3 charts that signal what might happen if Trump loses to Harris.
Are we barreling toward a legitimacy crisis in this election?
The polls show a tight race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, suggesting that the 2024 election, like the 2020 one, may be decided by narrow margins in a few battleground states. And like last time, polls suggest a sizable proportion of Republican voters seem poised to reject the results if Trump comes up short.
If Trump loses, about a quarter of Republicans said they think he should do whatever it takes to ensure he becomes president anyway, according to a September PRRI poll.
That may include resorting to violence: Among Republicans who don’t believe Biden’s win in 2020 was legitimate, almost one-third said in an August poll by the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University that they expected “a lot” or “a great deal” of political violence after the November election. That doesn’t mean that violence is inevitable — but after the deadly January 6, 2021, insurrection, the possibility cannot be dismissed out of hand.
These beliefs may stem from the fact that, among Republicans, Trump proved by far the most trusted source of information about election results, well above local and national news outlets. In an Associated Press/NORC/USAFacts poll from earlier this month, more than 60 percent of Republicans said they believe Trump himself is the best place to get the facts about results.
The problem with all this, of course, is that the former president has been very consistent in falsely claiming that he won the 2020 election, and in casting doubt on the legitimacy of US elections ahead of the 2024 contest.
During his first debate against Harris, Trump again refused to acknowledge that he lost the 2020 election, walking back his comments in a podcast interview earlier this month in which he said he “lost by a whisker.” And despite facing criminal charges for pressuring election officials to overturn the results in 2020, Trump has not indicated that he will accept the results in November.
