Oct. 29, 2024, 1:40 p.m.
Polling is very unclear about who might win the presidential election, or really any closely contested election. Most of the results show Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Trump in a dead heat, both nationally and in the battleground states. We’re very unlikely to get anything more out of these sorts of questions in the next week.
What polls are very clear about is that most people expect problems with the election results, particularly if Trump loses. Two-thirds (66 percent) of registered voters say they do not think Trump will accept the results and concede if he loses, yet 77 percent say Harris will accept the results and concede if she loses. Multiple polls show similar numbers. Nearly all (97 percent) of Harris’s supporters think she will concede; 57 percent of Trump’s supporters think he will do the same.
Let’s be clear: This wasn’t even a question that pollsters had reason to ask prior to 2020. Plus, this is more a Trump phenomenon than a Republican phenomenon. Work I have done on these topics shows that Republicans are more willing to accept results, even involving a hypothetical loss by their candidate, than they are to accept an explicit Trump loss.
Trump supporters assume Trump will win. The campaign has primed its supporters to think there is no other possible outcome, and Trump never conceded in the 2020 election. He knows he lost—he slips up every now and then and says it—but he has conditioned his supporters to say he won. Polls over the last four years have consistently shown majorities of his supporters saying he did not lose in 2020.
You can see the doubts that Trump has sowed ever since in how voters respond to questions about vote counting and trust. Across every poll, Republicans are less likely to say they think ballots will be counted accurately. Some articles note that majorities of every party think the results will be accurate, but that masks the difference between more than 90 percent of Democrats and 66 percent of Republicans. Tellingly, 47 percent of Republicans in the same poll say they are worried that Trump will try to overturn the results of the 2024 election.
In one poll, a majority of Republicans even said it is likely that poll workers will try to tamper with the results. In fairness, so did more than 1 in 4 Democrats. This mistrust is particularly dangerous for poll workers—many of whom face increasing threats to themselves and their families simply for conducting an election. Look no further than the harrowing tale of election security in swingy Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, which The New York Times reports has “installed a primitive fortification of large rocks around the county building in Wilkes-Barre where the Bureau of Elections is located” in an effort to deter car bombs.
The distrust is not isolated to election outcomes: Republicans are less likely than Democrats to say that American democracy does a good job representing the people. Surveys I have worked on also back this up—lower satisfaction with democracy is highly correlated with mistrust in election outcomes. Trump supporters who are satisfied with democracy are much more likely to say they will accept the outcome of the election if he loses. It’s not isolated to Trump supporters, either. Although the baseline of trust is much higher, Harris supporters who are not happy with the state of democracy are a bit less likely to say they will trust the results if she loses.
Also under the category of “topics we didn’t have a reason to poll on until 2020,” most surveys that ask about the possibility of postelection violence show majorities are at least somewhat concerned about it. This concern is bipartisan—about three-quarters of Republicans are at least somewhat concerned about violence, compared to about 9 in 10 Democrats. They are likely concerned for different reasons, but the fact that we have such high levels of concern is astonishing.
Taken together, none of this says good things about the state of elections in the U.S. We have seen a lot of erosion of our small-d democratic norms in the last four years, most of which lies directly at the feet of Trump and his allies.
If Trump wins, the democratic erosion could become institutionalized. Even if Harris wins, though, we will have to face down efforts similar to what we saw in 2020, and this time, election deniers have had four years to prepare.
The voting will be over in a week. The uncertainty about what’s next will just be getting started.
Contributing editor Natalie Jackson is a vice president at GQR Research.
