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Surveys taken since Donald Trump’s win show a resurgent faith among the president-elect’s supporters, and little Democratic appetite for conspiracy theories.
Dec. 17, 2024, 7:00 a.m. ET
Americans are more confident in the country’s election system than they have been at any time since the 2020 election, according to a new study — a shift owed to a sea change in Republican sentiment since Donald J. Trump’s election.
The findings, which echo other post-election polling, underscore the role Mr. Trump played in encouraging Republican suspicion of unwelcome results, and reveal stark differences in how Republican and Democratic voters have handled recent losses.
“The increase is heartening,” said Brendan Nyhan, a professor of government at Dartmouth College and a director of Bright Line Watch, which commissioned the survey from YouGov. The group is a consortium of political scientists that has conducted regular polls on democracy issues since 2017. “But there’s also bad news, which is we now have to wonder if Republicans will only trust the system if they win,” Mr. Nyhan said.
Eighty-nine percent of all respondents recognize Mr. Trump’s victory in last month’s election as legitimate, according to the Bright Line Watch survey. Only 65 percent said the same of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory in 2020 in the group’s survey that November.
The shift highlights the two parties’ differing response to losses. Eighty-three percent of Democrats view the outcome of the 2024 election as legitimate, according to the survey of 2,750 Americans, which was conducted in mid- to late November and has a margin of error of about 2 points. By contrast, only 27 percent of Republicans viewed the outcome of the 2020 election as legitimate at the time.
A Pew Research Center post-election poll released this month found similar results. Eighty-four percent of Democratic respondents polled last month said they believed the 2024 election had been run “very” or “somewhat” well, a decline of only 10 percent from 2020. But the share of Republicans saying the same jumped to 93 percent from 21 percent in November 2020.
