United States Senator JD Vance already raised eyebrows at last week’s vice presidential debate, when he refused to acknowledge that his running mate, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, lost the 2020 election.

But Vance has continued to skirt the issue, most recently during a podcast interview with The New York Times.

In excerpts released on Friday, Vance ducked questions about Trump’s 2020 defeat no less than five times, according to the newspaper.

“There’s an obsession here with focusing on 2020,” Vance told the podcast, The Interview, slated to air on Saturday. “I’m much more worried about what happened after 2020, which is a wide-open border, groceries that are unaffordable.”

When pressed on the outcome of the 2020 election, Vance claimed censorship may have cost Trump millions of votes.

“I’m talking about something very discreet — a problem of censorship in this country that I do think affected things in 2020,” said Vance.

He accused, for example, social media companies of blocking negative stories about President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden.

The podcast’s host, Lulu Garcia-Navarro, pointed out there was “no proof” election fraud had occurred, a reality Vance brushed off as a “slogan”.

Vance’s refusal to recognise the legitimacy of the 2020 results reflects the rhetoric of Trump himself, who has repeatedly claimed that the election was stolen.

Trump, the incumbent at the time, lost that race to Biden, a Democrat and former vice president. Biden earned 306 Electoral College votes, out of a total of 538, earning him the presidency. Trump only nabbed 232.

In the aftermath of the results, Trump blasted the election as “stolen”. On January 6, 2021, he held a rally in Washington, DC, to encourage his followers to “stop the steal” and demonstrate in front of the US Capitol.

Thousands did, and violence erupted in and around the Capitol building, where the Electoral College votes were being certified by Congress.

Trump has also been accused of pressuring his then-vice president, Mike Pence, not to certify the votes, as mandated by the Constitution. Pence held a ceremonial role on January 6, overseeing the result count.

When Pence refused to heed Trump’s call to circumvent the vote, Trump slammed his second-in-command as lacking “courage”.

]After leaving the White House, Trump’s campaign and allies lost dozens of lawsuits alleging fraud in the 2020 election. Trump himself faces criminal charges for allegedly interfering in the election, with the events of January 6 included as evidence.