In the wake of Donald Trump’s 2024 victory, huge numbers of Republicans who previously believed that the economy was “getting worse” and that U.S. elections are not “free and fair” no longer believe those things, according to a new Yahoo News/YouGov poll.
Democrats have moved in the other direction on both questions but to a much smaller degree.
The survey of 1,612 U.S. adults, which was conducted from Nov. 14 to Nov. 18, found that fewer than half of Republicans (48%) now say the economy is getting worse. But immediately before the Nov. 5 election, nearly three-quarters of Republicans (74%) said the economy was going downhill.
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That’s a sudden 26-point shift.
Meanwhile, a mere 13% of Republicans said in a December 2021 Yahoo News/YouGov poll that the 2020 election — which Trump lost to Joe Biden, then tried to overturn — had been free and fair. Last month, just 27% of Republicans predicted this year’s contest would be free and fair.
Yet now that Trump has won, a full 89% of Republicans say the 2024 election cleared that bar.
The latest Yahoo News/YouGov results illustrate the powerful effect that partisanship can have on people’s perception of reality. Nothing significant about the U.S. economy or election process has changed over the past two weeks, yet consumer sentiment has soared among Republicans — and concerns about voter fraud have plummeted. The difference is that Trump’s victory makes his supporters feel more optimistic about the direction of the U.S. economy and less skeptical about the integrity of U.S. elections.
The poll also shows that Trump’s win has had the reverse effect on some Democrats — but far fewer of them.
For instance, the number of Republicans who say “enough voter fraud was committed” in 2024 to “influence the outcome” (7%) is 63 points lower than the number who said the same after the 2020 election (70%). But the share of Democrats who now say there was enough fraud in 2024 to influence the outcome (23%) is just 9 points higher than it was four years ago (12%).
And while reports that the economy is getting worse have fallen 26 points among Republicans since Election Day, they’ve risen only 5 points among Democrats (from 19% to 24%).
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The Yahoo News survey was conducted by YouGov using a nationally representative sample of 1,612 U.S. adults interviewed online from Nov. 14 to 18, 2024. The sample was weighted according to gender, age, race, education, 2024 election turnout and presidential vote, party identification and current voter registration status. Demographic weighting targets come from the 2019 American Community Survey. Party identification is weighted to the estimated distribution at the time of the election (31% Democratic, 32% Republican). Respondents were selected from YouGov’s opt-in panel to be representative of all U.S. adults. The margin of error is approximately 2.6%.
