J.D. Vance Once Warned Trump About Lying About Elections. That Was Then.

In the last days of the 2016 presidential campaign, when Donald J. Trump preemptively accused Hillary Clinton of stealing an election that many assumed Mr. Trump would lose, his critics included his future running mate.

“If he decides to make this election about how it was stolen from him, then folks are going to be angry and they will be less engaged in the political process than they otherwise would be,” J.D. Vance warned in a CNN interview that October. He said he hoped that Mr. Trump, if he lost, “acts magnanimous.”

But after Mr. Trump did, in fact, lose and contest an election, four years later, Mr. Vance took a very different position.

“We have a fake country right now,” Mr. Vance — at the time, a Senate candidate vying for Mr. Trump’s endorsement in a Republican primary — told a reporter for The Vindicator, a newspaper in Mahoning County, Ohio, in October 2021. “There were certainly people voting illegally on a large-scale basis.”

Mr. Vance has candidly acknowledged his very public journey from outspoken critic of Mr. Trump — who he once speculated might be “America’s Hitler” in a text message to a former roommate — to an enthusiastic supporter of the former president, who named Mr. Vance his vice-presidential candidate on Monday.

As Mr. Trump’s running mate, the most consequential part of this journey may be his transformation from a critic of Mr. Trump’s false 2016 claims about election fraud to a defender of his efforts to overturn the 2020 results.

In recent interviews, Mr. Vance has argued that the 2020 election was compromised by a combination of censorship and influence by social media companies and mid-election changes to voting procedures in key states, and that it should have been settled by Congress’s deciding between competing slates of electors.

The comments seem to give credence to the so-called fake electors plan — the strategy that Trump’s allies used to try to prevent the transfer of power to Mr. Biden after his victory. It ultimately led a mob to storm the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in search of Vice President Mike Pence, who had refused to go along with the plan.

“If I had been vice president, I would have told the states like Pennsylvania, Georgia and so many others that we needed to have multiple slates of electors,” he said. “And I think the U.S. Congress should have fought over it from there. That is the legitimate way to deal with an election that a lot of folks, including me, think had a lot of problems in 2020. I think that’s what we should have done.”

The claim that changes in voting rules related to the coronavirus pandemic were illegal has not been upheld in any court except partially in Wisconsin, which has an elected Supreme Court. The conservative majority of that court in 2022 ruled that the use of drop boxes for early voting was not in accordance with state law, but the decision was reversed by a new liberal majority on the court this month.

Ben Ginsberg, a longtime Republican election lawyer who has been a vocal critic of Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, argued that Mr. Trump had ample opportunity to prove his case in court. Mr. Trump’s claims were ultimately rejected or declined a hearing by courts in every state where the campaign brought a legal challenge.

“We had the open debate through all the court cases, and we’ve continued to have the open debate for the past three years,” Mr. Ginsberg said. “Still, nobody’s found evidence of fraudulent results.”

Neither the Trump campaign nor Mr. Vance’s Senate office responded to requests for comment.

By the time of the 2020 election, Mr. Vance had publicly distanced himself from his early skepticism of Mr. Trump. But he did not publicly countenance the former president’s claims of a stolen election until he began his campaign for Senate the next summer.

In early interviews, he demurred when questioned about the election. Asked by a reporter for Time whether it had been stolen, he allowed only that it had been “unfair.”

But like many Republican primary elections in 2022, Ohio’s Senate race quickly became a referendum on Mr. Trump’s 2020 election claims.

“It was crowded. Nobody really stood out. And he was struggling,” David Pepper, the former chairman of the Ohio Democratic Party, said. “They all knew that Trump’s endorsement would end the primary.”

Mr. Vance’s most formidable challenger was Josh Mandel, the state treasurer, who, like Mr. Vance, had remade himself as a pro-Trump hard-liner, and who early on staked out a position of absolute fealty to the former president’s claims.

Shortly after Mr. Vance’s interview with Time, Mr. Mandel appeared on the podcast of Stephen K. Bannon, the former Trump adviser, and denounced Mr. Vance as a “total establishment squish” and “Mitt Romney, Jr.” He ridiculed Mr. Vance’s refusal to embrace Mr. Trump’s election claims.

That February, a pollster for a pro-Vance super PAC, Protect Ohio Values, took the unusual step of publicly releasing a memo detailing Mr. Vance’s struggles to break through in the race. The pollster, Tony Fabrizio, argued that Mr. Vance faced an image problem with Republican voters driven by “the perception that he is anti-Trump,” and noted that a majority of likely Republican primary voters in Ohio “say the election was stolen from Trump.”

Two months later, when the Republican candidates faced one other in a televised debate, Mr. Vance joined Mr. Mandel and other Republican candidates in declaring that “I think the election was stolen from Trump.”

In the interview with The Vindicator, Mr. Vance accused Meta’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, whose Center for Tech and Civic Life had donated millions of dollars to local election offices, of “buying up local boards of elections in battleground states” in order to help Mr. Biden win. “If a billionaire can go and buy up votes in our biggest geographies and tilt an election, transform who can be president, it’s really, really dangerous stuff,” he said.

More recently, Mr. Vance has mostly argued for a version of the alternate electors scenario. He has said that Congress should have held an open debate over the merits of Mr. Trump’s claims of voter fraud, rather than certifying the election for Mr. Biden based on the vote count in the states, as vice presidents have always done.

“Do I think Joe Biden would still be president right now? Yeah, probably,” he told the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat in June. “But at least we would have had a debate.”

Mr. Ginsberg noted that the Supreme Court ruling last year in the case of Moore v. Harper effectively closed the door on long-shot legal scenarios involving referring elections back to the state level. He suggested that Mr. Vance, a graduate of Yale Law School, was leaning on specious legal theories as “a safe rhetorical place to go in an interview that was in part an audition for the vice presidency.”