13 of 143 GOP congressional candidates in Texas call Biden win legitimate: report

Of all 143 Republican candidates for Congress in Texas, only 13 reportedly said the results of the 2020 election and President Biden's victory were legitimate.

The Houston Chronicle reported that a poll of the candidates and searches of their campaign websites and social media pages showed that 86 of the candidates had discernible stances, and 42 said the 2020 election was stolen, had illegitimate results or that they would not have certified the results.

Eleven candidates said that there was enough fraud or irregularities to cast doubt on the election results, according to the newspaper.

Thirteen said the results were legitimate.

Statements about the 2020 election have served as a possible way of measuring a candidate's loyalty to former President Trump, who has repeated false claims of election fraud since losing his reelection bid, the Chronicle noted.

"Every candidate is having to navigate these waters as best they can in terms of what they believe, what they feel like they can say publicly, and then the cost-benefit analysis of doing it," Brendan Steinhauser, a Republican strategist, told the newspaper. "It's definitely a front-and-center issue."

Joshua Blank, research director for the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin, called the issue "the article of faith among Republicans."

While Trump filed lawsuits in key states where he lost to Biden, multiple studies, an investigation from Trump's own Department of Justice and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton's (R) "Election Fraud Unit" all found no evidence of widespread fraud, the Chronicle noted.

The new report comes as a new Politico-Morning Consult poll found that 50 percent of Republicans are eager to move on from Trump's baseless claims of election fraud.

Among all respondents in the survey, 64 percent of Americans said the Republican Party should move on from the claims.