Six years after a contested election, the question of what a political party owes its past versus its future remains unresolved in American life. Republican candidates in the most competitive races of 2026 continue to invoke claims about 2020 that courts and officials have repeatedly rejected, even as voices within their own coalition quietly ask to be led somewhere new. It is an old tension in democratic politics — the pull between the grievances that bind a base and the broader ground where majorities are actually built.