Americans are more confident in the country’s election system than they have been at any time since the 2020 election, according to a new study — a shift owed to a sea change in Republican sentiment since Donald J. Trump’s election.
The findings, which echo other post-election polling, underscore the role Mr. Trump played in encouraging Republican suspicion of unwelcome results, and reveal stark differences in how Republican and Democratic voters have handled recent losses.
“The increase is heartening,” said Brendan Nyhan, a professor of government at Dartmouth College and a director of Bright Line Watch, which commissioned the survey from YouGov. The group is a consortium of political scientists that has conducted regular polls on democracy issues since 2017. “But there’s also bad news, which is we now have to wonder if Republicans will only trust the system if they win,” Mr. Nyhan said.
Eighty-nine percent of all respondents recognize Mr. Trump’s victory in last month’s election as legitimate, according to the Bright Line Watch survey. Only 65 percent said the same of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory in 2020 in the group’s survey that November.
The shift highlights the two parties’ differing response to losses. Eighty-three percent of Democrats view the outcome of the 2024 election as legitimate, according to the survey of 2,750 Americans, which was conducted in mid- to late November and has a margin of error of about 2 points. By contrast, only 27 percent of Republicans viewed the outcome of the 2020 election as legitimate at the time.
A Pew Research Center post-election poll released this month found similar results. Eighty-four percent of Democratic respondents polled last month said they believed the 2024 election had been run “very” or “somewhat” well, a decline of only 10 percent from 2020. But the share of Republicans saying the same jumped to 93 percent from 21 percent in November 2020.
Mr. Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him, which remains unsupported by any evidence, profoundly reshaped the political landscape in the years after his loss. The stolen election claim led his supporters to riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, threatening the peaceful transfer of presidential power for the first time in American history, and it became a litmus test for Republican candidates and officials at every level of the party, from county chairmanships to the U.S. Senate.
It spawned elaborate conspiracy theories and costly legal settlements for the right-wing media companies that gave them a platform. And it was at the heart of the case for election that Mr. Trump made to Republican voters from the first days of his 2024 campaign.
“We won by much more in 2020” than in 2016, Mr. Trump falsely claimed at his campaign kickoff rally in Waco, Texas, in March of last year. “But it was rigged.”
The centrality of election denialism to the post-2020 Republican Party raised concerns that mistrust of the election system had become deeply ingrained on the right, enough so that it could outlast Mr. Trump’s own presence in politics.
But the 2022 midterm elections suggested its limits, as many prominent Republican candidates who won primaries by rallying Trump supporters against the supposed theft of the 2020 election lost in their general elections. Some, like the Arizona candidate for governor, Kari Lake, tried to challenge their own losses in 2022, but failed to generate much grass-roots momentum.
“It didn’t play the same as it did in 2020,” Mr. Nyhan said.
Early results showing a sharp decline in Democratic turnout last month led to the circulation of conspiracy theories on the left claiming Mr. Trump had stolen the election, and, less intuitively, on the right, where the drop-off was taken as evidence that Mr. Biden’s numbers in 2020 were inflated.
But the Bright Line and Pew surveys suggest that Democratic suspicion did not broadly persist after Vice President Kamala Harris’s concession, underscoring the influence that candidates and other party leaders have on their supporters’ views of the system’s legitimacy.
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