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Before I answer this, it's critical to note that the election was extremely, extremely close. A lot of people, especially non-Americans, don't understand how ridiculously close it was because our system for elections is so atypical.
With an election of more than 155 million votes total, if 6k votes went the opposite way in Georgia (a state with over 4.9 million votes), 5.5k went the opposite way in Arizona (a state with over 3.2 million votes) and 20.5k went the opposite way in Wisconsin (a state with over 3.2 million votes), the electoral college would have been a tie at 279-279, and all hell would have broken loose with what we call a contingent election, in part because Trump would have most likely won based on our rules for that.
For scale, imagine an election with about 155,000 votes total. If 32 votes went a different way, the results of the election would have been different. That's essentially what we're dealing with here.
I point this out to show that, in terms of numbers, it's absolutely the case that the election could have plausibly been stolen (in either direction) because things were simply so close. If Trump won this election with these numbers, we'd be hearing all about the Russians rigged it or something similar instead.
 Originally Posted by MadMojoMonkey
Is the continued denial of the legitimacy of the 2020 election by some Republican leaders part of this, or related to the split?
That's part of it, but it's not really a core issue. The primary issue is that a lot more voters are more loyal to Trump than the Republican Party at this point, but that's been the case since the 2016 election for a lot of people. The reasons for how indifferent they are about the Republican Party go back decades. Long story short, the United States doesn't really have a actual conservative party.
Since so many are more voters are loyal to Trump and the MAGA agenda, many in GOP leadership tried to align themselves with him to help with their re-election over the past four years. Ted Cruz is a good example who is in the news right now. Having an endorsement from Trump is a really big deal right now and helps your chances in elections a lot.
Originally Posted by MadMojoMonkey
What do they stand to gain by undermining the legitimacy of US elections?
That brings us back to the elections. Whether they give a shit about the election or not is kind of irrelevant. For example, for a lot of them, they're probably actually in a better position with Trump losing than winning because fundraising goes better when you're the minority party in Congress.
For the most part, they're just aligning themselves with Trump to get that rub.
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