A18 N THE NEW YORK TIMES NATIONALTUESDAY, DECEMBER 1, 2020
Since the election, surveys
have consistently found that
about 70 percent to 80 percent of
Republicans don’t buy the re-
sults. They don’t agree that Joe
Biden won fair and square. They
say the election was rigged. And
they say enough fraud occurred
to tip the outcome.
Those numbers sound alarm-
ingly high, and they imply that
the overwhelming majority of
people in one political party in
America doubt the legitimacy of
a presidential election. But the
reality is more complicated,
political scientists say. Research
has shown that the answers that
partisans (on the left as well as
on the right) give to political
questions often reflect not what
they know as fact, but what they
wish were true. Or what they
think they should say.
It’s incredibly hard to separate
sincere belief from wishful think-
ing from what political scientists
call partisan cheerleading. But
on this topic especially, the dis-
tinctions matter a lot. Are Repub-
lican voters merely expressing
support for the president by
standing by his claims of fraud —
in effectively the same way Re-
publicans in Congress have — or
have they accepted widespread
fraud as true? Do these surveys
suggest a real erosion in faith in
American elections, or some-
thing more familiar, and tempo-
rary?
“It’s one thing to think that you
don’t trust the guys in Washing-
ton because they’re not your
party,” said Lonna Atkeson, a
political scientist at the Univer-
sity of New Mexico. “But it’s a
whole other thing if you think,
‘Well, gee, they didn’t even get
there legitimately.’ ”
She suggested, however, that
these results be taken with some-
thing between alarm and skepti-
cism.
Tracking surveys, which ask
people the same questions over
time on topics like the direction
of the country or the economy,
showed a lot of Republicans
responding immediately after the
election as if they believed the
president had lost. Among Re-
publicans, consumer confidence
swiftly dropped, as did the share
saying they thought the country
was headed in the right direction.
Those results, which mirror
past elections, suggest many
Republicans knew Mr. Biden
would become president. But
they don’t tell us much about
whether Republicans believe he
won fairly.
In one survey released Mon-
day by YouGov and Bright Line
Watch, a group of political scien-
tists who monitor the state of
American democracy, 87 percent
of Republicans accurately said
that news media decision desks
had declared Mr. Biden the
winner of the election. That rules
out the possibility that many
Republicans simply aren’t aware
of that fact.
Still, only about 20 percent of
Republicans said they consid-
ered a Biden victory the “true
result.” And 49 percent said they
expected Mr. Trump to be inau-
gurated on Jan. 20 — a belief
that’s “unreasonably optimistic”
at this point, said Brendan Ny-
han, a Dartmouth political scien-
tist who is part of the research
group. Digging deeper, he added,
only about half of the group
expecting Mr. Trump to be inau-
gurated also said he was the true
winner. The other Republicans
expressed instead some uncer-
tainty about the outcome.
“There’s a set of people who
are true believers that Donald
Trump won the election and is
going to be inaugurated, but
that’s a relatively small set,” he
said. “There’s also a small set of
people who acknowledge JoeBiden won, but not nearly as
many as you would hope.
“And there’s a lot of people
who are at different degrees of
acceptance in between.”
In that group, political scien-
tists say there are also people
who give the equivalent of the
party line answer to survey
takers, regardless of their real
beliefs.
“The evidence is strong that a
number of people out there, even
if they know the truth, will give a
cheerleading answer,” said Seth
Hill, a political scientist at the
University of California, San
Diego. Part of the president’s
base appears eager to stick it to
the establishment, he said. If
those voters interpret surveys
about the election’s legitimacy as
part of that establishment, he
said, “it’s quite possible they will
use this as another vehicle to
express that sentiment.”
For other voters, what they
sincerely believe and what they
want to be true may well be the
same thing. And politics can be
inseparable from that reasoning.
Research has shown that
supporters of the winning candi-
date in an election consistently
have more faith that the election
was fair than supporters of the
losing candidate do. This pattern
is true of both Democrats and
Republicans. And when theparties’ fortunes flip in subse-
quent elections, people’s an-
swers flip, too.
“Even if the magnitudes are
bigger now, this tendency to
respond in this way has just
been with American politics
since we’ve been asking about
it,” said Michael Sances, a pro-
fessor at Temple University.
A series of surveys by Morn-
ing Consult even suggests thatMr. Biden’s win in the election
caused Democrats to revise their
beliefs about the fairness of past
elections. Respondents were
asked before the November
election if they believed presi-
dential contests going back to
1992 were “free and fair.” In most
of these years, about 65 percent
to 70 percent of all registered
voters said yes.
But when people were asked
these questions again after this
year’s election, Democratic faith
in the 2016 election jumped 22
percentage points. It jumped 11points for the 2000 election.
And so we may not have to
wait too long for a clearer an-
swer to whether Republicans
have truly lost faith in elections.
If their candidates win both
Senate runoff races in Georgia in
January, a contest with outsize
national importance, perhaps
Republicans across the country
will decide that elections are fair
after all.
