Most Arizona Republicans say election audit will show Trump won: poll

A majority of Arizona Republicans in a new poll said that a partisan election audit there will show that former President Trump won the state’s 11 Electoral College votes instead of President Biden.

Sixty-two percent of Arizona Republicans said in a new OH Predictive Insights poll that Trump will receive more votes in the state after the GOP audit is completed. Another 21 percent of Republicans say Biden’s victory will stand, while another 16 percent are unsure.

The poll underscores the extent to which Arizona Republicans have been swayed by unsubstantiated claims from Trump and his allies that alleged electoral misconduct and irregularities swung the election to Biden in key swing states like Arizona.

Sixty-one percent of Republicans agreed with the statement that “evidence has been uncovered which shows that the election was stolen from President Trump in a number of states that the media and election officials have called for Joe Biden,” and 55 percent said they have a favorable view of the audit, which was sparked by such claims. 

No evidence has emerged to suggest widespread fraud marred the November presidential election. Biden won the state by more than 10,000 votes in 2020, marking the first time a Democratic presidential candidate has won Arizona since 1996.

Republicans in the Arizona state Senate launched the audit after Trump railed against his loss in the state, though the process has been dogged by competing complaints from the lawmakers and Democratic outside groups over the other side’s alleged unwillingness to turn over documents.

Republicans earlier in the year had forecasted that the audit could be completed by May, but the deadline has since slipped and there is no clear end date to the process.

The audit is focused on the results from Maricopa County, Arizona’s largest county and the home of Phoenix. Biden won the area by over 2 percentage points in November.

Still, Republicans have rallied around the process, with GOP lawmakers from other states hinting they could launch similar audits elsewhere.

“The irregularities revealed at the hearing today amount to hundreds of thousands of votes or, many times what is necessary for us to have won,” Trump said in a statement after a briefing in Arizona on Thursday on the audit. “There was no victory here, or in any other of the Swing States either.”

The OH Predictive Insights poll surveyed 863 registered Arizona voters from July 6 to 11 and has a margin of error of 3.3 percentage points.