Republicans more likely to trust Trump than election results: Survey

More Republicans trust former President Trump and his campaign over the government’s certification of election results, according to a new poll.

The poll, released Tuesday from Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and USAFacts, found 67 percent of Republicans trust Trump and his campaign for accurate information on the outcome of the November election. Just 51 percent of Republicans said they trust the government’s certification of election results.

In contrast, 87 percent of Democrats trust government certifications, while 82 percent trust Vice President Harris and her campaign, pollsters found.

Around 7 in 10 Americans trust government certifications of election results at least to a moderate extent, the AP noted.

Majorities of Americans surveyed also trust local and national newspapers, as well as local or national television networks to provide accurate information about the outcome of this year’s presidential election.

The survey follows a series of other findings showing a decreased trust in election integrity, especially after the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection, in which scores of rioters stormed the Capitol in an attempt to stop the certification of the 2020 election results.

The Jan. 6 attack came to symbolize the growing skepticism surrounding election accuracy, especially among some Republicans who felt the 2020 election was “stolen” from Trump.

In a poll released in January, more than half of Trump supporters said they lacked confidence the ballots will be accurately tallied this November.

Trump has repeatedly claimed there was widespread fraud in the 2020 election, which he lost to President Biden. He challenged the results in court, which rejected those claims for lack of standing or evidence. The Supreme Court rejected various election challenges.

The former president made one of his clearest pledges to go after his opponents in a social media post last Saturday, in which he threatened to prosecute lawyers, political donors and operations should they be found to have “cheated” or conducted “unscrupulous behavior” in regard to voting.

The former president was criminally charged in Georgia for an alleged scheme to overturn the state’s election results in 2020, and he was indicted federally in Washington, D.C., for his attempts to overturn the election results and remain in power.

He is slated to square off Tuesday against Vice President Harris in what will be the first, and possibly only, debate between the two presidential candidates ahead of November. The race between the two remains tight and a polling index by The Hill/Decision Desk HQ shows Harris with a 49.4 percent to 48.2 percent lead over the former president.

The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and USAFacts poll of 1,019 adults was conducted July 29 to Aug. 8. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is 4 percentage points.