WASHINGTON (AP) — A majority of Republicans say they are confident in the 2024 vote count after Donald Trump’s win, according to a new poll that finds a sharp turnaround from GOP voters’ skepticism about U.S. elections after the president-elect spent four years lying about his loss to President Joe Biden.
About 6 in 10 Republicans said they have “a great deal” or “quite a bit” of confidence that the votes in last year’s presidential election were counted correctly nationwide, according to the poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. That’s a sharp rise from about 2 in 10 Republicans who were confident in an AP-NORC poll in October. And about two-thirds of Republicans in the new survey said they were confident in their state’s vote count, up from about 4 in 10 before the election.
That helped drive up the share of Americans saying they have “a great deal” or “quite a bit” of confidence in the accuracy of the election to about 6 in 10. That’s higher than in October, when roughly half of Americans said they were highly confident the votes would be counted accurately.
The mood is substantially different than it was four years ago, when Trump’s supporters, fueled by his false claims of a stolen election, assaulted police and smashed their way into the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to interrupt the certification of Biden’s victory. Weeks later, an AP-NORC poll found that about two-thirds of Republicans said Biden was not legitimately elected president.
That belief persisted throughout Biden’s presidency and until last year’s election, as Trump continued to sow doubt about the accuracy of U.S. elections. He even did so on Election Day in the hours before it was clear he would win.
But since Trump’s victory in November, Republicans’ suspicions about election security at all levels — including confidence in their own local election officials — have ebbed substantially.
There were no indications of trouble before the election despite Trump’s attempts to lay the groundwork to challenge the accuracy of the count if he lost the vote. Nor were there any real questions over the integrity of the 2020 count, which was confirmed by a wide range of state audits,recounts and reviews, some of which were led by Republicans, including Trump’s own Department of Justice.
Threats toward local election officials soared after 2020, leading to a wave of veteran administrators leaving office. In a potential sign that those hostilities might ease, the poll found that about 7 in 10 Americans have “a great deal” or “quite a bit” of confidence that votes in the 2024 presidential election were counted accurately by their local election officials, up from about 6 in 10 in October.
That movement was almost entirely driven by Republicans: About 7 in 10 were highly confident in local officials’ counts in December, compared with about half in October.
One group’s confidence in the integrity of the election ticked down — Democrats. Their confidence in the national vote count declined from about 7 in 10 to about 6 in 10, although their certainty in the accuracy of state vote counts remained stable.
Still, the dip in Democratic confidence is nowhere near the scale of skepticism among Republicans after Trump’s defeat in 2020. The Democratic candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris, conceded her loss to Trump the day after Election Day and there has been no organized Democratic effort to prevent the handover of the presidency to Trump, as there was among some conservatives in 2020 to try to block Biden from ascending to the presidency.
