Democrats sweep the midterms in Georgia. Is 2020 election denial over?

The 2020 election in Georgia, which President Donald Trump has repeatedly and falsely claimed he won, has cast a long shadow over state politics.

But several Republicans who have kept the controversy alive lost their elections Tuesday, potentially knocking wind out of the denialism that’s fueled politics for the better part of a decade.

“There’s probably going to still be people in the Legislature who will be spreading misinformation, but I just don’t see it getting the same traction as it used to,” said Saira Draper, a Democratic state representative who won a seat in the state Senate on Tuesday. “For the sake of everyone, I sure hope we can move forward. There are so many more important things to be discussing at this point.”

Some Republicans have embraced Trump’s spurious election rigging claims. Some say they’re merely skeptical that Trump lost the state in 2020 or they try to avoid speaking about it. But many voters had already moved on from the election, University of Georgia political scientist Charles Bullock said.

“I think a lot of Republicans have also moved beyond that and didn’t think that Donald Trump’s continuing to talk about it was at all helpful,” he said.

Republicans were already facing headwinds, but Tuesday’s rebuke in Georgia was extraordinary and has led to a generational shift in state politics. After holding none, Democrats won every statewide office and flipped one of two chambers in the state Legislature.

U.S. Rep. Mike Collins was among the Republican skeptics not reelected. He told CNN after winning the Republican primary for U.S. Senate that he still believed Trump won the 2020 election in Georgia.

In the aftermath of 2020, state Sen. Greg Dolezal was among those who sought to help Trump overturn the results of Georgia’s presidential election and continued to cast doubt on Fulton County’s elections procedures during his campaign for lieutenant governor. And state Rep. Tim Fleming said during his campaign for secretary of state that he believed there were “irregularities” in the vote.

All three — Collins, Dolezal and Fleming — lost their races.

Republican incumbent state Sen. Shawn Still, who was indicted in the 2020 election interference case that was dismissed last year, also lost his campaign for reelection.

Trump’s allies still in state government may soon take a backseat when Democrats are handed the reins, if they remain in government at all. For example, the shift in power toward the Democratic Party could result in new appointees to the Republican-dominated State Election Board.

Bullock said that with such a dismal showing nationally, some of the remaining Republicans could break ranks with the president on issues — including the 2020 election.

That doesn’t mean skepticism of the vote will end altogether. Trump’s fixation may never fade, and he has packed his administration with allies who have echoed his election conspiracies and wielded the federal government to investigate his 2020 grievances.

Fulton County, where 2020 lingers

Perhaps nowhere else in Georgia will 2020 skepticism linger longer than in Fulton County, long a target of fraud claims.

Georgia conducted three counts of the 2020 presidential election, including a hand count audit. Each count showed Democrat Joe Biden won. What problems monitors and state investigators in Fulton found, they attributed to human error and sloppiness. To skeptics — including the State Election Board’s majority — those investigations were inadequate.

In January, FBI agents seized more than 650 boxes of election records from a Fulton County warehouse as part of a criminal investigation into election irregularities. In April, the Justice Department demanded the personal information for thousands of Fulton’s paid and volunteer election workers, but a federal judge quashed that demand.

And an internal memo showed 260 FBI analysts were directed to complete hundreds of records checks related to Fulton County’s 2020 election by mid-July. So far, the Trump administration has yet to unveil any evidence that would recast Trump’s narrow defeat or show wrongdoing in the state’s most populous county.