions such as “Math That Just Doesn’t Math” (513k views), “It’s Not Over” (224k), “My Vote Didn’t Count” (181k), “Stars … Starlink” (388k) and “Tinfoil Hat Time” (315k).

While some of the theories have roots in reality – some people had reported their ballots went missing or believed their in-person votes were not recorded when they checked later – others are purely fantastical, looking for tea leaves in the numbers in Harris’s post-election fundraising emails or the color of Joe Biden’s tie when he met with Trump. (It was purple.)

For many on the left, another four years of Trump and the prospect of Project 2025 becoming a reality are too much to accept. Some are turning to large doses of “copium” (a portmanteau of “cope” and “opium” popular on social media).

***

After Karen Clark, 49, began posting about her disappointment in the election outcome, she heard from many people who told her, “No, my vote was never counted.” (She advises they to go to their county election board to double-check.)

“And all I said was, you guys, something is not right. I don’t feel right about this. It doesn’t seem right to me how this election was called so soon. It doesn’t feel right to me that Elon Musk is involved with this.”

As a volunteer in North Carolina, she saw the on-the-ground organizing and heard from people in other states that turnout was strong for Harris. “They were not worried about turnout at all. At the risk of sounding crazy, I think her turnout was bigger.”

While the 2024 election denialists aren’t arguing that the White House is populated by reptilian hybrids eating babies, some of them are looking for hidden messages – in Harris’s concession speech mentioning stars (stars, Starlink, get it?) or her choice of playing Connect 4 in a photo that is supposed to … well, never mind.

Sandra Colton-Medici, 46, began posting about the election on her second account – her posts are often coy response videos to commenters’ questions like: “Has anyone explicitly come out and denied the conspiracies flying around on Kamala’s team, including her? I’m tinfoil hatting.”

Colton-Medici is based in Los Angeles and teaches English and dance. (She was in the first season of the TV competition show “So You Think You Can Dance.”) “A lot of what I’m doing on TikTok specifically is amplifying the questions and amplifying specific things that I think need to be pointed out,” she said.

Astrologer Laurie Rivers, 55, host of the Awake Space astrology podcast, understands the appeal of Easter eggs – in this case, people are looking for clues for what might really be happening behind the scenes with the administration.

“I think when people are desperate, they’re going to look for signs. Anything. Like, please let my coffee grounds show me that this is not going to be the reality,” said Rivers, who has maintained since 2021 that Trump will not be president “based on health reasons.”

Gia Prism, a 44-year-old medium based out of Utah, posted about her eerie 4.a.m awakening the day after the election. She was surprised to see an outpouring of replies from women (and some men) around the country who had similar experiences. Many had dreams of a Harris victory party or inauguration, of electoral maps flipping from red to blue, of numbers invoking the electoral college – which didn’t align with the news when they awoke.

Prism has maintained since before the election that Harris will serve; she sees this as an incoming of the “divine feminine.” But after her 4 a.m. post, her followers and viewing numbers skyrocketed. She had previously been operating, she says, in her little niche corner of SpiritualityTok. Now, she had a new, larger audience of people desperately seeking solace or answers. Her videos have several million views combined.

“In all my years of being a spiritual practitioner, I’ve never seen a collective experience this widespread,” she says.

Licensed professional counselor Jeff Guenther who goes by “Therapy Jeff” on social media, posted that looking for alternative answers to reality is a coping mechanism. People are in the shock and denial stage of grief.

“Your brain literally cannot accept it as reality,” he said in a video. “Also, what feels just as realistic, there’s another timeline, another parallel universe, where she won.” The biggest reason for the denial, he said, “is accepting this reality means that your loved ones could very well be in danger under this administration.”

For Priya Hubbard, a reality television producer in Los Angeles, that’s tough to accept.

“I’m having a hard time getting my head around these tech bros having now entered the government chat,” she said from her home. “And because of that, and because of the potential of the ACA being taken away, I have preexisting conditions that if I don’t have insurance, I will not make it through Trump’s second presidency. My father, who is recovering from cancer, will not make it through a second presidency.”

There’s at least some self-awareness among left-wing voters that they might seem a little delulu to outsiders.

“You should be able to have a little election denialism as a treat,” joked TikTok creator LukefromOhio. “Just a little.”

“I do look at the videos that people post about the numbers where they’re treating it like Taylor Swift, and I’m like, ‘This is fun,’” Hubbard said. “This is like an hour that I can spend and just ignore the hellscape that is about to be.”

