Earlier this year, we learned about how the American political right’s most trusted news outlet proactively aired claims that its higher-ups understood to be baseless and false, and resisted fact-checking them. Fox News’s viewers were sold a fantasy about a stolen election and voting machines because it was decided that’s what they and the business model demanded — with it all accruing to the benefit of Donald Trump.
Months later, with Trump facing a pair of criminal trials over his stolen-election crusade, that fantasy still looms over the potential political fallout.
The Economist and YouGov this week became the latest to publish a head-scratching poll showing Republicans rejecting basic facts about Trump and his legal jeopardy.
The poll asked people whether Trump was “involved in an attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election in Georgia.” He, of course, was. Myriad pieces of evidence make that abundantly clear. We have a literal recording of him asking Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” just enough votes to overcome his deficit, and Trump on the call explicitly cited “flipping” the results in the state.
But to most Republicans, this apparently never happened. Just 18 percent in the YouGov poll said Trump was involved in trying to overturn Georgia’s results, compared to 59percent who say he wasn’t.
It’s now the second poll to show the vast majority of Republicans saying Trump wasn’t even involved in trying to overturn the election. YouGov asked similar, non-Georgia-specific questions in August. Republicans said just 38-30 percent that there was an attempt to overturn the election. That’s shocking in and of itself. But then it showed only half of that 38 percent said Trump was personally involved.
So in both polls, only about 1 in 5 Republicans said Trump tried to overturn the election — the very basic threshold fact that undergirds two of his four indictments.