Speaking to CBS News’s Robert Costa this week, President Joe Biden offered a pessimistic assessment of the aftermath of this year’s presidential election.
“If [Donald] Trump loses, I’m not confident at all” that there would be a peaceful transfer of power, Biden said. “He means what he says. We don’t take him seriously. He means it, all the stuff about, ‘If we lose, there’ll be a bloodbath, it’ll have to be a stolen election.’”
The “bloodbath” comment to which Biden refers was offered at a Trump rally earlier this year and, in context, appeared to refer to theoretical economic damage from Trump not returning to the White House. But the latter part of Biden’s comment, about how Trump is likely to frame any loss as a function of illegality, is unquestionably on the mark. It’s what he did in 2020, as you’re no doubt aware, and two-thirds of Republicans still tell pollsters that they think Biden’s win that year was somehow illegitimate. More than a third of Republicans say there’s solid evidence Biden didn’t win, which — despite four years of feverish looking — there isn’t.
It’s not clear that there’s any way to ensure that Trump’s supporters accept a loss this time around, either.
This is a more likely outcome than it was a month ago. Biden’s decision to step aside in favor of Vice President Kamala Harris has dramatically reshaped the race. Cook Political Report, which assesses the state of play in swing states, moved three Sun Belt states it thought were leaning to Trump back into the toss-up category. Republican pollster Frank Luntz said during an interview that he believed Harris would win if the election were today. Analyst Nate Silver’s forecast now gives Harris a 2-point lead.
None of those voices is more powerful than Trump’s. In June, for example, Marist University conducted a poll for NPR and PBS NewsHour in which they asked respondents how much confidence they had in public opinion polling. Only 38 percent of Americans said they had a great deal or good amount of confidence in polls. Among Republicans, only a third did.
In an interview with NewsNation, one of the co-chairs of the Republican Party was asked whether she would accept the results of the election.
“I can assure you,” she replied, “if he does not legally and legitimately win, there will be no problem.”
This, of course, was Lara Trump, the Republican candidate’s daughter-in-law. This refrain about how a legal/legitimate win would be respected was the watchword before 2020, too — and then Trump and his allies cast the results as illegal and illegitimate.
Pew Research Center polling conducted last month found that fewer than half of Republicans believed that the election would be “conducted fairly and accurately.” Recent YouGov polling, conducted for the Economist, determined that 8 in 10 Trump supporters think that he will defeat Harris in the election. Should Harris prevail, is it more likely that those Trump supporters will accept the defeat or that they will assume the election wasn’t fair and accurate?
A separate poll conducted by YouGov for the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University determined that about 30 percent of Republicans who felt the 2020 election was stolen anticipate significant political violence after the election. That poll also found that a lot of Americans are concerned about misinformation — none more than those who reject the 2020 results.
“Republicans who believe Trump won in 2020 are more concerned about misinformation than any other group surveyed,” Johns Hopkins’s Hannah Robbins notes, “and believe ‘liberal media’ are responsible.”
In the wake of 2020, there was a concerted effort to address the issue of confidence in election results. News outlets detailed the ways in which claims about fraud were invalid, to little effect. (They are the “liberal media,” after all.) Elections administrators made efforts to inform voters about the protections that exist to ensure fraud isn’t substantial. One, Maricopa County, Ariz., recorder Stephen Richer, even went so far as to personally respond to false allegations about purported issues in his area.
Richer’s is an elected position. He lost his primary last month to a Republican who had backed legislation centered on false claims of election malfeasance.
In other places, Republicans are making it easier to challenge election results. The Georgia Election Board on Wednesday approved a new standard in which the certification of results could be held until a “reasonable inquiry” was conducted into their legitimacy — an intermediary step introduced not because of rampant, significant irregularities but to make it easier to suggest that such irregularities exist.
It is very possible that Trump wins the November election, in which case this question is moot. But it is also possible — more possible than it was a month ago — that he loses. The odds are low that Trump would be able to seize power in the event of such a loss. But, as we saw in January 2021, that’s not the only possible negative consequence of his supporters thinking without evidence that the election was stolen.