Donald Trump and his Republican allies in Congress refuse to concede the presidential election. Right now it looks like their attack on the U.S.’s democratic system is not going to be sufficient to prevent Joe Biden from becoming president, but it’s still possible to imagine worst-case scenarios. What if the party finds the one judge who’s enough of a hack to invalidate a million Democratic votes at once? What if they start pressuring state legislators to overturn certified vote counts and appoint pro-Trump electors?
Well, that would be bad. But would it be sustainable? Would the American public as a whole support or tolerate the unwinding of the election results, to make the losing candidate into the winner? While many Democrats fear otherwise in “these polarized times,” early returns suggest the answer is no.
Let’s do the math.
First, Trump is likely going to end up with something like 47 percent of the popular vote, on 66.5 percent turnout. So that means about 31 percent of the eligible adult population of the United States voted for him.
How many of those people believe his claim he’s the real, legitimate winner of the election? The evidence there is a bit mixed. A Reuters/Ipsos poll finds that about 60 percent of Republicans believe Biden “won the election,” which would suggest that only 40 percent at most believe Trump won it. On the other hand, a YouGov/The Economist poll finds that 60 percent of Republicans say they think that Trump’s legal challenges will lead to the results of the election being overturned, and a Politico/Morning Consult poll finds that 70 percent of Republicans “don’t believe the 2020 election was free and fair.”
Let’s take the highest number there—70 percent—and assume that it applies to everyone who voted for Trump, not just Republicans. Then let’s add five points to it given that polls before the election underestimated Trump’s national support by about that much. As an extremely generous back-of-the-envelope calculation then, we find that 75 percent of Trump voters may believe he should legitimately be the next president. (Another reason that’s likely generous: Supporters of both parties often give ludicrously inaccurate answers to polling questions about matters of fact, suggesting that they interpret those questions as serious, but not literal, cues to signal their partisan identity.)
Even given all these assumptions, though, we would still only conclude that the portion of voting-eligible American adults who are prepared to believe Trump should remain president is 23 percent. Twenty three percent! This is the base on which he is trying to build an illegitimate takeover of federal power.
That number, as it happens, roughly matches up with the topline result of Reuters/Ipsos’ poll, which was that 79 percent of all Americans answered the question “who won the election” by saying it was Joe Biden. That number includes committed Democrats, indpendents who voted for Biden simply because they don’t like Donald Trump, and people who don’t particularly care either way but heard, correctly, that Biden won. Let us not forget, in these stressful coming weeks, that this silent faction of Americans who have no interest in overturning an election because of made-up voter fraud stuff they saw on Facebook is an enormous and overwhelming one. We don’t have to cede the terms of discussion to the loud, crybaby minority!
from Slate Magazine https://ift.tt/3eOZaCg
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