In California, a Republican congressional candidate trounced in Democratic-heavy Los Angeles is still refusing to concede — while simultaneously announcing he’s running for governor. In Maryland, a congressional candidate beaten by more than 40 percentage points is still complaining about “irregularities” in her election. And in Tennessee, a House candidate defeated by more than 57 percentage points has reached out to the ubiquitous pro-Trump lawyer Sidney Powell to air her grievances about an election that no Republican had any chance of winning — but that she’s convinced she did.

The down-ballot parroting of Trump’s baseless claims of widespread voter fraud began right after the election. But in the weeks since, it has evolved into a self-sustaining phenomenon of its own. Republican candidates for House, legislative and gubernatorial races in more than half a dozen states are still refusing to concede.

Echoing the president, these candidates are an early sign of what Republicans say will be a sustained, post-Trump effort to tighten voting restrictions and to reverse measures implemented in many states to make voting easier. They also may mark the beginning of a Trump-inspired trend of candidates who never fold — they just fade away after weeks and months of unsubstantiated allegations of fraud.

“It’s not about whether it’s a competitive race or not,” said Errol Webber, a little-known Republican who lost his race to unseat Rep. Karen Bass (D-Calif.) by more than 70 percentage points. “It’s on principle that we will not let up until the truth is known.”

In the pre-Trump era, the campaign season grew longer on the front end, as candidates started campaigning earlier and earlier each year. In the post-Trump era, the opposite may be true: campaigns may never truly die.

“I’ve been doing politics for 60 years, and it’s always been pretty much assumed, unless the margin was a handful of votes, that the winner was the winner and we all just went on our merry way,” said Tick Segerblom, a Democratic commissioner of Clark County, Nev., one of the jurisdictions where Trump and several down-ballot Republicans have challenged the outcome. “It’s definitely a new era.”

In the case of Republicans losing in impossibly Democratic districts or states, their post-election protests can come off as almost comical. In Washington, the Democratic home of Gov. Jay Inslee, Culp’s campaign announced his lawsuit last week as if it was momentous breaking news: “At 1:15 p.m. Pacific Standard Time,” an adviser said in a video, “the Culp for Governor campaign has filed a lawsuit in King County Superior Court against the secretary of state asking for injunctive relief and demand for an audit of the paper ballots, vote counting machines and voting results” in several counties.

Then there’s Webber and other felled candidates using their complaints about election integrity as a ready-made plank for their own future campaigns. Kimberly Klacik, the House candidate beaten by more than 40 percentage points in her heavily Democratic, Baltimore-based district, has said she is starting a PAC to help other Republicans and is planning on running again, while also calling for voter ID laws and “pointing out the irregularities” in her election.

Buzz Patterson, a Republican who lost to Rep. Ami Bera (D-Calif.) by more than 13 percentage points, has refused to concede and is complaining about voting machines. He, too, is “definitely running again.”

“Right now, it’s mostly kooks and crackpots,” said Mike Madrid, a Republican strategist and one of the founders of The Lincoln Project, a Republican group opposing Trump. “But it’s pretty rapidly becoming mainstream Republican thought.”

Likening refusals to concede with anti-mask rallies and militia marches on state capitols, Madrid said, “There’s a very wide segment of the Republican electorate that is demonstrating self- and socially-destructive behavior … Democracy requires a willing winner and a willing loser. You can’t just say this was stolen because you lost when there was no evidence of it.”

For Republican candidates, there is little incentive to concede. A majority of Republicans believe the November election wasn’t free and fair, and some Republicans who did acknowledge defeat immediately after the election were accused by supporters on social media of going soft. That prevailing distrust in elections has been a blessing for the self-esteem of losing candidates.

Since the inception of representative democracy, politicians who fall short have struggled to reconcile their own sense of their popularity with the judgment rendered by voters. But today, instead of grieving, Republicans can take a short step from disappointment to accusations that the race was rigged.

In Tennessee, Charlotte Bergmann, who lost her race to unseat Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) by more than 57 percentage points, said she became a “household name” in the Memphis-based district and that for Cohen, the sitting congressman, “to get the vote that he got in this race, people couldn’t understand it.”

Bergmann — who lost to Cohen by 80 percent to 19 percent in 2018 — said supporters told her the results were “weird,” and she has contacted both Tennessee’s secretary of state and Powell to share her concerns about the election, specifically about voting machines.

“I’ve been active in politics since 1999, helping to get Republicans elected, starting with George W. Bush,” she wrote to her secretary of state, Tre Hargett. “That’s 21 years of service, and I’m the angriest I have been in decades! There are a group of corrupt people who have absolute contempt for the American people, who believe that we’re so spineless, so cowardly, so unwilling to stand up for ourselves, that they can steal the presidency, and down ballot seats, and we’ll just wring our hands, bring in a few lawyers, and do nothing.”

Last week, Bergmann said, “I don’t think the results are honest, I really don’t. That’s my personal opinion based on the feedback I’ve received.”

In Massachusetts, Republican John Paul Moran is using unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud to fundraise, after losing his long-shot bid to unseat Rep. Seth Moulton by more than 30 percentage points. He was one of five failed Massachusetts Republican candidates for state and federal office whose lawsuit to invalidate the election results was thrown out by a federal judge last week.

Moulton lamented in an emailed statement that “It will take years to recover from the damage inflicted by Donald Trump and his acolytes on the trust of the American people in our most fundamental institutions.”

John Thomas, a Republican strategist who advised a dozen House candidates across the country this year, said he could understand a candidate refusing to concede if the margin of defeat was “literally razor-thin and they were going to pay for a recount.” In any other case, he said, it’s a strategy “just for sore losers … And the problem is the damage it could potentially do to the electorate is huge, and I’m nervous as hell.”

Thomas shares a concern that many Republicans have expressed about the effect Trump’s rhetoric could have on Republican turnout in Georgia’s Senate runoffs next month. And for those who refuse to concede, he said, “these candidates are doing their own reputations a disservice” if they want to run again.

That’s been the operative advice for losing candidates for years, with the concession speech viewed as one last opportunity to leave a good impression on voters a candidate may be courting in a future race. But like so many other norms in the Trump era, the traditional concession may be on its way out, replaced by the use of conspiracy peddling as a springboard to the next campaign.

On Friday, after the Supreme Court’s rejection of an effort to overturn the presidential election, Webber suggested on Twitter that even the court’s action was a sign of something sinister.

“That’s how you know it’s deeper than anyone could have ever imagined,” he said.