Abstract
The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election saw an unprecedented number of false claims alleging election fraud and arguing that Donald Trump was the actual winner of the election. Here we report a sur-vey exploring belief in these false claims that was conducted three days after Biden was declared the winner. We find that a majority of Trump voters in our sample – particularly those who were more politically knowledgeable and more closely following election news – falsely believed that election fraud was widespread and that Trump won the election. Thus, false beliefs about the elec-tion are not merely a fringe phenomenon. We also find that Trump conceding or losing his legal challenges would likely lead a majority of Trump voters to accept Biden’s victory as legitimate, alt-hough 40% said they would continue to view Biden as illegitimate regardless. Finally, we found that levels of partisan spite and endorsement of violence were equivalent between Trump and Biden voters.
Highlights
What factors might lead Trump voters to accept Biden as the President of the United States? What do people expect that they would do if Biden is inaugurated and Trump does not concede? What characteristics are correlated with holding false beliefs about the election and voter fraud among Trump and Biden voters?
Only 22% of Trump voters believed Biden’s win to be legitimate at the time of the survey, another 21% said they would be convinced of Biden’s legitimacy either by Trump losing his legal challenges or by Trump conceding, another 6% would be convinced by Trump losing his legal challenges but not by him conceding, and another 11% would be convinced by Trump conceding but not by him losing his legal challenges
Consistent with other contemporary polls (Bump, 2020; Laughlin & Shelburne, 2020; Mitchell, Jurkowitz, Oliphant, & Shearer, 2020; but see Kahn, 2020), we found that false beliefs about election fraud and a Trump victory were widespread among Trump voters
Summary
What factors might lead Trump voters to accept Biden as the President of the United States? What do people expect that they would do if Biden is inaugurated and Trump does not concede? What characteristics are correlated with holding false beliefs about the election and voter fraud among Trump and Biden voters?. We find that Trump voters with higher levels of basic political knowledge and engagement with election news were more likely to hold false beliefs about the election, while the opposite was true of Biden voters.
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