One interpretation of this
pattern is that our regularly
alternating election outcomes
mean that no one side gets wed-
ded for too long to the idea that
the whole enterprise is broken.
But all of these researchers
emphasized that there was
something new this year: One
candidate in this election, the
sitting president, has refused to
concede and is himself working
to undermine the results.
“In 2000, people had the sense
that there was an unfairness in
the process that had to do with
technology; it wasn’t driven by
partisan politics,” said Betsy
Sinclair, a professor at Washing-
ton University in St. Louis. And
there was a sense that we could
fix that problem, she said, with
updated voting machines and
new legislation.
“The dispiriting thing for
political scientists looking at
2020 is this isn’t a technicalproblem,” she said. “There isn’t
an engineering solution. This is a
much more complicated problem
that has to do with the incen-
tives of elites to stoke anger in
the American population. That’s
not something we can solve by
coming up with a different ballot
casting process.”
It will take more time, she
said, before we know if the presi-
dent’s messages will leave a
lasting impression on Republi-
cans. It’s clear that they have
had an effect in the immediate
term. One recent experiment
found that among Mr. Trump’s
supporters, people shown Twit-
ter messages by the president
attacking democratic norms lost
confidence in elections.
In another recent survey
experiment conducted by Brian
Schaffner, Alexandra Haver and
Brendan Hartnett at Tufts, sup-
porters of Mr. Trump were asked
shortly before Election Day how
they would want him to respond
if he lost, depending on the de-
gree of the loss: if they would
want him to concede and commit
to a peaceful transfer or power,
or resist the results and use any
means to remain in office.
About 40 percent wanted him
to take the latter option if he lost
in the Electoral College and lost
the national popular vote by only
a percentage point or two. But
roughly the same share wanted
the president to contest the
election even if he lost the popu-
lar vote by 10 to 12 points. That
suggests, Mr. Schaffner said,
that a significant share of the
president’s supporters don’t
necessarily believe the election
was fraudulent. Rather, they
were prepared to support the
president’s contesting of the
election no matter what.
Other evidence shows that
Republicans actually felt fairly
good about how their votes were
handled this year. In a large Pew
survey, 72 percent of Trump
voters said they were confident
their vote was accurately
counted. And 93 percent said
voting was easy for them. That
paints a different picture of how
these voters view the electoral
process that played out closest
to them, even as many said
elections this year weren’t run
well nationally.
Voters have often said in sur-
veys that they have more confi-
dence in elections in their com-
munity or state than they do in
voting across the country. That
may be a useful insight for this
moment, too: It means that the
president’s sweeping claims
about election fraud won’t neces-
sarily dissuade Republicans in
Georgia in January. They proba-
bly have more faith in their local
election workers and precinct
offices than these surveys sug-
gest they have for the country.Most Republicans Say They Doubt the Election. How Many Really Mean It?
By EMILY BADGERSupporters of President Trump protesting in Lansing, Mich., last week. Mr. Trump has made sweeping claims of election fraud.EMILY ELCONIN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESAnswers to political
surveys often reflect
wishful thinking.
Arizona and Wisconsin on Mon-
day certified President-elect Jo-
seph R. Biden Jr. as the winner in
their presidential elections, for-
malizing his victory in two addi-
tional battleground states as Pres-
ident Trump’s effort to overturn
the results of the election contin-
ued to fall short.
Such certifications would be an
afterthought in any other year.
But in a political environment
where Mr. Trump’s false claims of
sweeping voter fraud have creat-
ed an alternate reality among his
die-hard backers in the West Wing
and beyond, the results have
closed off yet another path to vic-
tory for him.
Although Mr. Trump has in-
fused daily drama into the normal
postelection bureaucratic process
by urging his Republican allies to
push to block the certification of
results or to overturn them en-
tirely in battleground states won
by Mr. Biden, the proceedings on
Monday were staid affairs.
In Arizona, Katie Hobbs, the
Democratic secretary of state, for-
malized her state’s results while
sitting at a long table with three
Republicans who signed the elec-
tion documents: Gov. Doug
Ducey; the state’s attorney gen-
eral, Mark Brnovich; and the chief
justice of the Arizona Supreme
Court, Robert M. Brutinel.
Ann Jacobs, the chairwoman of
the Wisconsin Elections Commis-
sion, signed a document during a
three-minute video conference in
which she narrated herself certi-
fying Mr. Biden’s victory.
“I am now signing it as the offi-
cial state determination of the re-
sults of the Nov. 3, 2020, election
and the canvass,” Ms. Jacobs said
before holding the document up to
the camera. Later Monday after-
noon, Gov. Tony Evers of Wiscon-
sin, a Democrat, announced that
he had signed the state’s Certifi-
cate of Ascertainment appointing
Mr. Biden’s slate of electors to rep-
resent Wisconsin at the Electoral
College.
