Trump’s abandonment of Brooks is interesting, as Trump has largely been endorsing Republicans who agree with his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen. On that front, Brooks is one of the Big Lie’s biggest supporters. Brooks was the first member of Congress who said he would challenge the election results, and he also spoke at the Jan. 6 rally before the attack on the U.S. Capitol.

But what it means to support the Big Lie is an ever-evolving litmus test, and Brooks seems to have made a grievous miscalculation in telling his supporters to put Trump’s 2020 election loss behind them at an August 2021 rally. Trump cited this as the reason for why he was no longer supporting Brooks, though of course it’s impossible to disentangle the role Brooks’s sagging poll numbers played in Trump’s decision, as we know Trump loves a winner.

But Brooks’s fall from grace aside, a belief in the Big Lie has been perhaps the most consistent part of Trump’s endorsements since the 2020 election. Of the 109 candidates he’s endorsed for governor, federal office, attorney general or secretary of state,5 at least 78 — more than 70 percent — believe that the 2020 election was fraudulent, according to our research. (To make our determinations, we checked whether Trump’s endorsees had, if members of Congress, voted against certifying the election results, and whether they had taken a public stance on the issue via news reports and their social media pages. Candidates who more generally raised questions about voter fraud or wanted to increase scrutiny of voting practices weren’t included in our totals.)