If any person still thinks the election was stolen after that, they're not a reasonable person.
This doesn't mean they're right. Unfortunately, no matter how "unreasonable" you think these people are, when they exist in such numbers and feel with such confidence they've lost the ability to have fair elections, the result of suppressing, ridiculing, and marginalizing them is fairly predictable.
[1] https://poll.qu.edu/national/release-detail?ReleaseID=3685
Did you read the poll? Literally, in the first three paragraphs:
- 98% of Dems think election victory is legitimate
- 97% think there was no widespread voter fraud
Please stop trolling HN. Take it to Parler.
> a margin of error of +/- 3.1
The number of Dems you've claimed to support your position is less than the margin of error.
That leaves 2% of Dems that disagree. They aren't wrong in saying their stated figure includes Democratic party voters, just misleading.
> 97% think there was no widespread voter fraud
Assuming this reflects all polled people and not just Democratic party voters, then yes, 3% ≠ 1/3 and they are wrong. Assuming this figure only reflects Democratic party voters, that seems to suggest that 1% of Dems believe that there was widespread fraud, but still think the victory was legitimate.
In fact, it's much worse than that: a third of Americans believe it (which shows its appeal to centrists and/or the depth of Republican belief), and if you dig into the crosstabs, the number of Independents who believe it (approx 1/3rd) and Republicans who believe it (approx 3/4ths) is quite concerning. For such an extreme question ('widespread fraud') I would have expected this to be a fringe belief. The belief that would have made these numbers less surprising would have been questions such as "do you believe there is some evidence of targetted fraud" etc. Given that I'd suspect nearly 100% of Republicans believe some form of fraud occurred. If so, the entire losing party believes they were cheated to some degree. This isn't a recipe for reduced conflict from here. It means that the radical end of the party is large enough to be meaningful, and it means that large parts of the population will be less likely to condemn actions they take given the widespread shared beliefs.
> Do you believe there was widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election, or not?
> 77% R
> 3% D
> 35% I
To feel secure that this isn't going to spill over into a conflict, we should expect to see a similarly marginal number of I's and ideally less R's (this should be a fringe belief in the Republican party, but it's not.) This question is the most extreme form of the issue, as well. (Few ought to believe widespread fraud definitely occurred, many more likely believe it’s possible strategically targeted fraud occurred, a much weaker stance but similarly dangerous.)
I'm guessing you'll just assume the I's are closet Republicans. But don't blame me if you aren't willing to face reality that this skepticism is not just going to go away through coercion.
While this may have shifted a bit since 2019, 38% of the public identify as independents, but 13% are R-leaning independent, 17% are R-leaning, and 7% aren't leaners. [0]
If you assume leaners are exactly like partisans and further assume the non-leaners are stealth leaners split equally between the two parties, you'd predict 36% of I’s would believe in large scale fraud. If you force all non-leaners to the D side or all to R side, you get a predicted range of 28%-44%.
So, yeah, the results actually seen (35% of Is believing in widespread fraud) are very consistent with the “independent" numbers being entirely predicted by partisan bias of “independents” combined with whatever factors drive the distribution of beliefs among party identifiers, with nothing nonpartisan about “independents” on this issue.
[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2019/03/14/political-in...
No, the US distribution of political beliefs is not a unidimensional center-weighted distribution. More independents are either extremists outside the main parties on the main axis between the parties or sitting equally far off on axes orthogonal to that axis than are centrists.
And most centrists are in the neoliberal capitalist faction of one or the other for the major parties.
Not in any meaningful sense; largely for related limits to those discussed upthread for general centrism: research on voting behavior that has shown those who identify as independents are not particular independent, and contain an identifiable major subset as reliably partisan as those who identify with a major party.
If by “average, non-partisan belief” you simply mean the belief of the average person who doesn't identify with a major party, then, sure, you will have defined it such that independents are key. But this isn't useful information.
There is no such thing as apolitical observers.
Otherwise, I see the extended "election fraud" campaign as an excuse to squeeze out more money for Trump (bad), generate emotional support for the Georgia election (good), and help a guy in Texas get a pardon (lol).
I realize how what I wrote could be construed saying D's support the claim, especially if you presume I'm some kind of partisan hack trying to troll you. In fact, what I was emphasizing (poorly) was that the population sampled from which has one third of support includes Democrats and Independents, since I would have found one third of just Republicans believing there was widespread fraud to be somewhat surprising. I should have written "sampled from a population that includes Democrats and Independents" - I'd like to assume everything else I've written in this thread is evidence I'm not trying to trick anyone or score points. I am genuinely concerned at the level of dismissal, ridicule, and suppression of skeptics of the election, since the floor on this is a third of the country and history tells us what to expect when you leave that many feeling powerless to overcome a presumed deep injustice via speech, voting, and the legal system.
> [...] get out ahead of it and do everything in their power to legitimize the election for these people.
When the people in question refuse to hear anything other than what they want to hear?
Actually, no. If there was no election fraud (as it seems to have been proven) then they all have the same wrong belief, regardless of degree.
> The goal isn't to convince all of them...
Actually, it is since "conservatives" keep pushing lies.
> only a few simple steps needed: full forensic audits of the disputed states, as well as a day in court in SCOTUS
Both of those have happened. So why do you, a reasonable(?) person on HN trying to convince us that it hasn't?
> Actually, no. If there was no election fraud (as it seems to have been proven)
Your claim here seems to be that there was no election fraud, and it seems proven. Two problems with this statement:
- You cannot prove there was no election fraud, it is unfalsifiable.
- Beyond that, the idea that there was no election fraud is absurd on its face. We should expect there to have been some election fraud, with some liklihood of finding evidence of it, since in an election as large as this one there is always election fraud to some degree.
What I think you're trying to say, is there is insufficient evidence to prove there was sufficient election fraud to have an impact on the result. If that's the case, I agree with you. But commentators who say things like "there is no evidence of fraud" or "there is no evidence of widespread fraud" are wrong in the former case and creating a strawman in the latter. And of course, the effect of saying fallacious things like this is it just serves as confirmation for the other side that you are acting in bad faith. The specific claim made is that there was targeted fraud in specific districts in swing states to tip the result. I don't think there is sufficient evidence to show this.
> then they all have the same wrong belief, regardless of degree
My point is the degree matters if we care about avoiding a conflict.
> The goal isn't to convince all of them...
I don't know what you are saying here. My point is that if you are trying to persuade people of their errors in reasoning, you shouldn't expect to convince all of them, just a sufficient amount to reduce their confidence in their wrong beliefs to change the dynamics of the situation enough to avoid the worst possibilities.
> Both of those have happened. So why do you, a reasonable(?) person on HN trying to convince us that it hasn't?
This is objectively false. A full forensic audit of all the states has not occurred (some local forensic audits of sampled ballots in specific counties in some states has) and SCOTUS has not heard any cases (yet) about this issue. I don't know why you state obvious untruths, beyond just being ignorant of the facts or something.
I would imagine to actually get to that point there are really only a few simple steps needed: full forensic audits of the disputed states, as well as a day in court in SCOTUS. I believe so far those have been largely denied or blocked (the merits of doing so are irrelevant) - if those were acquiesced by the winning side and accelerated at the outset it seems highly likely to me we would be nowhere near the precipice it seems we are now.