And yet they tried. There were and are a lot of people somewhat desperate to validate a very false worldview that they've been manipulated into supporting. That also has fallout among the more reasonable, but much less engaged groups where biases and fallacies can be further exploited. "Where there's smoke, there's fire" is not actually true, but the reasoning is frequently superficially persuasive. Going a little further, IIRC, there were rumblings about attempts to screw with the ballots and that being used as further and more legal-sounding justification to add to the mess, which would have been used to sway public sentiment in their direction even more, regardless of how complete the BS was.
I'm not going to disagree that it was a failed strategy in the short run and that Barr abandoned ship for less than honorable reasons (and I'm certainly not impressed with some more recent attempts to rehabilitate the image of that partisan aider and abetter of Republican crime). The whole thing is more than a little reminiscent of Hitler's Putsch, though, including how it spurred on much more legal measures as the Nazi party worked to seize power.
