October 24, 2024 - Republican Voters Are Primed for the Next Big Lie
For four years, President Donald Trump has claimed to have won the 2020 election. In the fashion of strongmen throughout history, he spun an elaborate “Big Lie” about how the election had been stolen from him, and many of his followers believed him.
In 2020, Kevin Arceneaux and I conducted a repeated survey before and after the election, collecting responses from 20,000 American registered voters in total over 40 waves. It was then that we were able to see Trump’s “Big Lie” about the election results unfold in real time. Within days of the election, only about 40% of Republican voters would admit that Biden won. Only three of four American voters overall would admit Biden won and viewed the election as legitimate. These proportions stayed remarkably consistent in the days and months following the election. Indeed, there seemed to be nothing to shake that belief— Republican voters did not update their perceptions even after Barr made a statement citing no fraud in the election on December 2nd, after the Electoral College certified the result on December 14, or Biden was inaugurated on January 20th.
We also observed, presciently at the time, that Republican voters would be willing to punish future candidates that affirmed the legitimacy of Biden’s 2020 victory. We conducted what’s known as a “conjoint test” on our Republican and Independent voters in January 2020, where we presented them hypothetical candidates in a future Republican congressional primary and asked them to choose who they would vote for. For Republican respondents in the experiment, all else equal, a candidate who said Trump won would be favored by 5.7 percentage points relative to a candidate who said Trump lost. This dynamic foreshadowed why so many Republicans have failed to repudiate Trump’s lie about the 2020 election, and presaged the electoral and political fates of the few Republicans that did endorse the 2020 results as legitimate.
Four years have passed, and the “Big Lie” about 2020 has been largely been embraced by the Republican Party. Courageous Republicans who put democratic norms before their party, such as Liz Cheney, were made to be pariahs, called RINOs (Republican in Name Only), stripped of their seats. As we saw in the Vice Presidential debate, it is not possible for Republican candidates for office, such as JD Vance, to tell the truth. They must either repeat the Big Lie or refuse to deny it in order to stay in the good graces of the rank-and-file, and of Trump himself.
In anticipation of a tumultuous election, we started our survey anew this past summer, collecting 500 responses from registered American voters every Tuesday starting in mid-July through and past the election in November. We ask many of the same questions we did in 2020, allowing us to directly assess how the thinking of voters has evolved in the last few years.
Donald Trump’s lie about the 2020 election is now effectively accepted as truth by nearly all registered Republican voters. Of the over 2000 registered Republicans we have sampled in the past 3 months, only 26% identified Biden as the winner of the 2020 election, down from 40% four years ago. We replicated our conjoint experiment as well, with the same hypothetical candidate profiles, and again, a Republican candidate who said Trump won would be a heavy favorite in a primary, this time by an incredible 17.1 percentage points (up from 5.7 in 2020). Over time, this dynamic has made the Republican party shed any moderates that dare state the truth about 2020.
Republican voters have fully internalized Trump’s Big Lie about 2020, and should he lose again, they will be primed to reject a Harris victory as legitimate, likely in greater numbers than they did in 2020. In our survey, we also ask voters questions about their perceptions of electoral processes, and it is quite clear that many Republicans no longer view the electoral process as free and fair. Nearly 40% of Republican respondents say that they do not believe that votes are counted fairly.
My expectation is that if Trump were to lose, his personality deficit would once again prevent him from conceding, and the Republican legal machine will seek to challenge the results through whatever means possible. Republican Party elites will once again face the decision of whether to perpetuate Trump’s lie and pander to his ego and the voters locked under his spell, or finally break free and move forward as a party and conservative movement.