LAWRENCEVILLE, Ga. — Former President Donald Trump’s false claims of a stolen election fueled anger among Republicans who flocked to local-level GOP chapters in hope of playing a greater role in future elections.
Now, some leaders of those grassroots outfits say they and their members have turned the page — even as Trump himself has made it clear that he wants the issue front and center in coming contests.
“People here have turned to the future,” Hai Cao, a member of the Gwinnett County GOP in Georgia, said in an interview.
Fellow members of the local Republican Party “don’t dwell and talk about” 2020, he added, because “we’ll just lose opportunity for future advancement — wins.”
Cao isn’t alone in his thinking. In interviews with more than a dozen local GOP officials in four key presidential battlegrounds, most indicated that they had moved on from the arguments about 2020, a notable shift from some of the most forceful Trump defenders during his second impeachment and through his first year out of office.
The desire to put last year’s election on the back burner indicates that among at least some Republicans, new issues have begun to take precedence. Republicans have ramped up attacks on President Joe Biden and other Democrats ahead of the 2022 midterms, particularly around rising prices, the chaotic U.S. withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, vaccination mandates and education. And while Trump remains popular, the new GOP figures fighting those battles are drawing increased interest and attention.
Michele Woodhouse, the Republican Party chair in North Carolina’s 11th Congressional District, which includes 17 counties in the western part of the state, said she started noticing a change in what was driving enthusiasm in late August, when Biden began the withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Woodhouse said that earlier this year, anger over Trump’s loss was driving new participation at the local GOP level. Not so much anymore.
“There's been this uprising to say Biden's policies are failing us so miserably,” said Woodhouse, who is running for a U.S. House seat in North Carolina’s newly drawn 14th Congressional District. “And it's been a very issue-driven enthusiasm. I really think the issues are driving it.”
The political calculation for leaders like Woodhouse is straightforward, because they want to harness the energy around issues like inflation and pandemic policy to help turn out voters in the midterms, an election without Trump on the ballot. It’s not dissimilar to sentiments expressed by national party leaders, who have said they would prefer to focus their attention on Biden, his administration and the Democratic-controlled Congress as they work to regain power in Washington.
The calculus was bolstered by Gov.-elect Glenn Youngkin's blueprint for success in blue Virginia and Republicans’ much closer-than-expected loss in the New Jersey governor’s race. Youngkin, while neither embracing nor repudiating Trump, zeroed in on education and parental involvement in schools, which appeared to resonate with GOP voters, along with concerns about the economy.
Earlier this year, anger over the election animated local GOP chapters in tangible ways. Branches across the country passed censure resolutions aimed at just about any Republican who crossed Trump, particularly those members of Congress who voted to impeach or convict him for his role in the deadly Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, when a mob of pro-Trump supporters tried to disrupt the electoral vote count formalizing Biden's election win.
Local-level GOP groups saw significant rises in membership from people who wanted to become precinct officials — filling low-level positions that carry out key election-related functions — following former Trump official Steve Bannon’s call to action, according to a ProPublica report published in September.
At the time, Lou Capozzi, who chairs the GOP chapter in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, which had significant growth in the number of people volunteering for party-affiliated election positions, told ProPublica: “Who knows what happened on Election Day for real.”
In a more recent interview with NBC News, Capozzi said: “I think a lot of people have moved on from last year.”
“We still have the best system in the world,” he said of the U.S. electoral process. “And I think, as far as Republicans go, I think they're just kind of redoubling their efforts to try to make a difference and to try to get Republicans elected. From my perspective, I think most people have turned the page.”
In Gwinnett County, local GOP Chair Sammy Baker sounded a similar tune.
“So we still have a few that are still upset” over the 2020 vote, said Baker, whose county party rejected censure measures aimed at Republican Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger earlier this year. “But for the most part, we’re turning the corner.”
