Although the article linked above is a few months old, I am pretty confident that new polling will not show much of a change. So this means that 7 out of 10 Republicans as well as 30-50% of independents and a non-zero sliver of Democrats believe that Trump was the real winner in 2020.
Since this board has a lot of different types of people on it, it has to have some who are part of such a huge percentage of Americans. And this is a board that is pretty big on backing up opinions with empirical evidence.
So I ask those in this forum who feel that the outcome of the 2020 election had Trump winning to please stand up and provide the evidence for those beliefs.
First off, I don’t believe Trump won. That being said, a lot of people who believe such things, go by probability logic. They cite some obscure-but-true stat that says that “an incumbent president who got 95% of the primary vote within his party has won the last 13 elections” or something like that and argue, “See, how likely is it that Trump lost?” Or point to things like Biden’s sudden rise in votes after 2 AM on Election Night.
On top of that, there was/is also wild overoptimism. I used to frequent an LSU Tigers message board that was rabidly MAGA. Up til Election Day 2020, there were predictions like “Trump will win 70% of the popular vote” (serious, not joking) and threads asking, “Can Trump carry California or New York?” When people are that deluded about how red they imagine America to be, it comes as a terrible shock when Biden in fact wins, and they can’t believe it (“How could Trump fall from my expected 70% of the popular vote down to just 47%? It must be CHEATING!”)
I think part of it is that they cheated so much that they can’t believe that Joe Biden won honestly. Kind of like that poker game scene in “The Sting”.
I am afraid this thread is going to come-up dry. If there was evidence of a fraudulent election, it would have emerged by now, but the opposite is true - proof time-and-again the election was legit - with all the recounts and audits initiated by the Republicans. The MAGA crowd and their conspiracies give too much credit to the Democrats - there is no way any election shenanigans could be pulled off on the scale they are suggesting, for so long, without someone, or something, emerging to give any credence to the idea the election was “stolen”. Something would have come out by now.
I suspect the main reason that so many were so confident that TFG would win was the whole bubble effect. I was part of that in 2016 with Clinton - I went to bed the night before the election confident there was no way she’d lose. The problem with TFG is that his bleating about his election loss for so long makes it “knowledge” inside the same bubble that caused so many of his followers to be so disappointed on election night 2020. Press any of them for evidence of fraud and they retreat to the old canard “the MSM wont report on it!” however, their right-wing media also isn’t reporting on it, because there is nothing to report, other than innuendo and evidence-free “they are saying” claptrap.
Trump told his followers he not only won, but he won by a landslide, and they continue to believe that regardless of the reality. Biden won the popular vote by 7 million votes and 74 Electoral College votes. If you’re a pathological narcissist, that’s impossible and can only mean that the election was rigged. Massive cheating and fraud are the only possible explanations.
The thing is that when Trump won in 2016, he also lost the popular vote, but Democrats didn’t storm the Capitol and try to overturn the election. They accepted that Clinton lost fair and square. Trump and his supporters can’t accept that he lost fair and square, and even though there is no evidence of widespread voter fraud, that’s still the only possible explanation. They will continue to think that until Trump is reinstated as president… which will never happen.
You can’t argue with that logic because it’s completely delusional. In a true cult, the followers only believe what their leader tells them, regardless of any facts that contradict what they are being told.
Let’s turn this around. I have never accepted that George W. Bush legitimately won the 2000 election, given the chicanery that occurred in the state of Florida, where his brother just happened to be governor, and the Secretary of State (I think) was as crooked as they come. To my mind, Al Gore was cheated out of the presidency. There can be no “evidence” presented that will ever convince me otherwise. Grudgingly, I accepted the outcome when Al Gore conceded.
There. That’s the mindset of MAGA Republicans. Except they refuse to let it go and prefer to blindly follow a proven liar whose aim is to tear the country apart.
I think that’s an important difference. Not only did Trump not concede when he lost, he just recently yet again insisted he be reinstated as POTUS (probably because he worries he’ll go to prison otherwise).
Yep, and he was planting those seeds months before the election. I mean, you’d have to be a moron to fall for it, but the world doesn’t seem in short supply of those.
When OJ Simpson was on trial, there was a significant group who polled that he was innocent and continued to do so…right up the point that everyone stopped arguing over the subject. Once it became a “thing of the past”, the numbers corrected to something more reasonable.
I don’t think there’s a big group who thinks that Trump won. I think there’s a big group who thinks that they’re obligated to say that Trump one.
