As much as the election denying Trump forces tried to make the recent Brazilian elections a replay of the 2020 US election denial detour, the outcomes of the elections in Brazil and the results of the US mid-term elections spell out a defeat for the anti-democratic election-denial movement.
One might say it was the best for democracy and it was the worst for extremism in two of the world's greatest democracies.
Democracy really was on the ballot in both elections, and preliminary results show that democracy won on both sides. For now.
Parallel tracks had been playing out in both nations, with Trump-supported Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro seeding doubt for months about the security and reliability of the election results, demanding a paper ballot to replace electronic voting machines. The implication, that all systems other than a physical paper ballots Bolsonaro, a friend and ideological ally of the former US president, raised tensions around the presidential election, which was played in two rounds, by parroting Trump in refusing to say whether he would accept the results of the election should he lose.
The off-the-shelf answer to such questions has been the same by the election deniers in both the US and Brazil. "I will accept election results...if I win." That is a trend that began in 2016 when Trump first made that quip.
"I am going to win the election, and I will accept that result," has become a popular variation. Bolsonaro used it on the day of the first round of voting. Arizona's Kerri Lake, the Republican candidate for governor, said the same thing days before the US elections.
Trump endorsed Bolsonaro and hundreds of election deniers as candidates for Congress and governorships in the US.
In both, the cast supporting election denying characters is the same: Steve Bannon, GETTR CEO Jason Miller, My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell, Tucker Carlson, and FOX News in memes and video clips.
Bolsonaro lost, and so did most election deniers at the top of the ticket in the American election, though some races remain undecided, and Lake trails in Arizona by a slim margin.
Will they accept the results?
On election night in Brazil, we had an early answer. When results showed a slim Lula victory, Bolsonaro retreated without making a statement. His silence fueled a denialist movement that Bolsonaro did not accept the results but, importantly, he also did not deny them outright. On election night, he retired without saying a word, fueling an insurrection of sorts, with supporters heading to the streets, blocking roads, and staging demonstrations in front of military garrisons.
Bolsonarists demanded a military takeover, or they hoped to provide cover for Bolsonaro to declare a state of emergency and re-run the election under a constitutional provision to restore order, last used in the 1964 military coup that led to a 21-year dictatorship.
In his first statement days later, he implied that votes were stolen but left the podium two minutes later after vague, inconclusive words, leaving it to one of his ministers to confirm that the transition process would begin.
That also left his supporters encouraged. Election denialists blasted thousands of messages on online forums, claiming election fraud, talk of Venezuela-like results-altering algorithms, and videos of supposed fake ballots.
Does it all sound too familiar? It should. All of that happened before, in the post-2020 US election.
Lindell, who had famously claimed that he had "all the evidence of the biggest crime in history," supposed electoral fraud that turned out to be false, was broadcasting from his own television studio to Brazil last week, claiming he had evidence of 5.1million votes stolen from Bolsonaro.
Lula won the election with 60.3 million votes to Bolsonaro's 58.2 million.
Fox News' Tucker Carlson clips were being forwarded thousands of times as he raised doubts about the election results and the process, claiming that the Brazilian elections were not over because Bolsonaro had not conceded, despite official acceptance of the results and the declaration of Lula as the winner by the country's Supreme Electoral Tribunal.
Jason Miller was also in frequent clips of an interview to a Brazilian website, repeating the now discredited doubts about the US election, this time applied to Brazil.
With millions of people in the streets demanding a military intervention that would keep Bolsonaro in power, an insurrection seemed in the making.
But it was Bolsonaro himself, through his demeanor more than his words, that seemed to put an end to the idea that he would lead a Trump-like fight to deny Lula legitimacy. He did not say he accepted the election, but his body language spoke louder, telling the country he knew he had lost.
In calling road-blockading truckers to clear the highways, he said demonstrations were their right, but that their actions were not cool.
That moment marked an apparent defeat of the election deniers as the online forums that had been fueling the insurrection died down and turned in, leaving only a few posters to try to keep the movement alive.
A much-touted audit of the ballot boxes in Argentina and broadcast from there turned plenty of innuendoes but no evidence, further deflating those still hanging on.
Brazilian media have largely ignored continued sit-ins demanding the military to step in to grant their electoral wishes and arrest Lula. Remember those 'lock her up' chants against Hillary from Trump supporters in 2016?
But the situation in Brazil today is a triumph for democracy. And in America, the sum-total of the election results are also a triumph for democracy.
Election deniers have been racking up defeats in races for governor in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin; the Senate in New Hampshire and Pennsylvania; and secretary of state in Michigan, Minnesota, and New Mexico, where election denier Audrey Trujillo claimed the 2020 Biden victory was a huge coup, and has not conceded her loss.
Yet, there is still work to do despite election-denier losses in pivotal positions on the top of the ticket, 165 Trump-backed candidates have won in the US, just as Bolsonaro allies won significant numbers in congress in the first round of the election.
It may yet be that Republicans gain control of both the US House and Senate, but Biden seems to have avoided the large losses incumbent presidents suffer in mid-term elections.
It is not an absolute rejection of election deniers in either country, but the voters are also sending a message toward a democratic system where those defeated peacefully accept the results, and away from the Trump paradigm that elections are only fair if they win.
The Republican wave expected to drown Biden and the Democrats did not materialize and even if they take control of both houses, the White House is seeing the results as a vindication. The Republicans will have to reassess whether their Trump association sank their expected wave.