Election Denialists Still Targeting Michigan in 2025 With Most Narratives Driven by One Conspiracy Site

TLDR

• Since President Donald Trump lost Michigan (a crucial “swing state”) in the 2020 presidential election, partisan activists across the United States have worked to shake faith in the state’s election officials, voting processes, and legal systems.

• As the United States prepares for 2026 midterm elections, Open Measures researchers reviewed discourse related to Michigan elections over the last year on four platforms that have historically harbored election denialist movements – Gab, Gettr, Telegram, and Truth Social.

• The on-platform conversations about Michigan elections our researchers found were heavily driven by hyperpartisan news blogs known for promoting conspiracy theories about voting. Specifically, more than 20% of identified posts contained links to The Gateway Pundit.

• While the most-reshared posts we identified came from accounts with larger national audiences, we also identified a handful of smaller accounts gaining traction by posting inflammatory and conspiratorial claims about Michigan elections.

Background

As a key “swing state,” Michigan voters often play a critical role in determining the winner of presidential elections.¹ As a result, and since the 2020 presidential election, partisan activists have targeted the state with efforts to undermine public trust in its election officials, ballot-counting processes, and voting infrastructure.² 

Amid these efforts – some of which were extreme enough to evoke criminal charges – Michigan state officials proposed legislation in 2024 to impose financial penalties against individuals promoting false claims with intent to “impede or prevent” others from voting. The bill died in committee,³ and election denialists have since continued to dispute the legitimacy of the state’s elections.

These denialists have since found allies among Michigan lawmakers, such as Rep. Rachelle Smit. Formerly the clerk of Martin Township, Rep. Smit is an outspoken 2020 election denier who was appointed by Michigan House Republicans in 2025 to lead a committee focused on election administration.⁴ That year, Michigan Republicans also sent a letter to the Justice Department requesting federal oversight of the state’s midterm elections in November.⁵

Methodology

Open Measures researchers reviewed conversations about Michigan elections across four platforms that have historically hosted communities of election conspiracy theorists: Gab, Gettr, Telegram and Truth Social. Using our platform, they searched for relevant posts made since Trump began his second term as president on Jan. 20, 2025, and assessed the results for relevant trends ahead of this year’s midterm elections.

For inclusion in this analysis, posts had to include at least one keyword related to voting, one related to the state or its top election officials, and another related to accusations of wrongdoing. Our researchers used the following search string in this analysis:

("MI" OR "michigan" OR "Benson" OR "Whitmer") AND ("voting" OR vote* OR electi* OR poll* OR ballot* OR referendum* OR "polling station" OR registrat* OR "turnout" OR cast* OR absentee* OR "voter roll" OR "voter rolls" OR database* OR "voting machine" OR "voting machines" OR record* OR mail* OR tabulator* OR "smartmatic" OR "dominion voting" OR "qvf" OR "qvfs") AND (fraud* OR scandal* OR corrupt* OR fake* OR hack* OR noncitizen* OR illegal* OR criminal* OR crime* OR fault* OR error* OR invalid* OR problem* OR conspirac* OR cabal* OR collu* OR cheat*)

Analysis

We identified nearly 13,800 total posts matching our search query across Gab, Gettr, Telegram, and Truth Social. As depicted below in a chart created with our Timeline tool, posting activity was relatively steady throughout our analysis period, with periodic spikes primarily driven by activity on Truth Social.

Caption: Chart showing posts per day that matched our search query on Truth Social, Gab, Gettr, and Telegram since Jan. 20, 2025. Posting activity was relatively stable throughout our analysis period, apart from a major spike in early April driven by activity on Truth Social.

The highest overall activity spike was in early April 2025, around the time Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer appeared alongside President Trump as he signed election-related executive orders. Among them were orders for the Justice Department to investigate two former administration officials who had criticized Trump for commenting that the 2020 presidential election had been rigged against him.⁶

The platform with the greatest number of posts matching our query was Truth Social (making up approximately half of all posts we identified). Further, the amount of posts identified from Truth Social was nearly double the amount identified from Gab, the platform with the second highest number of relevant posts.

