(Western Journal) Cue the hyperventilation in the WaPo newsroom.
Yes, The Washington Post is out with a new poll, and it isn’t good news — for the type of person who reads the Post, anyhow. You can probably guess by the headline, which sounds a clarion alarm to liberal Beltway lifers: “Republican loyalty to Trump, rioters climbs in 3 years after Jan. 6 attack.”
“Three years after the Jan. 6 attack, Republicans are more sympathetic to those who stormed the U.S. Capitol and more likely to absolve Donald Trump of responsibility for the attack than they were in 2021, according to a Washington Post-University of Maryland poll,” the Post reported Tuesday.
Yes, start clutching those pearls, WaPo addicts: Only 24 percent of Republicans and 17 percent of Trump voters think that the events of Jan. 6, 2021, constituted “an attack on democracy that should never be forgotten,” according to the poll.
Are those pearls clutched tightly, dear reader? Clutch them harder! Because — gasp!— the percentage of voters who feel that Biden’s election was “legitimate” is down significantly in 2023 compared to 2021.
The Post, working with the University of Maryland’s Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement, asked the 1,024 adults it polled between Dec. 14 and 18 this question: “Regardless of whom you supported in the 2020 election, do you think Joe Biden’s election as president was legitimate, or was he not legitimately elected?”
According to the poll numbers, only 62 percent of those polled in 2023 said Biden’s election was legitimate, versus 69 percent in 2021. Moreover, while only 29 percent said the election was illegitimate in 2021, 36 percent said it was illegitimate in 2023.
That 7 percentage point difference means roughly 20 percent more respondents in 2023 said the election was illegitimate when compared to 2021.
Moreover, the percentages of those who said Biden’s election was legitimate were down in every category: Republicans (from 39 percent to 31 percent), independents (from 72 percent to 66 percent) and Democrats (94 percent to 91 percent).
The Post, naturally, blamed this on those cray-zee conspiracy theorists:
“Several voters interviewed by The Post cited what they said was evidence of voter fraud, in particular the long-debunked claim that Georgia election workers were caught on video putting fake ballots into tallies. The two women in that video recently won a $148 million judgment against former Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani for spreading those defamatory claims,” the Post’s article stated.
Yes, because if there’s somebody whom voters across the board — independent and Democrat voters included — are going to listen to when it comes to the election of 2020, it’s going to be Rudy Giuliani.
Note that the Post doesn’t give any quantifiable number of voters who echoed these claims to them before citing them as reasons for the shift in the poll. It just reported that “several” did. WaPo’s gonna WaPo.
So, if this wasn’t Rudy Giuliani and his wacky “long-debunked claims,” what might instead be causing the shift in perception here?
It’s not just the bedrock principle that time heals all wounds. If that were the case in these results, there wouldn’t be an across-the-board decline in those who said Joe Biden was legitimately elected in the same poll that provided ample evidence of Democrat voters still waving the bloody shirt of Jan. 6 with Republicans less inclined to call it a threat to our democracy.
Rather, if one wants to search for a reason to question the “legitimacy” of Biden’s election, perhaps we shouldn’t start with claims of Georgia ballot-stuffing or Venezuelan backdoors into election software.
