Trump and Republicans haven't made a peep about voter fraud in Virginia since Glenn Youngkin won

• Trump and Republicans repeatedly cried voter fraud before the Virginia gubernatorial election.
• They haven't said a word about fraud since the GOP candidate, Glenn Youngkin, won Tuesday.

On Monday, former President Donald Trump said he was "not a believer in the integrity of Virginia's elections."

The next day, he took credit for Republican Gov.-elect Glenn Youngkin's win in the state.

Following Trump's lead, other Republicans and conservative pundits abandoned their claims that Democrats would steal the election immediately after Youngkin became the first Republican to win a Virginia gubernatorial election in over a decade.

The conservative talk-radio host John Fredericks warned of rampant voter fraud in an October 27 broadcast, saying: "Everything's moving in Youngkin's direction and the Republicans, but a lot of people fear that this is going to get stolen - they're going to try and cheat. We've got all kinds of irregularities right now going on."

Mother Jones reported that John Mills, a former cybersecurity official at the Pentagon who is now a conservative commentator for the far-right Epoch Times, claimed that ballot-counting facilities had poor security and that "people can walk in and out."

Republican state Sen. Amanda Chase of Virginia, a Youngkin surrogate who has long claimed the 2020 election was rigged, baselessly claimed in an interview last month that "Democrats are cheating" in the early vote and that she had passed along to the Youngkin campaign that Democrats "are stealing elections in Virginia."

Youngkin said he knew nothing about these claims and the election would be fair. On Tuesday night, Chase congratulated Youngkin on his win. She never released any evidence of voter fraud, which she said she had.

Youngkin walked a fine line on the issue during his campaign. While he was careful to avoid openly embracing the GOP's baseless claims about the 2020 election, he also refused to reject these conspiracy theories in the early months of his campaign.

Before he secured the GOP nomination in May, Youngkin wouldn't say that Joe Biden legitimately won the 2020 presidential election and pushed for a "commission on election integrity." In recent months, he conceded that "there wasn't material fraud" in the 2020 election, which he called "certifiably fair."

Youngkin also acknowledged under questioning that recent elections in Virginia had been safe and fair, but he spoke at an "election-integrity" rally in Lynchburg in August that featured speakers who've spread false and misleading claims about voter fraud in the 2020 election.

He also tried flipping the script on his Democratic opponent, Terry McAuliffe, by saying Democrats questioned the results of the 2000 presidential election and Georgia's 2018 gubernatorial election. McAuliffe hit back at Youngkin, saying there was no comparison between disputes over the 2000 election and the 2020 election because of the Supreme Court's involvement in deciding the winner of the former.

Virginia officials have for months attempted to assuage concerns about the security of the state's elections. The state's Department of Elections set up a website called "Democracy Defended" that laid out all the ways in which the state kept its elections safe. At the same time, Youngkin and other Republicans urged their supporters to volunteer as poll watchers, and there was a surge in election observers in the state this year.

Trump and many of his allies have continued to aggressively promote their baseless claims that the 2020 election was "rigged" and "stolen" by Democrats. There is no evidence of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election, and Republicans' claims that fraud swung the election are false. In fact, nonpartisan election and cybersecurity experts concluded that the 2020 election was the safest and most secure in US history.

But many Republican voters are convinced otherwise. In several recent polls, a large majority of Republican respondents said they still believed Biden didn't win and the 2020 election was rigged. Of the 413 Republicans and Republican-leaning independents in a recent NPR-PBS-Marist poll, just one-third of respondents said they trusted US elections either a great deal or a good amount. In an October NBC poll of 1,000 adults, just 41% of Republican respondents said they thought their vote would be counted fairly - down from 84% in October 2020.

Trump, for his part, credited himself and "MAGA voters" with delivering Youngkin a victory in Virginia, despite repeatedly suggesting that the election would be marred by fraud and abuse.

"It is looking like Terry McAuliffe's campaign against a certain person named 'Trump' has very much helped Glenn Youngkin," the former president said in an email Tuesday night. "All McAuliffe did was talk Trump, Trump, Trump and he lost."

As of Wednesday morning, with an estimated 99% of the vote reporting, Youngkin carried 51% of the vote, a nearly 7-point improvement over Trump's vote share in 2020. McAuliffe won 49% of the vote, underperforming Biden's share by 5 points.