In January 2021, seven of the 11 California Republicans in Congress refused to certify the 2020 presidential election results, boosting former President Donald Trump’s false claim that he lost in a rigged vote.
As Trump attempts to return to the White House, only a third of California’s Republican U.S. representatives have pledged to certify the results this November.
Only four of the 12 GOP incumbents—seeking another term—have promised to uphold the election results. Of the three GOP challengers in California’s most competitive districts, two—Scott Baugh in Orange County and Kevin Lincoln in the Central Valley—made the same pledge in response to an inquiry. And in California’s U.S. Senate race, GOP candidate Steve Garvey committed in February.
The refusal to commit by most GOP congressional candidates comes as Trump and his allies are already casting doubt on the outcome of the November election, stoking fear among election officials of disruptions and violence.
Eight of California’s current Republican members of Congress were in office, but only Rep. Young Kim—who flipped her northern Orange County seat in 2020—voted to certify the results without casting doubt on the election outcome. “The Constitution does not give Congress the authority to overturn elections. To take such action would undermine the authority of the states,” she said in a statement in 2021.
She said she plans to uphold the results of this election as well.
Rep. Tom McClintock was the only other California Republican to vote to certify the election. But he said it was because he believed Congress did not have the constitutional authority to reject the electoral votes—not because he didn’t have concerns about how the election was conducted.
In December 2020, however, McClintock was one of four California Republicans in Congress to file an amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court to challenge the election outcome in Pennsylvania, arguing that mail balloting “invites fraud and incubates suspicion of fraud” and claiming that “ballot harvesters” collected ballots with “no chain of custody.” Multiple fact checks found no evidence of widespread ballot harvesting or voter fraud during the 2020 election, and courts rejected more than 50 lawsuits Trump and his allies brought to challenge the election results.
McClintock said he will vote to uphold the electoral votes for the upcoming election. “Congress’ only role in the matter is to witness the counting of the ballots. Period,” he said.
In 2022, Congress passed the Electoral Count Reform Act, which made it more difficult for Congress to object to election results and clarified the vote-counting process. All California Republican incumbents who were in office at the time voted against it.
But even with that new guardrail, political experts say efforts to overturn the election are to be expected now. That’s a stark departure from a decade ago, said Kim Nalder, a political science professor at California State University in Sacramento.
“It’s really kind of horrifying that we’ve normalized this abnormal sort of situation,” she said. “We can’t survive with this level of distrust in our basic institutions, and I don’t know what will give to change that, but something has to.”
Lobbyist Chris Micheli said the presidential election results could be challenged again, partly because of how close polls say the race is in seven battleground states. Both Kamala Harris and Trump are preparing legal teams in the case of a challenge.
“It’s definitely a dark period of American history, both what transpired on Jan. 6, but also earlier that prior December, when members of Congress voted against certifying the election of the clear victor in the presidential election,” Micheli said. “Those votes raised the ire of a lot of voters, particularly in California.”
The state Republican Party is firmly behind Trump, who—despite losing to Biden 63% to 34% in 2020—still won more votes in California than any other state. In a new Public Policy Institute of California poll released last week, Harris leads Trump 59% to 33% among likely voters. But in the swing congressional districts, likely voters are generally evenly divided.
Rep. Ken Calvert, who represents the 41st District in Riverside County, is the only California Republican member of Congress to commit to certifying the presidential election results this time after objecting four years ago. He also joined the court brief challenging Pennsylvania’s results in 2020 and advocated for a “thorough investigation” of voter fraud allegations in 2021.
Calvert’s campaign did not say why his position has shifted from four years ago.
Rep. Jay Obernolte, who voted to object to the count, told Southern California News Group in 2022 that he still had “serious constitutional reservations about the things that happened in those two states”—Arizona and Pennsylvania.
Reps. David Valadao and Michelle Steel missed the vote in 2021. Steel said she had tested positive for Covid, while Valadao had not been sworn in yet because he also tested positive. However, Valadao said on social media he would have voted to certify the election.
The three incumbents who took office in 2023 will face that decision for the first time if they win re-election. But not everyone is answering the question: Rep. John Duarte—a Modesto farmer facing a fierce challenge from Democrat Adam Gray—is the only one to state his position publicly, telling The Sacramento Bee he would vote to certify the presidential election. (Duarte did not respond to an inquiry.)
Reps. Kevin Kiley, Vince Fong, Doug LaMalfa, Darrell Issa and Mike Garcia, and Obernolte and Valadao did not respond to inquiries. Ditto Matt Gunderson, a candidate for the toss-up 49th District in San Diego County.
Nalder said Republicans running in swing districts will decide whether to uphold the election outcome based on which voters they want to court.
“Coming out strongly in support of certification would make sense if the goal was to recruit some moderate voters or some voters from the other party in these close races,” she said. “But if the strategy is more about turnouts amongst their base … it probably makes sense to equivocate.”
For GOP members of Congress in safe Republican districts, however, the calculation is more about their “future in the party,” Nalder said.
“Assuming Trump wins, they will need to have loyalty exhibited within the party, and so having committed beforehand to something that the party maybe goes against later would not be helpful for their political career,” she added.
