A recent CNN poll found that a large and growing majority of Republicans continue to believe that the 2020 election was tainted by fraud, making Joe Biden’s alleged victory in that election illegitimate. I found the story in the Daily Mail.
Polling continues to show that former President Donald Trump convinced a large portion of Republican voters that President Joe Biden‘s 2020 win was illegitimate.
A CNN poll released Thursday found that 69 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning voters still believe Biden’s win wasn’t legitimate – up from 63 percent earlier this year.
Among registered voters who cast a ballot for Trump in 2020, the numbers were even higher – with 75 percent expressing doubts that the last election was conducted properly.
The ex-president will be indicted for a third time Thursday in Washington, D.C. over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election and role in the January 6 Capitol riot.
Overall, pollsters found that 38 percent of Americans currently believe the so-called ‘big lie,’ while 61 percent say that Biden legitimately won the 2020 race.
Among those 69 percent of Republican-leaning voters who expressed skepticism about the 2020 election, 39 percent said they believed there was solid evidence proving it was illegitimate.
The other 30 percent simply said they had a suspicion that something was afoul.
Another 29 percent of GOP-leaning voters believed that Biden’s win was legitimate.
Special Counsel Jack Smith detailed how many people in Trump’s circle were expressing to the president that there was no evidence of widespread election fraud – including from the top-tiers of the Department of Justice and the Director of National Intelligence.
Federal prosecutors will need to show that Trump knew he was lying about election fraud in order to prove their case.
Directly after the January 6 Capitol attack, 54 percent of Republican-leaning voters said they believed there was evidence proving the election had been stolen from Trump – the lie the ex-president was telling his supporters.
Looking forward, voters who chose Biden in 2020 were more likely to say they’d only back candidates who didn’t support the ‘big lie.’
Forty-eight percent of Biden voters considered this an essential shared view.
Only 20 percent of Trump supporters said they’d only support a candidate who shared their views on whether the 2020 election was rigged.
Trump’s 2024 Republican rivals tend to try to have it both ways – they’ve expressed skepticism about how the 2020 election was conducted, but won’t say they believe Trump was the legitimate winner.
The fresh polling showed widespread anxiety about U.S. elections.
Fifty percent of Americans said they felt it was at least somewhat likely that elected officials could successfully overturn the results of an election if their party didn’t win.
The Trump indictment laid out a scheme the ex-president pursued that included pressuring election officials, putting in place fake slates of Electoral College electors and pushing Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the election during the joint session of Congress on January 6, 2021.
A majority – 58 percent – said they are just a little or not at all confident that elections reflect the voters’ will.
Another 42 percent said they had at least some confidence elections are carried out properly.
Only 13 percent of those polled said they are ‘very confident’ in U.S. elections – which is the lowest percentage captured in CNN surveys since 2021.
This is not good. Whether there was fraud or not, having large numbers of Americans believe our electoral system is fundamentally corrupt does not bode well for future political stability. We simply cannot have large numbers of people questioning the validity of our elections if we wish to remain a constitutional republic. If there was sufficient fraud in recent elections to affect the outcome, it must be ended. If not, the public must be assured our elections are clean.
While it has become fashionable among our political and media elite to blame Trump and his followers for the increased skepticism concerning election integrity, I believe it is almost entirely the elites’ fault. To put it bluntly, our leaders have not acted like honest people. They have largely refused to take action to make our elections more secure against fraud and interference. They have been unwilling to even discuss the issue.
If I were in charge of such things, I would do whatever I could to assure the Americans that our elections are honest. I would appoint a commission of trusted experts to thoroughly examine the electoral process in every state, particularly in those swing states that were close in 2020. This commission would examine allegations of irregularities, perhaps offering immunity to people willing to testify about any illegal acts they participated in. The purpose of the commission would not be to punish anyone, but to discover the truth. No doubt the commission would find some irregularities, no election is completely clean. Once it has completed its investigation, the commission could make recommendations to secure future elections against attempted fraud.
This is not what happened in the wake of the 2020 election, of course. Instead, we were basically told to sit down and shut up. Any attempts to talk about any problems with the election were shut down. Social media accounts were censored. Anyone who brought up the question was labeled a threat to “our democracy” and a domestic terrorist. Reporters used the same phrase “baseless accusations” to describe any allegations of fraud, without bothering to investigate the matter. Protesters against the fraud were accused of sedition and insurrection and locked up. The National Guard was called out to protect the capital. These are not the actions of honest people who won an honest election. These are the actions of people who have something to hide.
If they wanted us to trust them they would act in a trustworthy manner. If trust in our institutions is at an all-time low, the people who control the institutions have no one to blame but themselves.
David's Commonplace Book 