Perhaps you think the 2020 election was stolen. I don’t, but that is not the point here. What is the point is that the narrative of the recall became a brand consideration — did independents and moderates want to be branded as election-fraud conspiracists? Larry Elder had every chance to rebuff this narrative, and actually, to never let the narrative take hold to begin with. What he did, instead, was create the narrative! He jumped in with both feet and asked for the Trump/MAGA/voter-fraud brand in a state that Trump lost by 29 percent.

Dare I point out the obvious — that of the small minority of folks in California who voted for Trump in 2020, somewhere around 100 percent of them were pro-recall and pro-Elder. For the many millions who did not vote for Trump but were sympathetic to the recall, there could not have been a message less effective for earning and retaining their vote than the “stop the steal” story.

This is going to stay around Republicans’ necks as long as they let it. Not just in an “against all odds” case such as recalling a Democrat governor in a deep-blue state, but anywhere independents and moderates are needed to win an election — the backward-looking focus on the unprovable claims of a 2020 stolen election are toxic, self-defeating, and counter-productive. It is a fatal focus. A forward-looking focus on defeating cancel culture, pandemic irrationality and tyranny, and woke corporatism is the winning formula for the party and the cause.