From the article:
The election results suggest that a focus on Mr. Trump’s election lies did not merely galvanize Democrats but also alienated Republicans and independents. Final turnout figures show registered Republicans cast more ballots than registered Democrats in Arizona and Nevada, but election-denying candidates nevertheless lost important races in each of those states.
Republican candidates in statewide contests who embraced Mr. Trump’s election lies also significantly underperformed compared with Republicans who did not. This was true even in districts that voted overwhelmingly for Mr. Trump in 2020, suggesting that the defection of ticket-splitters like Mr. Mohler likely played a role.
In a survey of voters in five battleground states conducted by the research firm Citizen Data for the advocacy group Protect Democracy, a third who cast ballots for a mix of Democrats and Republicans in November cited a concern that G.O.P. candidates held views or promoted policies “that are dangerous to democracy.”
“The good news from the 2022 elections is that election denial seems like a loser for Republicans to run on,” said Richard L. Hasen, an election law scholar at the University of California, Los Angeles. “Maybe that will lead more Republicans to speak out against fact-free claims of election fraud.”
“This extreme conversation about voter fraud, it attracts an extreme flavor of people,” said Kristopher Dahir, a councilman and pastor in Sparks, Nev., who ran as a Republican for secretary of state this year. After losing the primary to Jim Marchant, a prominent figure in the election denier movement, Mr. Dahir endorsed Mr. Marchant’s Democratic opponent, Cisco Aguilar, who won in November.
The narrowness of some of the election deniers’ losses, and the diversity of factors that likely played into them, have led some experts to caution that November’s results should not be mistaken for a wholesale rejection of anti-democratic politics.
“Anyone who believes that we’re out of the woods because a handful of election deniers lost close races in swing states is deluding themselves,” said Brian Klaas, a scholar on authoritarianism at University College London.