Opinion | Republicans fell down their own conspiracy theory rabbit hole

In Umberto Eco’s classic novel “Foucault’s Pendulum,” a group of friends develop a ridiculous conspiracy theory as a game, only to start believing it themselves, with horrible consequences for everyone involved.

Now, many Republicans have stumbled into the same trap, promoting conspiracy theories about the 2020 election that will make it harder for them to win in 2024.

The latest example comes from Wisconsin Senate candidate Eric Hovde, the GOP’s likely nominee against Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin. In a radio interview this week, Hovde seemed to suggest that senior citizens living in nursing homes are not qualified to vote — an idea that has roots in one of Donald Trump’s more outlandish claims about the 2020 election.

When discussing that election, Hovde turned to the subject of senior citizens: “Well, if you’re in a nursing home, you only have five, six months life expectancy,” he told host Guy Benson. “Almost nobody in a nursing home is in a point to vote. And you have children, adult children showing up that said, who voted for my 85- or 90-year-old father or mother?”

Hovde, who is behind Baldwin in recent polling, immediately backtracked, with a campaign spokeswoman saying that he did not mean to suggest that elderly people should not be able to vote.

That suggests that someone in his campaign, at least, recognized how counterproductive this particular conspiracy theory is to a candidate in a battleground state. After all, older voters are among the most reliable — both at casting ballots and checking the box for Republican candidates. Add in the number of voters who have a loved one in a nursing home, and you’re potentially irritating a large segment of Wisconsinites with loose talk about how they shouldn’t be allowed to vote.

That’s the kind of messaging that hurt election-denying candidates around the country in the 2022 midterms. Simply put, voters like voting, and telling them you’ll make it harder is a losing argument.

To understand why Hovde would even go there, you have to go back to the aftermath of the 2020 election. At the time, Trump and his supporters promoted so many conspiracy theories to explain his loss that it’s easy to lose track: Voting machines! Ballot mules! Dead voters! Mail ballots! Mark Zuckerberg! Italian satellites! Nest thermostats! There was precious little evidence, but the goal was to throw a Gish gallop’s worth of outlandish arguments out there to make the case that Trump actually won.

In Wisconsin, one of the theories revolved around nursing homes. As you probably recall, there was a global pandemic going on at the time, which particularly threatened older people. To protect their residents, many Wisconsin nursing homes barred all outside visitors, which happened to include the special voting deputies who typically handle their ballots. The Wisconsin Elections Board decided to send mail ballots instead.

Trump and his allies portrayed this rather sensible decision as proof of some kind of massive fraud. The best evidence they could muster was a ballot cast by a single resident of the Ridgewood Care Facility in Racine County who had previously been declared incompetent by a judge — in a state that Joe Biden won by 20,000 votes.

But, as in Eco’s novel, the conspiracy theory metastasized.

Racine County Sheriff Christopher Schmaling, who campaigned for Trump during the election, even referred recommendations for criminal charges against five members of the state elections board, a move the state’s Democratic attorney general called a “disgraceful publicity stunt.” The local prosecutor, a Republican, declined to prosecute — not because it would be criminalizing a minor policy dispute but because she didn’t have jurisdiction since the commissioners don’t live in her county.

It didn’t stop there: State lawmakers selected former state Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman to investigate the election. Gabelman focused on the nursing home claims, interviewing residents and children who claimed the older voters weren’t competent. This evidence was interesting but not really germane since state law requires a judge to make that determination, and Gableman’s investigation was heavily criticized for being overly credulous, going over budget and botching a routine deposition.

In a normal universe, lawmakers from both parties might work together to streamline the process of determining if a voter is competent and spell out contingencies for voting in a nursing home.

Instead, the claims made about a handful of ballots across the state are being used to justify sweeping claims about the election results in 2020 and proposed changes to how voting should be handled in 2024. Trump, who now regularly claims without evidence that he actually won the state in 2020, has recently called for the head of the Wisconsin Elections Commission to be fired.

As a candidate, Hovde has tried to downplay Trump’s fixation, arguing that there were problems, but that it was time to move on. But his fumble this week showed just how difficult it is to thread that needle.

In Eco’s novel, the narrator notes that he and his friends were playing around when they started their conspiracy theorizing and would have been ashamed if anyone accused them of actually believing their outlandish claims. But over time, he laments, they lost sight of what was real and what wasn’t. “I believe that you can reach the point,” he says, “where there is no longer any difference between developing the habit of pretending to believe and developing the habit of believing.”

Many Republicans may have already reached that point.