“Even if you look at Republicans, the percentage that claim that the election was stolen is not as high as Trump claims,” McLennan said in an email.
Available data shows that Trump’s claim is “absurd,” Alexander Theodoridis, co-director of the UMass Amherst Poll at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, said in an email.
A January Umass Amherst Poll found that 30% of respondents believed Biden’s win was illegitimate.
Theodoridis noted that even among former Republican members of Congress — who were involved in government and could access detailed information about elections — more than 80% said Biden’s victory was legitimate.
Polling groups have surveyed Americans multiple times about the 2020 presidential election’s legitimacy and none of their findings support Trump’s claim. Here’s a smattering of poll findings since we last examined this issue.
- A Washington Post-University of Maryland poll from December found that 36% of respondents viewed Biden’s win as illegitimate.
- An August poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that about 70% of respondents believed Biden was legitimately elected. Among Republicans, the number was 57%.
- A June Monmouth University poll found that 30% of respondents believe Biden won the 2020 election because of voter fraud. Among Republicans, the number was 68% — still lower than Trump claimed. That result “has been a nearly constant percentage in Monmouth’s polling since the November 2020 election,” Monmouth noted in its report.
Trump may have been referring to a
2021 survey conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute, a public opinion research firm.
Thirty-one percent of the poll’s respondents said they believed the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump — but the number was much higher for respondents who consumed conservative media. Among Republicans who claimed they trust Fox News more than any other outlet, 82% said they believed the election was stolen.
Polling results consistently show a partisan divide over the election’s legitimacy, said Alejandra Campos, a Latino Studies professor in the University of Arkansas’ political science department. Still, “the available data does not support the claim that a majority of Americans thought the 2020 election was rigged,” Campos said."
At a Greensboro, North Carolina, rally, former President Donald Trump, referring to 2020, said "82% of the country understands that it was a rigged election. Poll results and polling experts say the claim is way off base.
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