A majority of Republicans still believe Donald Trump won the 2020 US presidential election and blame his loss to Joe Biden on baseless claims of illegal voting, according to a new Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll.
The 17-19 May national poll found that 53% of Republicans believe Trump, their party’s nominee, is the “true president” now, compared with 3% of Democrats and 25% of all Americans.
About one-quarter of adults falsely believe the 3 November election was tainted by illegal voting, including 56% of Republicans, according to the poll. The figures were roughly the same in a poll that ran from 13-17 November which found that 28% of all Americans and 59% of Republicans felt that way.
Biden, a Democrat, won by more than 7m votes. Dozens of courts rejected Trump’s challenges to the results, but Trump and his supporters have persisted in pushing baseless conspiracy theories on conservative news outlets.
US federal and state officials have said repeatedly they have no evidence that votes were compromised or altered during the presidential election, rejecting the unsubstantiated claims of widespread fraud advanced by Trump and many of his supporters. Voter fraud is extremely rare in the US.
Yet the Reuters/Ipsos poll showed that 61% of Republicans believe the election was “stolen” from Trump. Only about 29% of Republicans believe he should share some of the blame for his supporters’ 6 January deadly attack at the US Capitol, after Trump gave an inflammatory speech encouraging the crowds. The former president was impeached by the House earlier this year for “incitement of insurrection”.
Still, 67% of overall respondents say they trust election officials in their town to do their job honestly, including 58% of Republicans, according to the poll.
The November and May polls were both conducted online, in English, throughout the United States. The May poll gathered responses from 2,007 adults, including 909 Democrats and 754 Republicans. The poll has a credibility interval, a measure of precision, of about four percentage points.
Reuters contributed to this report