Early last year, polls showed far too many Republican voters buying into Donald Trump’s nonsensical conspiracy theories and embracing the Big Lie as if it were true. As we’ve discussed, my hope was that reality would set in gradually over time.
Sure, with the benefit of hindsight, that hope may seem naïve, but it was at least somewhat plausible that some of the post-election attitudes were driven by more of an emotional reaction than a meaningful assessment of the facts. Many GOP voters were led to believe that Trump would win, so perhaps their initial rejection of President Joe Biden’s victory was a combination of reflexive surprise and anger.
As the nation’s focus shifted to post-inaugural governance, it seemed possible, if not likely, that voters would accept reality in greater numbers as post-election drama faded from view — especially as recounts, audits, and independent reviews made it painfully obvious that the Republicans’ anti-election conspiracy theories were baseless.
Alas, reality did not set in. More than 700 days after Election Day 2020, GOP voters’ rejection of what actually happened hasn’t budged. Indeed, Republicans’ embrace of Trump’s conspiracy theories has been remarkably steady for nearly two years.
But what about these same voters’ attitudes toward this year’s elections? Axios reported:
Nearly four out of 10 Republicans and one in four Democrats say they’ll blame election fraud if their party doesn’t win control of Congress in November, in the latest wave of the Axios-Ipsos Two Americas Index…. A month out from the 2022 midterms, 2020’s Big Lie is alive and morphing into a broader distrust of institutions and elections that threatens to become entrenched.
It’s worth emphasizing that some Democratic voters will apparently be skeptical if their party comes up short, but the data from the Axios-Ipsos survey found that Republicans “are significantly more likely than Democrats not only to predict that election fraud will play some role if their party loses, but to feel that suspicion intensely.”
In other words, for roughly 4 in 10 GOP voters, the elections have effectively become a heads-I-win, tails-you-lose dynamic: If Republicans come out on top, these voters will assume it’s because GOP candidates earned their victories, while if Democrats prevail, these voters will assume it’s because of fraud, denying GOP candidates their rightful victories.
Why should anyone care? In part because governing is already difficult, and the challenges become more acute when too much of a major political party lives in a weird fantasyland.
But it also matters because of the degree to which the Trumpian party’s alternate reality can be weaponized by those eager to suppress Americans’ voting rights, reject certification of legitimate election results, and those willing to commit literal acts of violence.
Looking ahead, solutions are elusive. Republican voters have been told not to trust election results. Or election administrators. Or election lawyers. Or independent news organizations. Or political scientists. Or the courts. Rather, they’ve been told to trust easily discredited nonsense from a failed and corrupt former president, his conspiratorial allies, and conservative media outlets that profit from his propaganda.
It’s a campaign against democracy, and its success undermines our entire system of government.
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