Republicans Skeptical of Biden’s 2020 Election Victory – Republicans are skeptical that Joe Biden won the 2020 election fair and square, a new CNN poll finds.
The poll was taken on the eve of the latest Trump indictment suggesting that the former president created a conspiracy of lies to overturn the 2020 election.
The poll shows that 69% of Republicans or Republican-leaning voters do not accept Joe Biden as a president who was legitimately elected. They seem to share the sentiments reflected in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s latest indictment.
It alleges that “[former President Donald Trump], his co-conspirators, and their agents made knowingly false claims that there had been outcome-determinative fraud in the 2020 presidential election. These prolific about election fraud included dozens of specific claims that there had been substantial fraud in certain states, such as that large numbers of dead, non-resident, non-citizen, or otherwise ineligible voters had cast ballots, or that voting machines had changed votes for the Defendant to votes for Biden. These claims were false, and the Defendant knew that they were false.”
The number of Republicans who question the 2020 elections has risen since the start of the current Congress.
“Among Republican-aligned adults, the share who believe there is solid evidence proving the election was not legitimate stands at 39%, while 30% say it is merely their suspicion that Biden did not win legitimately, and 29% say Biden’s election was legitimate,” CNN reported. “The 39% of Republicans and Republican-leaners saying that Biden’s win was not legitimate and that there is evidence for it is not much changed from May, when 36% said the same, and it is well below the high point for that belief, which was 54% shortly after the attack on the US Capitol in January 2021.”
Democrats Held Similar Views on 2016 and Prior Elections
Such claims found in Smith’s indictment were practically identical to the ones Democrats made following the 2016 election when they accused the Russians of hacking the elections that year.
A Democratic Party-leaning group called the Democracy Alliance held an election recap in November 2016 at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Washington, D.C. after Trump’s election. It was attended by George Soros and other prominent Democrats. It similarly speculated that the Russians had hacked voter databases and potentially hacked into the election results.
Democrats challenged the electoral votes in 2001, 2005, and again in 2017.
Americans Doubt Electoral Legitimacy
The hotly contested and divisive elections of the 21st century have taken a toll on how Americans view the democratic electoral system.
“And most Americans lack confidence that elections in the US today reflect the will of the people. Overall, 58% say they are just a little or not at all confident that elections reflect the public’s will, while 42% say they are at least somewhat confident they do. Only 13% are ‘very confident’ that elections reflect the will of the people, the lowest share to say so in CNN polling since 2021. That deep confidence has declined somewhat among Democrats (from 26% last year to 21% now), and about half of Republicans say they have no confidence at all (48%), similar to last year,” CNN reported. “Biden’s approval rating for protecting democracy in the US has dipped into negative territory: 44% approve and 55% disapprove. That stood at a near even 50% approve to 49% disapprove in December. That shift has come fairly evenly across party lines, and in the new poll, 84% for Democrats, 42% of independents and 7% of Republicans approve of his handling of the issue.”
John Rossomando is a defense and counterterrorism analyst and served as Senior Analyst for Counterterrorism at The Investigative Project on Terrorism for eight years. His work has been featured in numerous publications such as The American Thinker, The National Interest, National Review Online, Daily Wire, Red Alert Politics, CNSNews.com, The Daily Caller, Human Events, Newsmax, The American Spectator, TownHall.com, and Crisis Magazine. He also served as senior managing editor of The Bulletin, a 100,000-circulation daily newspaper in Philadelphia, and received the Pennsylvania Associated Press Managing Editors first-place award for his reporting.
From 19FortyFive