The Gateway Pundit Leads Election Denialist Coverage of Michigan

On all four platforms we examined, election-denialist conversations frequently promoted articles published by The Gateway Pundit, a hyperpartisan news blog that filed for bankruptcy in 2024 following defamation lawsuits over conspiracy theories it promoted about the 2020 elections. The volume of links shared to Gateway Pundit articles in posts we surfaced eclipsed links shared to any other news outlet.

By manually counting posts, our researchers found that The Gateway Pundit had published at least 36 articles concerning Michigan elections during our analysis period. More than half were authored by Patty McMurray, the co-owner of 100 Percent Fed Up, a right-wing news blog identified by NewsGuard in 2020 as a top promoter of election misinformation.⁷

Rep. Rachelle Smit, the Republican-appointed leader of the Michigan House Election Integrity Committee, has given interviews to Gateway Pundit and promoted stories published on the blog.⁸

Caption: A chart displays the 15 most-shared URLs on Truth Social during the analysis period. Eleven of the URLs direct to articles published by The Gateway Pundit, a hyperpartisan news blog. Other URLs direct to competing blogs: Just the News, The Federalist, and The Daily Caller.

As shown above, 11 of the 15 most-shared links included in Truth Social posts our query identified directed to Gateway Pundit articles. Among these were stories rehashing allegations of 2020 election fraud, portraying top election officials as corrupt, and praising Rep. Smit for her work championing the blog’s claims. 

Our researchers found similar trends on Gab, Gettr, and Telegram. Gateway Pundit articles appeared in 2,774 posts across those four p latforms – about 20% of all posts we identified in our analysis.

Super Spreaders of Michigan Election Claims

To determine which Truth Social accounts were most influential at spreading these claims, our researchers filtered out posts that had fewer than 10 reshares and generated a bar graph of the results. Totals in the graph below measure how many unique posts each account shared that received 10 more reshares from other users.

Caption: A chart displays the Truth Social accounts that posted the highest number of posts that were reshared 10 or more times during the analysis period. The accounts with the greatest number of most-shared posts were Michigan election denialist Patrick Colbeck, conspiracy theorist Cornelia DiNunzio, and hyperpartisan news blog The Gateway Pundit.

The user who shared the most unique posts shared 10 or more times was Patrick Colbeck (28), a former Republican member of the Michigan Senate and prominent election conspiracy theorist.⁹ Other influential users during the same period included QAnon conspiracy theorist Cornelia DiNunzio and The Gateway Pundit.

Posts with 500+ Shares

Of all posts we identified across Gab, Telegram, and Truth Social, at least 27 received 500 or more reshares. (As our datasets do not include reshare counts for posts on Gettr, these numbers are not included in the total above.) 

Ten of these posts were from Truth Social, shared by the following users:

• Republican activist Scott Pressler (two posts)

• Social media personality Rogan “DC_Draino” O’Handley (three posts)

• Former Trump spokeswoman Liz Harrington (one post)

• The Gateway Pundit (three posts)

• A seemingly random user (one post)

The other 17 were shared on Telegram, among extremist channels promoting anti-government conspiracy theories (e.g., QAnon affiliated accounts) and between groups dedicated to “election integrity” efforts in states outside Michigan.

The most reshared post in our analysis was shared by O’Handley’s Truth Social account on March 12, 2025, after Michigan Gov. Whitmer met with Trump. The post claimed Trump had invited Whitmer to the White House to “taunt his prey on the world stage.”

Caption: A Truth Social post from Rogan O’Handley (aka “DC_Draino”) claims that President Donald Trump invited Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer to the White House to “taunt his prey on the world stage.” It was the most-reshared post identified in Open Measures’ analysis.

Conclusion

As of writing, narratives casting doubt on the integrity of Michigan’s elections continue to spread on the platforms we examined. Narrative trends were often influenced by claims made on a small number of hyperpartisan news blogs like The Gateway Pundit. 

Misinformation and conspiracy theories about elections continue to drive threats against officials, animate efforts to restrict ballot access, and undermine public confidence in democracy. Increased awareness about the networks of influence driving election misinformation may help inform efforts to protect voting. As such, we will continue to monitor and report on these trends as they develop and encourage other researchers to do the same using Open Measures’ platform.