Most California Republicans in Congress are refusing to commit to certifying the 2024 election results

In January 2021, seven of California’s 11 Republicans in Congress refused to certify the results of the 2020 presidential election, reinforcing former President Donald Trump’s false claim that he lost in a rigged vote.

Now, as Trump seeks 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 — all of whom are 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 promise in response to a CalMatters query. And in the California race for the US Senate, Republican candidate Steve Garvey made this commitment in February.

The refusal by most Republican congressional candidates to commit comes as Trump and his allies are already casting doubt on the outcome of November’s election and raising fears among election officials of disruption and violence. Trump has spread baseless claims about widespread voting by non-citizens, argued that Vice President Kamala Harris will only win if Democrats cheat and has questioned the constitutionality of Democrats replacing President Joe Biden at the top of the election.

Congress’s vote to count all the electoral votes already certified by each state is the final step in electing a president. Normally a formality, but after Trump lost the 2020 election to Biden, it was anything but a formality.

On January 6, 2021, a mob of Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol. The next morning, 147 Republican members of Congress voted to object to the counting of the Electoral College votes either Arizona or Pennsylvania or both.

All 44 California Democrats in the US House of Representatives and Senate voted to confirm the election.

Eight of California’s current Republican congressmen 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 power to overturn elections. Such measures would undermine the authority of states,” she said in a statement in 2021.

She told CalMatters 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 that was because he believed Congress did not have the constitutional authority to reject the electoral votes — and not because he had no concerns about how the election was conducted.

However, in December 2020, McClintock was one of four California Republicans in Congress to file an amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court challenging the election results in Pennsylvania on the grounds that mail-in voting had taken place “invites fraud and raises suspicion of fraud” and claims that “ballot collectors” collected ballots without a “chain of custody.” Multiple fact checks found no evidence that widespread ballot harvesting or voter fraud occurred during the 2020 election, and courts rejected more than 50 lawsuits seeking to challenge the election results from Trump and his allies.

McClintock told CalMatters that he would vote to uphold the electoral vote for the upcoming election. “Congress’s only role in this matter is to witness the counting of ballots. Period,” he said.

In 2022, Congress passed the Electoral Count Reform Act, which made it harder for Congress to object to election results and clarified the process of counting votes. All of California’s Republican incumbents at the time voted against it.

But even with this new guardrail, political experts say attempts to overturn the election can now be expected. “This is a significant departure from a decade ago,” said Kim Nalder, a political science professor at California State University, Sacramento.

“It is truly frightening that we have normalized this unusual situation,” she said. “We cannot survive with this level of distrust of our basic institutions, and I don’t know what we can do to change that, but something has to happen.”

Veteran lobbyist Chris Micheli said the presidential election results could be challenged again, in part because polls show the race is close in seven battleground states. Both Harris and Trump are preparing legal teams in case of a challenge.

“It is definitely a dark period in American history, both what happened on January 6th and earlier in December when members of Congress voted against certifying the election of the clear winner of the presidential election,” Micheli said. “These votes raised the ire of many voters, particularly in California.”

The California Republican Party is confident the election results will be certified, spokeswoman Ellie Hockenbury said in a statement to CalMatters. Nevertheless, the party is preparing for possible problems.

“To ensure we leave nothing to chance,” she said, “Republicans at the national and state levels have invested heavily in an election integrity operation to ensure all concerns are addressed in real time and Californians can cast their ballot with confidence. “that it will be accepted and counted.”

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 poll from the Public Policy Institute of California released Wednesday evening, Harris leads Trump 59% to 33% among likely voters. But in swing congressional districts, likely voters are generally evenly distributed.

Rep. Ken Calvert, who represents the 41st District in Riverside County, is the only California Republican congressman committed to certifying the presidential election results this time after he objected four years ago. He also participated in the court brief challenging Pennsylvania’s 2020 results and called for a “thorough investigation” into election fraud allegations in 2021.

Calvert’s campaign did not explain why his position has changed from four years ago.

Rep. Jay Obernolte, who voted against the count, told the Southern California News Group in 2022 that he still had “serious constitutional reservations about the things that happened in these two states” — Arizona and Pennsylvania.

Representatives David Valadao and Michelle Steel missed the vote in 2021. Steel said she tested positive for COVID-19, while Valadao has not yet been sworn in as he also tested positive. However, Valadao said on social media that he would have voted to certify the election.

The three incumbents who took office in 2023 will face this decision for the first time if re-elected. 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 that he supports confirmation presidential election would vote. (Duarte did not respond to a CalMatters inquiry.)

Reps. Kevin Kiley, Vince Fong, Doug LaMalfa, Darrell Issa and Mike Garcia, as well as Obernolte and Valadao also did not respond to inquiries from CalMatters. Matt Gunderson, a candidate for the 49th District in San Diego County, did not respond to CalMatters.

Will California Republicans certify the presidential election?

CalMatters surveyed U.S. officials and congressional candidates about the 2020 and 2024 results.

Note: Some candidates did not respond to the survey, hence a public comment

was used. A space means neither was available.

Table: Jeremia Kimelman, Yue Stella Yu and Jenna Peterson, CalMatters

Republicans are reluctant to speak publicly about the issue because they fear losing votes from Trump supporters, strategists say.

“It puts Republicans in competitive districts in a difficult position,” said Jon Fleischman, former executive director of the California Republican Party.

“Of course they will vote to certify the election results, but they also don’t really want to rouse the conservative base because they need them to ‘Get Out the Vote.’ So this is an issue that divides Republicans, and so I don’t think they want to talk about it much.”

For Republicans running in swing districts, the question of whether they will sustain the election results depends on which voters they are trying to court, Nalder said.

“Strong support for certification would make sense if the goal was to win over some moderate voters or some voters from the other party in these close races,” she said. “But if the strategy is more about the turnout of their base … it probably makes sense to be equivocal.”

For Republican 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 have to show loyalty within the party, and so having previously committed to something that the party may later violate would not be helpful to their political career,” she said.