WASHINGTON (AP) — A majority of Republicans say they are confident in the 2024 vote count after Donald Trump’s victory, according to a new poll that reveals a sharp turnaround from Skepticism of Republican voters on the US elections after the president-elect served four years lie about his loss to President Joe Biden.
About 6 in 10 Republicans said they were “very” or “somewhat” confident that votes in last year’s presidential election were correctly counted nationally, according to the poll. Associated Press-NORC Public Affairs Research Center. That’s a sharp increase from about 2 in 10 Republicans who were confident in a AP-NORC poll in October. And about two-thirds of Republicans surveyed in the new survey said they were confident in their state’s vote count, up from about 4 in 10 before the election.
That helped push the share of Americans saying they have “a lot” or “somewhat” confidence in the accuracy of the election to about 6 in 10. That’s higher than in October, when about half of Americans said they were I am confident that the votes will be counted accurately.
The atmosphere is noticeably different from that of four years ago, when Trump supporterspowered by sound false allegations of a stolen election, attacked police officers and made his way in the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, to interrupt the certification of Biden’s victory. Weeks later, an AP-NORC poll found that about two-thirds of Republicans said Biden was not legitimately elected president.
This belief has persisted throughout the Biden presidency and until last year’s electionslike Trump continued to sow doubt on the accuracy of American elections. He even did it on election day in the hours leading up to victory.
But since Trump’s victory in November, Republicans’ suspicions about election security at all levels — including trust in their own local election officials — have declined significantly.
There were no signs of unrest before the election, despite Trump’s attempts to lay the foundations challenge the accuracy of the count if he lost the vote. There was also no real questions on the integrity of the 2020 count, which was confirmed by a wide range of states audits,tell And noticesome of which were led by Republicans, including Trump’s. Ministry of Justice.
Threats against local election officials skyrocketed after 2020, leading to a wave of veteran administrators leave office. In a potential sign of an easing of these hostilities, the poll finds that about 7 in 10 Americans have “a lot” or “somewhat” confidence that votes in the 2024 presidential election were counted accurately by their officials local elections, an increase. about 6 out of 10 in October.
This movement was almost entirely driven by Republicans: About 7 in 10 people were very confident in local government numbers in December, compared to about half in October.
One group’s confidence in the integrity of the election has declined: Democrats. Their confidence in the vote count nationally fell from about 7 in 10 to about 6 in 10, although their confidence in the accuracy of the state’s vote count remained stable.
Still, Democrats’ decline in confidence doesn’t come close to matching the extent of Republicans’ skepticism after Trump’s 2020 defeat. Democratic candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris, conceded defeat to Trump the day after Election Day and there was no organized Democratic effort to prevent the presidency from being transferred to Trump, as there was among some conservatives in 2020 to try to prevent Biden from becoming president.
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Riccardi reported from Denver.
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The AP-NORC poll of 1,251 adults was conducted December 5-9, 2024, using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak panel, designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for all adults is plus or minus 3.7 percentage points.
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