I hope that’s true, but I wouldn’t say OJ was a cult of personality like Trump is to many people. “Followers/believers” are different than “supporters.”
I felt (and feel) the same way, and I do wonder what I would have done if, instead of conceding, Gore had attempted to rally some sort of resistance to the outcome as dictated by the SCOTUS. And it should be noted that the evidence of chicanery in 2000 was far greater than in 2020.
(As it was, I boycotted the state of Florida for four years. No visits, and avoided wherever possible buying anything made by companies based there. Pathetic, right?)
Hell, he was planting those seeds months before his first election. Even after he won, he was beating the drum over fraudulent ballets because he was butt hurt over not winning the popular vote as well as the electoral college vote.
I’ve pondered that question myself. Would I have gone to DC to protest a stolen election? I can’t speak to hindsight, but today I definitely would. For more than 50 years I’ve been a registered Dem, but until 2000 I often split my vote, casting my ballot for the candidate who I felt would do the best job, even if we didn’t agree on every point. (Though I’ve always voted D for the presidency.) What that election did, for my wife and I, was to galvanize us as solid Democratic supporters, and we were not alone.
Perhaps. Also perhaps just saying he won riles up the libs, which is easy-enough reason to keep repeating it, even if obviously false. Admitting you are wrong about someone/something can be painful, I get that, but keeping on saying the Big Lie just to piss-off someone?
This, in comparison, is a small thing. The big thing is first developing and nurturing a devotion to a whining baby of a man. It ain’t for everyone.
Once a person has taken a shit all over their own dignity, everything else is small potatoes.
I think this is a big factor. Conservatives excuse their crimes with both-siderism. Republicans commit crimes. Republican accuse Democrats of committing crimes. Republicans then argue “Well, both sides are committing crimes. So committing crimes is just part of normal politics. Neither side can claim the moral high ground.”
These are lies but a lot of people believe lies. So they believe all politicians are crooked and all elections are rigged. They’re not outraged when the politicians in their party are caught doing wrong because they already expected it.
Politics isn’t about good or bad. For these people, politics is about their team winning. That’s why they’re happy when Republican cheat and win but mad when Democrats cheat (they believe) and win.
I started to see a Republican item of faith appear when Nixon was president. They equated the Democratic Party with the socialists and communists they considered to be the losing side of history, and they didn’t think they’d ever again be out of power. Note that this was before the Congress had fallen into their laps. All they had was the Presidency. But they really thought they’d won in the court of public opinion here in America, they’d earned it, and it was theirs.
Jimmy Carter didn’t knock that off course at all. Jimmy Carter was viewed as an anomaly. Political payback for Nixon’s criminal overreach, the Watergate stuff. And when Reagan beat him, they were smug and self-assured. See, it’s ours.
Bill Clinton seriously pissed them off. This was not supposed to happen. Well, we’ll run him out of town just like Jimmy. Clinton’s survival of being impeached, and getting re-elected pissed them off even more. But they took Congress. And they began changing some rules.
They felt absolutely justified with George W. Bush. Never mind the ends used, the thing is, it’s ours. We belong in power. (“And they’d have done it if they’d had the chance”). It’s not like there was a clear winner, it was a tie. Well it’s our turn, enough with these damn Democrats.
They were outraged when Barack Obama won. They’d been promising each other, promising their constituents, that being in power was Republican destiny. The whole “birth certificate” thing was a reflection of their attitude that they were supposed to be the winners. It’s like God said so or something, so having the other side win just wasn’t fair. Find an excuse to overturn it.
So now they aren’t even trying to hide the inclination to dispense with a fair election. Whatever we have to do to win is justified by the fact that we’re supposed to win. That’s how a lot of them think.
The trouble with that is you completely have a point.
It was a 267 (Gore) vs 246 (Bush) with 25 votes to take the election.
There WAS a case for valid votes, and a recount could be justified.
That recount WAS denied.
But in this case.
It wasn’t even close to this with any state claimed to be in doubt making any difference to the overall win. Texas and California were the only states large enough to change that result, and Trump had Texas, and California hasn’t backed Republicans since 88.
Recounts took place. Plenty of them. Again and again. Nothing changed except Biden got a few more votes.
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I think “The Big Lie” is more effective if there’s a definite case of injustice on the wrong side. Those not paying attention probably remember something valid in the past. There was. It was Gore’s election. The same way there was claims of Jewish people killing “Real Germans” in the 1930s.