Most Republicans still doubt legitimacy of President Joe Biden’s election, UMass poll shows; experts urge GOP

Despite no evidence of widespread fraud or irregularities impacting the 2020 election, nearly three-quarters of Republicans claim they still have doubts about the legitimacy of President Joe Biden’s win over former President Donald Trump, according to a poll released this week by the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

The survey of 1,036 Americans showed 71% of Republicans say they don’t buy Biden’s victory, with the majority basing their opinions on bogus claims — including that votes from fraudulent ballots, non-citizens or dead people helped Biden win several states. Only 21% of Republicans said Biden is the rightful president, compared to 91% of Democrats. Bipartisan local, state and federal officials including town clerks, judges and secretaries of state — along with Trump’s own Attorney General and Department of Homeland Security leaders — say that no fraud or irregularities impacted the 2020 race.

While the poll showed nearly six in 10 Americans overall believe Biden is the legitimate president — he won by more than 7 million votes, with an Electoral College vote count of 306 to 232 — political scientists and election experts at UMass Amherst and across the country have pressed Trump and Republican lawmakers to cease suggesting the White House was stolen.

“Given the continued questioning of Biden’s victory by prominent Republican elected officials, conservative media personalities and former President Trump, it is no surprise that seven in 10 Republicans, conservatives and Trump voters view the results of the 2020 election with skepticism, if not outright disbelief,” Tatishe Nteta, associate professor of political science at UMass Amherst and director of the poll, said in a statement.

Raymond La Raja, a political science professor at UMass Amherst, called on GOP officials to “shore up faith in how we vote.” He highlighted that 83% of those who think Biden’s victory was illegitimate cited fraudulent ballots; 81% claimed absentee ballots from dead people played a role; and 76% claimed non-citizens or other ineligible voters impacted results.

“These are extremely worrisome perceptions, and improved faith in the electoral process won’t happen until Republicans stop saying the election was stolen,” La Raja said.

Claims that fraud or irregularities are widespread enough to impact a presidential race have already been debunked by local, state and federal officials and fact-checkers — both on the 2020 race and after years of research by nonpartisan policy groups like the Brennan Center for Justice.

“There was no evidence of widespread voter fraud,” the conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, which conducted a 10-month audit of the 2020 election in the state, said in a report earlier this month. “In all likelihood, more eligible voters cast ballots for Joe Biden than Donald Trump. We found little direct evidence of fraud, and for the most part, an analysis of the results and voting patterns does not give rise to an inference of fraud.”

The UMass Amherst poll, conducted by YouGov earlier this month, showed little differences from a similar survey in April, with stark partisan differences on the election and perceptions of the attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters on Jan. 6, 2020.

At least 91% of Democrats said they believed Biden’s victory was legitimate; 83% said it was “definitely legitimate” while 8% said it was “probably legitimate.” A majority of independents, 54%, agree that Biden is the rightful president.

Meanwhile, 84% of Democrats want Congress to continue to investigate, and learn from, the Jan. 6 Capitol attack, while 75% of Republicans say Congress should “move on.” Nearly a quarter of Republicans said they blamed U.S. Capitol Police for the events of Jan. 6; half of them pinned the events on a combination of Democrats and Antifa; only 7% said Trump, who was impeached on a charge of inciting an insurrection but acquitted in the Senate, was responsible. Three-quarters of Democrats say Trump was to blame.

“As we close a year that featured a shocking attack on the U.S. Capitol and persistent, baseless claims by the former president and his sycophants that the 2020 Presidential Election was stolen, we continue to see Republicans and Democrats living in diametrically opposed ‘realities,’” Alexander Theodoridis, associate professor of political science at UMass Amherst, said in a statement.

Nteta said the events of Jan. 6 — which included calls by Trump supporters to execute then-Vice President Mike Pence and other lawmakers — “highlighted the potential dangers associated with the nation’s current process of certifying the presidential election.”

“A plurality of Americans oppose giving the U.S. Congress and the sitting vice president the power to certify and potentially nullify electoral results moving forward,” Nteta added. “Given the increased politicization of the process by which presidential electoral results are certified, it is not shocking that a plurality of Americans oppose giving this power to the Congress and sitting vice president.”

Trump had called on Pence to unilaterally dismiss some of Biden’s Electoral College votes — a power the framers of the Constitution did not intend to give to the vice president, whose role is to preside over the joint session of Congress as it certifies the vote count. Pence refused — saying “the Constitution provides the vice president with no such authority” — and some of Trump’s supporters called for his hanging as they stormed the Capitol.

Seventy-two percent of Republicans told pollsters they don’t believe Pence or members of Congress were in danger on Jan. 6, compared to 84% of Democrats who say lawmakers faced violence.

In November, more than 100 political scientists and election experts, including some from UMass Amherst and other Massachusetts universities, urged Congress to protect voting rights and pass election reforms.

Claims of a stolen election are “widely accepted among Republican voters, and support for it has become a litmus test for Republicans running for public office,” the group said in a joint statement released by New America. Based largely on the bogus claims, Republican-led legislatures have proposed or passed a series of laws that strip powers from election officials and make it easier for partisans to overturn or reject legitimate state elections, the experts warned.

“This is no ordinary moment in the course of our democracy. It is a moment of great peril and risk,” they said. “The partisan politicization of what has long been trustworthy, non-partisan administration of elections represents a clear and present threat to the future of electoral democracy in the United States. The history of other crisis-ridden democracies tells us this threat cannot be wished away.”

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