What the Republican rank and file think about the 2020 election

This is from a Jan. 7, 2022 article in the Washington Post:

All credible evidence tells us that the 2020 election was very secure. Experts on both sides of the political aisle, and even President Donald Trump’s own Justice Department, have confirmed that 2020 was a free and fair election. 

Nevertheless, the vast majority of Republican voters say they agree with Trump’s unsubstantiated claims that the election was stolen. In our most recent University of Massachusetts at Amherst poll, fielded online Dec. 14-20 by YouGov among a nationally representative sample of the U.S. voting-age population, only 21 percent of Republicans say Joe Biden’s victory was legitimate. This is nearly identical to what we found in our April poll, in which just 19 percent of Republicans said Biden was legitimately elected. Other universities, media outlets and polling firms have found nearly identical results.

How could the “big lie” campaign convince so many Republicans that Trump won an election he so clearly lost? Some observers wonder whether these beliefs are genuine or just an example of expressive responding, a term social scientists use to mean respondents are using a survey item to register a feeling rather than express a real belief. In this case, it would mean that these Republicans, upset about Biden winning, say his victory was not legitimate even though they know deep down that it was.

While it is difficult to firmly establish what respondents truly believe, clues suggest this is a genuine belief. One piece of evidence is that the result is nearly identical in phone surveys and online surveys. When people respond to phone surveys, those responses are often biased by what social scientists call “social desirability,” in which respondents say what they think makes them look good — even if that is not what they actually believe. Web-based surveys are known to reduce social desirability bias.

Other survey responses appear consistent with a true belief that the election was stolen. In our December UMass Poll, we asked those who said Biden’s presidential victory was illegitimate to select all the reasons they believed so from a list of conspiracy theories floated by those pushing the “big lie.” As you can see below, fully 83 percent say that “fraudulent ballots supporting Joe Biden were counted by election officials”; 81 percent that officials counted “absentee ballots from deceased people”; 76 percent tell us that “non-citizens and other ineligible voters were allowed to vote for Joe Biden”; 69 percent that the victory was illegitimate because “some states changed election rules in ways they should not have”; and 65 percent that election officials destroyed ballots supporting Trump.

In other words, not only do they say that Biden’s victory was not legitimate, but they endorse several (though not all) specific theories about how fraud was perpetrated.

 

Further, Republicans in our UMass Poll say they would be more likely to vote for 2022 GOP congressional candidates who questioned Biden’s victory and less likely to vote for those who concede that Biden won. Using a conjoint experiment, an approach likely to reduce social desirability bias and expressive response, political scientists Vin Arceneaux and Rory Truex found that Republicans do indeed reward and punish candidates in this way. 

Republican respondents consistently tell pollsters that they doubt the legitimacy of Biden’s election. Apparently, that’s a genuinely held belief. (emphasis added)

The WaPo article described another polling technique to get at what Republicans really think without major distortion by cognitive or social bias. That experiment was a list experiment, which is a way to reduce social desirability bias and expressive responding. Here, people pick an item without having to directly tell pollster what they think. That avoids people telling about something embarrassing or feeling rewarded by telling a pollster a feeling rather than a true belief. 

Concerns about getting accurate data reflects how cognitive biology and social influences affect behavior in mostly subtle, unconscious but powerful ways. This is a big part of what makes polling so tricky and easy to get wrong. 

Note the emphasized paragraph. Republican candidates will be rewarded for questioning Biden’s win in 2020 and punished for not doing so. People, including candidates for office, do respond to incentives. Thus, we can reasonably expect continuous questioning of the 2020 election from radical right GOP candidates in 2022 and for as long as it remains an actual incentive. This big lie is probably not going to go away any time soon.

Acknowledgement: Thanks to salitcid for mentioning this article.