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About half of Republicans would support postponing the 2020 election so the country can address claims of voter fraud, according to a new poll by the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage blog.
The poll posed a hypothetical question: If Donald Trump were to say that the 2020 presidential election should be postponed until the country can make sure that only eligible American citizens can vote, would you support or oppose postponing the election?
Fifty-two percent said that they would support the idea of postponing the 2020 election until voter fraud is addressed, and 56 percent said they would support this decision if both Trump and Republicans in Congress proposed it.
This was just a hypothetical question. Trump claims voter fraud cost him the popular vote in 2016 (a claim with no evidence to back it up), but there’s no indication that he’d seriously consider postponing the election.
The survey also started with a series of questions about typical arguments made by Trump concerning voter fraud, including whether Trump won the popular vote in the 2016 election and whether millions of illegal immigrants vote. That led to a critique that survey respondents were primed by those questions to be more concerned about fraud than they otherwise would be:
Answers to questions will always be correlated when you evoke one previously-asked question in the other one. https://t.co/prrshA2HOx pic.twitter.com/48Ak7bawBn
— Natalie Jackson (@nataliemjb) August 10, 2017
Still, the authors — Ariel Malka, an associate professor of psychology at Yeshiva, and Yphtach Lelkes, an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania — suggest the results are worth paying attention to. The findings suggest, they write, that “a substantial number of Republicans are amenable to violations of democratic norms that are more flagrant than what is typically proposed (or studied).”
