Bright Line Watch found major-party runners-up in contested U.S. House and Senate races refused to concede less often in 2022 than in 2020, tracking a behavior highlighted by then-President Donald Trump’s 2020 refusal.
The research group counted 47 refusals in 2020 and 18 in 2022. Its review covered second-place finishers from the Democratic and Republican parties and excluded 31 runners-up who belonged to other parties.
The decline appeared across both parties, but Republicans remained more likely to reject defeat. Among defeated Republicans, the share who refused to concede fell from 20% in 2020 to 8% in 2022. Among defeated Democrats, it dropped from 2% to none.
Bright Line Watch also found a difference tied to prior officeholding among defeated Republican candidates in 2022: 9% of those without previous elected office refused to concede, compared with none of those who had held office. The finding shows an association; the study does not establish why the groups differed.
Researchers classified candidates’ public statements as concessions, refusals or neither, after searching social media and mainstream news coverage. When statement timing could be identified, they used Associated Press race-call times to measure the delay before a candidate responded. The classification concerns candidates’ statements and does not assess whether election results were accurate.
Separate survey data track voters’ reported wait times. MIT’s Survey of the Performance of American Elections found that 14% of Election Day voters and 21% of early voters waited more than 30 minutes in 2020. The respective shares were 6% and 4% in 2022, then 11% and 15% in 2024. Those figures describe wait times, one part of the voting experience.
Bright Line Watch’s report gives a total of 884 contests, but its annual counts—449 in 2020 and 436 in 2022—sum to 885.
