Voters Expect Trump to Deny Defeat — and Many Don’t Mind

Are we on the road to another January 6? Photo: Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images

One of the hearty perennial tactics deployed by Donald Trump is to suggest that his opponents are just as likely as he is to lie, cheat, steal, break the law, and deny the will of voters. Indeed, as he apparently prepares to claim victory on Election Night even if he’s not actually winning, he’s already banked a ton of allegations that the election has already been rigged and thus there’s no good reason to accept the results. But what you don’t hear him say so far is that he expects Kamala Harris to deny defeat if she loses, because, well, there’s not any indication that that might happen.

There’s now some polling evidence that this disproportionate expectation of election denial is shared by actual voters who may be paying more attention to Trump’s antics (or remembering what happened in 2020) than you might think. According to a major new pre-election Pew survey, 72 percent of registered voters believe Harris will “accept the results and publicly acknowledge Trump won” if that’s what the results show, and only 24 percent think the same of Trump if he loses. So only a fourth of the electorate (and less than half of those who say they back Trump) believe the former president will do anything other than deny defeat.

Even more alarming is another data point from Pew. Asked if it’s relatively important that the candidate they back concede defeat if they lose, 61 percent of Harris supporters say it’s “very” important, and only 14 percent say it’s not important at all. Only 32 percent of Trump supporters say a concession is “very” important, and 40 percent say it’s not important at all. To be clear, Pew defines “wins” as “receiving enough votes cast by eligible voters in enough states.” About half of Trump voters don’t expect him to concede in those circumstances, and close to half don’t even want him to do so. And that doesn’t even include the Trump voters who will likely hear their candidate on Election Night dismiss many of his opponent’s votes as fraudulent, as he did four years ago, aiming to convince them he actually didn’t lose. So he will have a formidable constituency for taking the election into overtime with all the perils that involves for public safety and for democracy.

It’s a shame there won’t be another Harris-Trump debate because with the election so close and so proximate, she might ask him bluntly and specifically about the circumstances, if any, under which he might concede defeat. Would all the major media outlets calling the election for Harris be enough? They weren’t in 2020. How about state certification of a majority of electoral votes for Trump’s opponent? Again, that didn’t matter in 2020. Critics of the media and of Democrats often complain that they’ve allowed Trump’s aberrant behavior to be “normalized.” This is certainly one area in which that might very well be true. It shouldn’t be acceptable for a presidential candidate — or to the candidate’s supporters — to go into the campaign homestretch indifferent to what the results show.