It appears that as liberals more and more assert that former President Donald Trump lied about the 2020 election being rigged or stolen and support the harsh treatment and punishment of the J6 rioters, much of the rest of America has a different take.
And they’re losing faith in the American election system.
The conservative website World Net Daily last week reported on a new poll by Suffolk University and USA Today that, in part, raised questions relative to the U.S. Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021.
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As noted by WND, the survey found that 37% of respondents said the J6 rioters “went too far, but had a point,” while another 6% said “they acted appropriately.”
On the other hand, 48% agreed that they were criminals.
Those numbers offer a sharp contrast to data compiled when the poll was first taken in 2021, shortly after the riot.
The ratio of respondents who labeled the J6ers “criminals” in last week’s poll was down 22 points from the 70% recorded in the first poll.
Respondents who agreed “they went too far, but they had a point” jumped 13 points, up to 37% from 24% in the initial survey.
And the 6% who called the rioters’ actions “appropriate” tripled the 2% who said as much the first time.
The results also showed that the number of people who claimed Trump deserves “a lot of the blame” for the J6 melee fell from 48% in 2021 to 43% last week.
The results, the pollsters said in a press release, indicate that “sympathy for the rioters has increased among the voting public over the past several years.”
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The upshot has been a crisis of faith in the election system, especially among Republicans.
The survey found that 46% of Republican voters “are not confident that the nation’s ballots will be accurately counted and reported in 2024,” while 52% of Trump supporters indicated that they “lacked confidence that ballots will be accurately tallied.”
In contrast, only 14% of Republicans said they were confident that the 2024 election would be “fair.”
In a press release, Suffolk and USA Today said such attitudes offer “an indication that unsubstantiated claims of a rigged 2020 election may carry forward with Trump voters in the coming November 2024 election.”
While the pollster declared that Trump’s claims about 2020 were “unsubstantiated,” WND noted that Trump and his supporters have made some points.
For example, Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg doled out $400 million in what was dubbed “Zuckerbucks” to elections officials across the country “who largely used it to recruit Biden supporters, a financial influence that never before had been present in American elections,” WND noted.
Furthermore, the outlet added, “the FBI decided to interfere in those results by warning publications to suppress very damaging – but accurate – information about Biden family scandals that were contained in a laptop computer Hunter Biden abandoned at a repair shop.
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Meanwhile, as reported by the Tampa Free Press last week, Trump released the results of his own investigation into potential election fraud in 2020.
The report offered 115 separate bullet points to make his case for election fraud in five swing states that went for Biden: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
Additionally, as the Free Press also noted, The Washington Post and the University of Maryland released a poll last week that found 36% of respondents think Biden was not “legitimately elected” in 2020. That was up from 29% in the same poll taken two years ago.
Meanwhile, Democrats, including Biden, used the J6 anniversary on Saturday to proclaim that Trump and his supporters seek to overthrow or undermine democracy.
Yet, in the poll, when respondents were asked which party is more responsible for “threatening democracy,” the blame was equal, as 40% of those surveyed said Democrats and 40% replied Republicans.
Perhaps the area of widest division was on the question of Democrats seeking to jail Trump.
The poll found that 96% of Democrats believe the legal actions against Trump in multiple state and federal courts are “the appropriate work of the justice system.”
But only 52% of all respondents agreed, and 43% said such cases were “inappropriate and should be dropped.”
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