WASHINGTON (AP) — A majority of Republicans say they are confident about the 2024 vote after Donald Trump’s victory, according to a new poll that finds a sharp reversal of The skepticism of Republican voters about the US elections after the president-elect had spent four years lie about his loss to President Joe Biden.
About six in 10 Republicans said they were “a lot” or “fairly” confident that votes in last year’s presidential election were counted correctly nationwide, the poll found. The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. That’s a sharp increase from about 2 in 10 Republicans who had confidence in one 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 has helped boost the share of Americans who say they have “a lot” or “a fair amount” of confidence in the accuracy of the election to about six in 10. That’s up from October, when about half of Americans said they were. There was a lot of confidence that the votes would be counted accurately.
The mood is significantly different than four years ago Trump’s supportersfueled by his false claims of a stolen election, police attacked and made their way to the US Capitol on January 6, 2021 to pause 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 until last year’s electionslike Trump continued to sow doubt about the accuracy of US elections. He even did that 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 trust in their own local election officials — have ebbed substantially.
Joe Raedle via Getty Images
There were no indications of problems before the election, despite Trump’s attempts to do so lay the foundation to challenge the accuracy of the count if he were to lose the vote. There weren’t any either any real questions on the integrity of the 2020 census, which was confirmed by a large number of states audits,tells And reviewssome of which were led by Republicans, including Trump’s Ministry of Justice.
Threats against local election officials soared after 2020, leading to a wave of experienced directors leave the office. In a possible sign that those hostilities could be easing, the poll found that about seven in 10 Americans are “a lot” or “quite a bit” confident that votes in the 2024 presidential election were accurately counted by their local election officials. from about 6 out of 10 in October.
That move was driven almost entirely by Republicans: About seven in 10 had high confidence in local officials’ counts in December, compared with about half in October.
One group’s confidence in the integrity of the elections declined: Democrats. Their confidence in the national vote count dropped from about 7 in 10 to about 6 in 10, although their certainty about the accuracy of state votes remained stable.
Still, the dip in Democratic confidence is not nearly as great as the skepticism among Republicans after Trump’s defeat in 2020. The Democratic nominee, 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 transfer of the presidency to Trump, as some conservatives tried to prevent Biden’s ascension to the presidency in 2020.
Riccardi reported from Denver.
The AP-NORC survey of 1,251 adults was conducted Dec. 5-9, 2024, using a sample from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for adults totals plus or minus 3.7 percentage points.