Trump's victory erases GOP skepticism of election results, poll finds
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A majority of Republicans now feel confident the 2024 election results were tabulated accurately, according to an AP-NORC poll released Friday.
Why it matters: President-elect Trump for years had repeatedly and falsely claimed the 2020 election was stolen from him, but those concerns disappeared after he scored his first popular vote win.
The big picture: A majority of Americans (57%) expressed a "great deal or quite a bit" of confidence in the accuracy of the election results at the national level.
- This figure was slightly higher among Republicans (64%) and Democrats (60%), but only 34% of independents shared that confidence.
- Republicans' confidence in the election's accuracy was high not just at the national level but also in the state (66%) and local races (71%).
State of play: The results are miles away from where the GOP stood at the start of President Biden's term, when, weeks after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, more than 6 in 10 Republicans believed Biden wasn't legitimately elected.
- Low confidence in the integrity of the electoral system followed the party ever since. A Dec. 2023 poll found that roughly a third of Republicans even doubted the outcome of their own party's primary contest.
- Ahead of the 2024 election, another AP-NORC poll found that only 24% of Republicans expressed a "great deal" of confidence in the impending national vote count compared to 71% of Democrats.
Methodology: This AP-NORC poll surveyed 1,251 adults between Dec. 5-9, 2024 using the AmeriSpeak Panel, the probability-based panel of NORC at the University of Chicago.
- The margin of sampling error for adults overall is ±3.7 percentage points.
Go deeper: Behind the Curtain: The most powerful Republican president of the modern era