Mr. Trump, buoyed by his legal
team and supporters in the con-
servative news media, has held
out hope that he could somehow
prevail in Wisconsin and Arizona,
as well as Georgia, where Republi-
can officials on Monday firmly re-
fused to challenge Mr. Biden’s vic-
tory there. In all three states,
along with Michigan and Pennsyl-
vania, the other two states that
flipped from voting for Mr. Trump
in 2016 to Mr. Biden this year, the
Trump campaign has sought to
undermine the results through le-
gal and public relations efforts
aimed at delivering the president
Electoral College votes.
But as has been the case else-
where, elections officials from
both parties in Arizona and Wis-
consin declined to undercut their
state laws to overturn the popular
vote in their states.
“We do elections well in Ari-
zona,” Mr. Ducey said on Monday
as he signed documents certifying
Mr. Biden’s Arizona victory and
awarding him the state’s 11 Elec-
toral College votes. “The system
is strong.”
In Wisconsin, Ms. Jacobs chose
to certify Mr. Biden’s victory there
one day before the state’s Dec. 1
deadline to do so.
Ms. Jacobs’s certification fol-
lowed the conclusion of recounts,
requested and subsidized with $
million from Mr. Trump’s cam-
paign, in Dane and Milwaukee
Counties that found Mr. Biden had
added 87 votes to his statewide
margin.
Ms. Jacobs, a Democrat fromMilwaukee, said that certifying
the result of the presidential elec-
tion came at her discretion and
that she expected the move to
kick-start legal challenges from
the Trump campaign.
“The power to do this is vested
solely in the chair,” Ms. Jacobs
said in an interview on Monday.
All states must exhaust legal
challenges by Dec. 8. Electoral
College delegates will meet in
their states on Dec. 14, sending the
results to Congress, which is
scheduled to resolve any final dis-
putes and certify the Electoral
College vote on Jan. 6.
Unlike in other states where the
Trump campaign has claimed,
without producing any evidence,
that widespread fraud led to Mr.
Biden’s victories, Mr. Trump’s le-
gal strategy in Wisconsin is predi-
cated on an effort to throw out
hundreds of thousands of absen-
tee ballots on what amounts to a
technicality.
The Trump campaign has ar-
gued in its recount petition that all
ballots cast at in-person absentee
voting sites before Election Day
should be disqualified. The cam-paign claimed incorrectly that
those absentee ballots had been
issued without each voter submit-
ting a written application request-
ing the ballot, but the top line of
the absentee ballot applications
that voters filled out at early vot-
ing sites read: “official absentee
ballot application/certification.”That argument would throw out
hundreds of thousands of ballots
across Wisconsin, including those
cast by prominent Trump sup-
porters, such as several state leg-
islators and a top lawyer for the
president in Wisconsin, Jim
Troupis, according to The Milwau-
kee Journal Sentinel.On Twitter on Monday, Mr.
Trump called for Gov. Brian Kemp
of Georgia, a Republican, to “over-
rule” Brad Raffensperger, the Re-
publican secretary of state. The
president also claimed baselessly
that there had been “total election
corruption” in Arizona. The
Trump campaign has yet to iden-
tify any systemic voter fraud in its
court challenges.
Ms. Jacobs’s certification of the
Wisconsin results represents the
opening of a window for legal chal-
lenges from the Trump campaign,
which has argued that the presi-
dent should have carried the state
and its 10 Electoral College votes
despite the fact that he lost to Mr.
Biden there by 20,682 votes.
Two weeks ago, the Trump cam-
paign requested recounts in Dane
and Milwaukee, the state’s two
largest and most Democratic
counties, in an effort to build a le-
gal case against Mr. Biden’s state-
wide victory. The Trump cam-
paign is also likely to sue to chal-
lenge Ms. Jacobs’s certification.
Republicans on Wisconsin’s six-
member bipartisan elections com-
mission had said that they hoped
Ms. Jacobs would wait to certify
the presidential election results
until after the Trump campaign
had exhausted its legal chal-
lenges. But the Trump campaign
has not filed any lawsuits in Wis-
consin; it had nothing to challenge
until Ms. Jacobs certified the re-
sults of the election.
The Trump campaign and Wis-
consin Republicans are also ex-
pected to challenge Ms. Jacobs’s
authority to certify the election re-
sults on her own. State law gives
her, as the elections commission
chair, clear authority and respon-
sibility to certify the election,
though other parts of the Wiscon-
sin elections code mention the en-
tire six-member bipartisan com-
mission certifying presidential
election results.Glenn Thrush contributed report-
ing.
An election worker processing ballots at the Maricopa County Recorder’s office in Phoenix.ADRIANA ZEHBRAUSKAS FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESArizona and Wisconsin
Certify Biden Victories:
‘The System Is Strong’
By REID J. EPSTEINElection officials
decline to undercut
state law to overturn
the popular vote.
Reviewing ballots in Milwaukee during the Wisconsin recount,
which was subsidized with $3 million from the Trump campaign.TANNEN MAURY/EPA, VIA SHUTTERSTOCKThe Upshot provides news,
analysis and graphics about
politics, policy and everyday life.
nytimes.com/upshotTransition in WashingtonThe Aftermath