As President Donald Trump refuses to concede or even acknowledge the possibility that he lost the presidential election to his Democratic rival, President-elect Joe Biden, a vast majority of Americans say that it’s clear to them who the real winner was.
According to a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll, 79 percent of Americans believe Biden won the election, while only 13 percent say the results haven’t been decided yet.
And as for Trump? The poll found that only 3 percent of respondents — less than one-in-thirty-three Americans — think that he won the race last week.
The poll was conducted from Saturday (the day Biden was declared the winner of the election by most media agencies) through Tuesday, allowing for a wide number of respondents to hear and at least acknowledge Trump’s case for why the race shouldn’t be called yet.
Where the country stands on the election, per Ipsos/Reuters pic.twitter.com/ReJGUIPibK
— Morning Joe (@Morning_Joe) November 11, 2020
Even among Republicans who took part in the poll, it was clear who the winner was: six-in-ten GOP-leaning respondents said that Biden had won the election.
Trump has so far refused to concede the election results to Biden. The current president has made several erroneous claims of supposed voter fraud, most (if not all) of them being debunked as false or overstated.
The president has expressed belief in a number of unverified claims, including that votes that were counted after election day were faked. In actuality, the huge influx of absentee mail-in ballots made it difficult to count votes all at once on election day. Many states mandated that such ballots couldn’t be counted until that time, which led to delays in submitting a final vote tally in their jurisdictions.
In spite of lacking evidence to back his claims, Trump has continued to push them, and said on Tuesday that he believed Americans would support his push to dispute the election. “People will not accept this Rigged Election!” the president tweeted out.
People will not accept this Rigged Election! https://t.co/XQAOIt5ZwU
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 11, 2020
The Reuters/Ipsos poll seems to contradict that notion.
Trump also alleged on Wednesday that a ballot-tampering claim that was reportedly recanted by a Pennsylvania postal worker was still accurate.
“Stays [sic] with the truth, his original story,” Trump wrote.
Indeed, that postal worker has said the reporting on his recanting was inaccurate. But his claims remain questionable, and supervisors have noted he may be a worker with an ax to grind, having received multiple disciplinary warnings in the past.
The worker, whose name is Richard Hopkins, has been working in conjunction with Project Veritas, a far-right organization that has used deceptive tactics and selective editing in videos to make accusations against progressive groups in the past that turned out to be false, in most cases.
Federal agencies and workers within the executive branch have been warned against making any suggestions that would lend credence to the idea that Biden won the election. “We have been told: Ignore the media, wait for it to be official from the government,” a White House insider has said.
But while Trump and his allies are reluctant to accept the outcome of the race, some conservatives are saying it’s a fool’s errand to continue denying the truth. Earlier this week, during his program on Fox News, Tucker Carlson admitted it was time to admit defeat.
Even though Carlson still insisted that there was “fraud that we can confirm,” he added that it “does not seem to be enough to alter the election result.”
A small number of Republican lawmakers, including Sen. Mitt Romney, have made similar statements. Romney called on giving the Biden-Harris team the tools necessary to begin the transition process.
“It’s very much in our national interest, in our foreign policy interest, national security interest, to make sure that if there’s a new team that may become the leadership team, that they be given all access as quickly as possible,” Romney said in a statement.
Most Republican lawmakers, however, perhaps out of fear over how their base of supporters may react, have backed Trump’s refusal to concede. “President Trump is 100 percent within his rights to look into allegations of irregularities and weigh his legal options,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said.
For what it’s worth, Biden himself has tried to play things coolly, telling reporters this week that he expects Republicans will come to their senses eventually.
“The whole Republican Party has been put in a position, with a few notable exceptions, of being mildly intimidated by the sitting president,” Biden said of the reason why Republicans have backed Trump’s erroneous claims of widespread fraud.
Featured image credit: Gage Skidmore/Wikimedia
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