And she knows what her post-election questioning looks like to outsiders, even as she stays away from psychic predictions and Easter eggs and sticks to facts. “I have gotten hundreds of comments of people saying, you’re being just like QAnon, you’re being just like the insurrectionists, you’re like in election denial, you need to get your mental health checked,” she says.

To self-soothe, she keeps spreadsheets on the updated vote numbers, tracking anomalies. “I am going to hold out hope until Dec. 17, knowing full well that this is probably real, but I personally need for my own mental health to ease into reality.”

***

One of the biggest differences between the 2020 election denialists and those emerging today is the lack of a central leader, whether that is “Q” or Trump.

Nobody inside the Democratic Party is drumming up the idea that the election was stolen or somehow fraudulent. “The insurrection, January 6th and all the election denial started in 2016,” Hubbard said. Even back then, Trump was claiming that he didn’t lose the popular vote and that if he lost any future election, it was because it was rigged.

“The insurrection was years in the making of getting all these people, the MAGA army, so aggravated that they would do anything that was asked of them,” she said. “I’m definitely not heading to the Capitol to s— in a senator’s office,” she said, laughing.

Phil Elberg, a trial lawyer who served as president of the International Cultic Studies Association, says this lack of a central figure means the phenomenon won’t have very long legs.

“There’s no leader of this group. There’s nobody of significance articulating this. You’d have to go a long way to convince me there’s any kind of a political movement in the absence of somebody particularly significant, some influence articulating this theory about any particular state or place,” he said.

“If you tried to organize a demonstration of these people, if you got a hundred people there, it would turn very quickly into a party.”

Still, some have seen people on the left fall down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole before. During the covid crisis, QAnon merged with psychics and sign seekers, giving momentum to a phenomenon dubbed “con-spirituality” by sociologists David Voas and Charlotte Ward in 2011.

“The almost immediate overlap with QAnon in those spaces was horrifying to watch,” Prism said. “I was under the belief that there’s no dogma here, there’s no leaders. We’re all just kind of love and light, doing our own thing.”

It’s a phenomenon author Naomi Klein observed in her 2023 bestseller, “Doppelganger,” which examines former feminist turned Steve Bannon associate Naomi Wolf’s slide into what Klein dubs the “mirror world.”

Though some political experts explain this blurring of left and right by way of the horseshoe theory (in which extremes on both sides seem to meet), Klein sees it as “a diagonal line,” sliding from the green left to conspiracist right. (See: Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a staunch environmentalist turned anti-vaccine proponent and Trump pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.)

But this iteration is different. “I think this is more grounded in actual reality in that we have this convicted felon who’s trying to take the highest office in the land and we’re p—-d about it,” Prism said.

During 2020s covid-QAnon crossover, many left-leaning voters got folded into the Republican Party tent. For these Harris supporters, that is not an option. Some of those interviewed have urged their viewers to get more involved in politics at the local level.

Already, there’s a pushback online – one woman jokingly tore off her tinfoil hat when the astrologically important dates passed without a major announcement.

Others, like content creator Erynn Chambers, are speaking out plainly. “I’m going to hold your hand when I say this,” she said in one video. “Nothing is going on behind the scenes.”

Chambers, who became active posting on social media during Black Lives Matter protests, was not shocked that Harris lost. Chambers said she didn’t think Harris’s messages were effective enough in differentiating herself from Trump. Most of the misinformation making the rounds was due to a simple misunderstanding of basic election rules. The 2020 election took longer because of covid and mail-in ballots.

“I think a lot of people expected things to maybe take a while to be definitive,” she said. “I just think people were reading into normal parts of the electoral process as if they were a conspiracy.”

“There is this sort of idea that a lot of people on the left hold that, like, ‘Oh, we’re the smart ones, so we don’t have to investigate our biases or, you know, pay more attention to where we’re getting our information.”

The astrologically meaningful dates have mostly passed, the election will be certified on Dec. 17, and even if there were any election malfeasance, the new Trump administration is hardly going to investigate itself.

And so Prism has been holding online meditation circles for the people of her 4 a.m. club.

It’s all about helping disappointed voters heal, said Jennifer Lisa Vest, a medical intuitive and psychic in Los Angeles who has also predicted that Harris will be president. As Vest sees it: “If the worst thing that we are doing is giving people hope when they should be in despair – I don’t think that’s a bad thing.”