President-elect Joe Biden won the 2020 U.S. presidential election with 306 electoral votes – a sizeable margin from the 270 he needed for victory. While the election occurred over two months ago, many of President Trump’s supporters continue to believe the election was rigged, parroting misinformation and lies about the voting process in swing states coming directly from Trump and his dwindling base of Republican lawmakers. Dozens of court cases brought up by Trump and his legal team have been thrown out by judges across the country but the current U.S. president continues to reject the outcome. Despite his loud, untrue claims of widespread fraud, data shows how a safe majority of U.S. voters believe Trump’s losses in court are due to insufficient evidence.
In a new survey from Morning Consult and Politico, 62 percent of all U.S. voters said they believe Trump is losing his case for election fraud in courts due to insufficient evidence or support for his arguments. Still, a shockingly high 28 percent of voters believe the courts have a large enough bias against Trump to rule against him. Another 10 percent believe Trump’s legal team is incompetent or there’s another reason for why he’s losing.
Trump and his family, legal team and Republican allies continue to fan the flames of misinformation and anger with just two weeks before Biden’s inauguration. This act of presidential defiance is unprecedented, and culminated in the U.S. Capitol building being stormed and occupied by pro-Trump rioters during the electoral vote-counting process on Jan. 6.
The anger demonstrated by the rioters also stemmed from the surprise victory of two Democratic Senate candidates in Georgia. The victories of Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff secured a majority for Democrats in the House, Senate and presidency for 2021. Trump and his base have already called these newest run-off elections as fraudulent. Trump has gone so far as to condemn and distance himself from Vice President Mike Pence, whom he asked to delay the electoral college vote count (a power that the U.S. vice president does not have.)
