Orban Concedes. Will the GOP?

Mostly since 2020 Rs have accepted election losses. Mostly.

Yesterday, Hungarians voted overwhelmingly to unseat the fascist government of Prime Minister Viktor Orban, whose regime has been in power for 16 years. Orban had rigged the election system, crushed freedom of the press, and targeted opposition leaders. But thanks to sustained resistance he had not been able to entirely gut democracy, and in the end democracy got him.

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Not only did it get him, but he had to admit it got him. Orban is a key Trump ally, and there was some worry that, like Trump in 2020, he might deny the election results or try to stage a coup and remain in power by force. But the regime’s collapse was so thoroughgoing that he had little ability or will to contest the results. As international relations professor Nicholas Grossman explained,

In competitive authoritarianism, leaders abuse state power to tilt the electoral playing field in their favor, manipulate the media environment and minimize opposition voices, maybe even steal close elections by lying about fraud. But they usually can’t overcome a large majority voting against them.

One possible conclusion here is that, to defeat Trump and to avoid a repeat of January 6, we need to win in 2026 and 2028 by huge margins. But while that sounds reasonable, I don’t think it’s the whole story. In particular, we have in the US a lot of evidence from elections since 2020 that election denial is not a default for MAGA and the GOP. That’s reason for hope—within limits.

The GOP generally concedes when it loses

In 2020, we all know, Trump refused to accept his election defeat, attempted to invalidate it through the courts, and eventually staged a violent insurrection in which he encouraged a mob to murder his own Vice President and threaten the lives of lawmakers. Trump still refuses to admit that he lost that election; his cronies and nominees regularly lie about, or dissimulate near, the election results in order to curry his favor.

Trump’s coup was a violent attack on the Constitution and on democracy—an attack which resulted in multiple deaths, and which is in many ways ongoing.

It’s also worth noting, though, that that particular attack has not exactly been repeated in the six years since it occurred. Republicans continue to attempt to steal elections and subvert democracy through gerrymandering, through voter suppression, and through other tactics. But by and large they have not attempted to deny or contest election results. When GOP candidates lose, they routinely concede.

Just looking at recent elections, for example, the high-profile Wisconsin Supreme Court race of 2025 was trumpeted as an existential cause by Elon Musk, who spent more than $25 million to boost the campaign of conservative Brad Schimel. Nonetheless, Schimel lost to liberal Susan Crawford by 10 points. He did not contest the election.

In Florida last month, Emily Gregory flipped the state legislative seat that includes Trump’s Mar-a-lago resort. She won by less than 3 points, or around 800 votes. Despite the high-profile nature of the race, and despite the relatively narrow win, Gregory’s opponent did not contest (though Palm Beach County conducted an audit of the results anyway to forestall any controversy.)

You could multiply examples almost indefinitely, because, again, the GOP continues to concede elections when they lose as a matter of course—even when they lose by a narrow margin, even in elections that the right has singled out as particularly important.

When the GOP doesn’t concede

There have been a few elections since 2020 where the GOP tried to undermine democracy and block election results. The first and most obvious is in 2024 where Trump (once again) refused to commit to accepting election results unless he won. It seems clear that if he had lost he would have tried to challenge the outcome—definitely in the media, probably in court, possibly with violence.

One candidate who did refuse to concede in 2024 was Jefferson Griffin, the Republican candidate for the North Carolina Supreme Court. Griffin lost a very close race to Democrat Allison Riggs; Riggs won by 734 votes out of more than 5.2 million cast. Griffin launched a lengthy challenge, attempting to invalidate absentee ballots in Democratic-voting counties, claiming those voters had incomplete registration information. The case dragged on for six months until a federal judge finally threw it out and ordered the election certified. Riggs held her seat, maintaining the court’s 5-2 Republican majority.

The other high-profile example of Republicans obstructing election results occurred in the US House. Democrat Adelita Griselva won a special election to AZ-7 in September 2025. Her opponent did not attempt to overturn the results. But Speaker of the House Mike Johnson did not want her to be the last vote needed to secure a discharge petition for the release of the Epstein files. He therefore refused to seat her for 50 days, an unprecedented stalling tactic. You could argue about the definition, but I think it’s at least arguable that Johnson was in effect refusing to concede the election on behalf of his party.

It’s difficult to draw generalizations from a very small data set. But to go out on a limb, it seems like the GOP contests elections when, (a) Trump is on the ballot (b) Trump is personally committed to blocking the election or (c) the results are extremely close.

Why doesn’t the GOP contest more elections?

One other takeaway here is that when the GOP does contest elections, they tend to lose. Griselva was eventually seated and signed the Epstein petition; Griffin lost his challenge; Trump did not stay in office in 2021. The 2000 election of George Bush is the grim and very consequential counterexample, but that is a quarter century ago now.

Contesting elections is difficult, time-consuming, and often fails, or worse, backfires. Journalist Zack Beauchamp points out that Orban didn’t concede out of the goodness of his heart. He conceded because his competitive authoritarian election rigging had failed and he didn’t have the capacity or the security forces to annul results and end elections altogether in the face of massive popular revolt.

Beauchamp argues that Orbán’s best bet for regime survival — for returning to power — wasn’t staging a doomed January 6-style putsch in the face of overwhelming defeat.” Instead, his best bet, “was retreating, and doing everything he can to preserve regime elements that would allow for a return to competitive authoritarianism in the future.”

Or, to put it another way, Orban—and most Republicans—are better strategic thinkers than Donald Trump. Trump has very little interest in calculating risks or in stepping back to fight another day. He just blunders ahead, insisting that he never loses, staging a coup with virtually no chance of success because he’s convinced of his own genius and impunity.

Of course, Democrats and civil society didn’t take advantage of that blunder to crush Trump once and for all, and now we’re in hell. But the point remains that January 6 was a serious and consequential failure for Trump, and one that at least many Republicans are not eager to repeat on a large scale. They will occasionally attempt to undermine results when there is plausible deniability of good faith (as in the extremely close NC SC race). But in most cases, unless Trump himself is goading them to expose themselves (as with 2020, 2024 and Griselva) they are aware that they, like Orban, do not have the capacity or the mandate to nullify elections.

This is obviously good news. The Republicans are generally not contesting elections or attempting to nullify elections because they can’t, and/or because they feel that doing so would end in defeat and perhaps in major setbacks for their authoritarian program. Hungary defeated Orban; the US has been defeating Republican candidates in off year elections. Those defeats stick because the authoritarians do not have the power to unstick them, which indicates that we (and Hungary too) can make future defeats stick as well.

The less great news, as Beauchamp says re Orban, is that a fascist loss, or even a number of fascist losses, do not mean that end of fascism. Orban conceded this election because he believes doing so will give him a chance to win in the future. Republicans concede because they have longer term plans for fascist success—plans which depend, for instance, on the permanent, almighty Christofascist Supreme Court.

And of course there’s always the fact that Trump has shown repeatedly in various contexts—most recently in the Iran negotiations—that he doesn’t know enough to concede when it would be in his interests. That often means worse defeats for him and his lackies. But along the way to those defeats, he can do a lot of damage, including ruining people’s lives and killing them.

Worse, if you aren’t willing to forcefully take advantage of his failures, if you lose your nerve—as I believe Joe Biden and Merrick Garland did, fascism can get back on the horse and into the presidency. Hungary now has to crush Orban. When we get the chance—if we get the chance—we need to do the same with Trump and Trumpism.