Republican denial of Trump’s 2020 loss is affixed firmly in concrete
This is a joke, of course, except on those occasions when it is not. As when a majority of the Republican Party continues to insist, 21 months after the fact, that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election due to widespread voter fraud. Or when a majority of Republicans say they like politicians who claim that Trump is that election’s legitimate winner.
The facts have established over and over that this is not true. Repeatedly, hundreds of times, claims about rampant fraud have been made and dismantled, or purported evidence of illegal voting has collapsed as incorrect. But those facts are treated as opinions, then they are dismissed.
Many, myself included, hoped that time would erode those sentiments. That as months passed and no evidence of fraud emerged, the number of people insisting Trump had won would fade. It has not.
Monmouth University on Tuesday released polling showing that the House select committee hearings centered on the Jan. 6, 2021, riot have not measurably moved public opinion on Trump’s culpability or the nature of the attack. In that poll, they also asked a question posed numerous times before: Did President Biden win fair and square or only due to voter fraud?
Most Americans say Biden won fairly. Most Republicans say he won because of fraud. Since two weeks after the election itself, that’s consistently been the case, with about 6 in 10 Republicans blaming fraud fairly consistently over the past year. Again, the hearings don’t appear to have affected that.
Having that as a background belief is one thing. New data from Pew Research Center, however, extends the idea, measuring the extent to which Republicans like or dislike candidates who claim that Trump is the 2020 election’s legitimate winner. In September, 53 percent of Republicans said they liked politicians who made that claim publicly. In the most recent poll, that percentage is essentially unchanged.
Among Republican-leaning independents — those who aren’t members of the party but usually vote with it — views were also unchanged since September. The difference, though, is that Republican-leaning independents are more likely to say that they dislike politicians who make that claim than that they like them.
Another interesting divide is among those with and without college degrees. The group most likely to support politicians who say Trump is the legitimate winner of the 2020 election is Republicans without degrees, among whom 56 percent hold that view. Least likely? Leaning independents with degrees, only 16 percent of whom say they like such candidates.
Of course, college-educated Republican-leaning independents are far less of the Republican voting pool than are Republicans without degrees, which helps explain why a number of candidates who’ve rejected the election results — Kari Lake in Arizona and Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania — are being successful in the party’s primaries.
As I’ve noted before, the issue here is not really that Republicans have assessed the evidence of fraud and deemed it credible. They have been presented with evidence and find it credible, mind you; a large portion of the party consistently says strong evidence of fraud exists. The issue is that the evidence is not good evidence and that it doesn’t need to be. The operating assumption is that something inexplicable happened, and whatever evidence is presented in the moment to bolster that assumption is too good to validate.
In other words, the facts are accepted as they conform to the opinion. Moynihan didn’t have a pithy summary for that rhetorical approach.
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