New records obtained by the Arizona Republic reveal the behind-the scenes efforts by Donald Trump, his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, and state GOP Chair Kelli Ward to pressure the county supervisors, who make up the elected body that oversees elections in the state’s most populous county.

After Maricopa County Supervisor Clint Hickman asked Arizona GOP Chair Kelli Ward to clarify what she meant when she asked for the “transparency of a human evaluation,” Ward replied: “We need you to stop the counting.”

Ron Brownstein on the new validated voter surveys: “The cumulative message from these studies is that we should brace for more years of grueling trench warfare between two coalitions that are becoming more and more inimical in both their demographic composition and vision of America. And to top it off? They appear to be about evenly matched.”

“While the Democratic coalition is clearly numerically larger—having won the popular vote in an unprecedented seven of the past eight presidential elections—Republicans have some offsetting advantages, some structural, others manufactured, that could allow them to control Washington nonetheless.”

Tim Alberta: “A Michigan Republican spent eight months searching for evidence of election fraud, but all he found was lies.”

A new Pew Research analysis finds that even as Donald Trump was narrowing Democrats’ margins with white women and Hispanic voters in the 2020 presidential election, Joe Biden was surging with other groups, like suburbanites, white men and voters who identified as independents.

Politico: “Pew’s survey of ‘validated voters’ — members of their survey panel whom they could match as people who cast ballots on state voter files — is among the deepest analyses of who voted in the last presidential election and how. And because Pew also conducted similar studies of the 2016 and 2018 electorates, it’s possible to track how both parties’ coalitions evolved across the Trump era — and where the battle lines for the 2022 midterm elections may fall.”

Nate Cohn: “Married men and veteran households were probably not the demographic groups that Democrats assumed would carry the party to victory over Donald Trump in the 2020 election. But Joe Biden’s apparent strength among traditionally moderate or even conservative constituencies, and especially men, is emerging as one of the hallmarks of his victory.”

Here’s a Morning Consult poll finding that will shape the upcoming Republican primaries: 61% of conservatives agree that “GOP officials who say there was no evidence of widespread fraud are part of a cover up.”

Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) said Donald Trump’s ongoing lying that he won the 2020 election is “like WWF,” comparing the former president’s return to rally events with the lurid theatrics of staged wrestling entertainment, the HuffPost reports.

Said Romney: “It’s entertaining, but it’s not real. And I know people want to say, yeah, they believe in the ‘Big Lie’ in some cases, but I think people recognize that it’s a lot of show, and bombast. But it’s going nowhere.”

“My attitude was: It was put-up or shut-up time. If there was evidence of fraud, I had no motive to suppress it. But my suspicion all the way along was that there was nothing there. It was all bullshit.”

— Former Attorney General William Barr, quoted by The Atlantic, on former President Donald Trump’s claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election.

Wealthy allies of former president Donald Trump have spent millions on films, rallies and other efforts to tout falsehoods about the 2020 vote, claims now reverberating across an alternative media ecosphere, the Washington Post reports.

A Republican official in Ohio admitted to forging his dead father’s signature on an absentee ballot in the 2020 presidential election, NBC News reports.

Edward Snodgrass, a Porter Township trustee, called it “an honest error.”

A months-long Republican investigation into Michigan’s 2020 election uncovered no evidence of widespread fraud and concluded Wednesday with a recommendation the attorney general investigate those who made false claims for “personal gain,” Bridge Michigan reports.

From the report: “Our clear finding is that citizens should be confident the results represent the true results of the ballots cast by the people of Michigan. The committee strongly recommends citizens use a critical eye and ear toward those who have pushed demonstrably false theories for their own personal gain.”

“The board of commissioners in a northern Michigan county that supported Donald Trump voted to pursue an audit of its election Tuesday,” the Detroit News reports.

“I never used the word concede. I have not conceded. There is a tremendous percentage that thinks the election was rigged and stolen.”

— Donald Trump, quoted by the Dallas Morning News, disputing that he admitted last week that Joe Biden won the election.