I recall a conversation with a Trump supporting friend. I walked him through what was going to happen during the election.
I showed him various laws in the Midwest, Florida, etc about when votes could be counted and how; I talked briefly about Arizona and Georgia. We both concluded that places like Florida will start blue and turn red, and places in the Midwest will start red and turn blue. We both agreed that the votes would take days to count. And I got him to acknowledge that if the democrats won in Pennsylvania, it would probably take a couple of days to find out. And I even got him to acknowledge that if the election was not called and was waiting for those states, Trump shouldn’t declare victory if he was leading.
I told him that Trump would probably claim victory on election night, then as the vote was counted, those places would turn blue - and he would claim fraud. He agreed that it would be completely unreasonable should he do so. He objected on the basis that Trump would concede if he lost
So when it happened exactly the way I had outlined, and exactly the way he agrees - he of course started reeling off unhinged Facebook screeds about how the result in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin clearly looked fraudulent - for exactly the same reasons he had acknowledged were perfectly reasonable a week before; and doubled down when I asked him to comment on his previous statements.
This is all to say that I think “believe” is not a word that appropriately conveys the concept people hold.
The statistics on how many people believe Trump really won the election is a measure of what proportion of the population have been completely disengaged with logic, reason, and reality - and are largely being driven along by right wing group think.
The remaining questions are:
- How much control do individuals like Trump have over the direction they take (probably a lot): the right wing has whipped up animosity and conspiracy thinking for decades; but they kinda lost control of it until Trump took control of it.
- How many can be whipped into violence; or supporting it. It seems the former is minimal, but the latter is substantial - BLM riot crackdowns was what worried me the most prior to the election - because it meant that if Trump tried to seize power, and violently suppressed pro democracy protests - he could just call it anti-fa and BLM, and the base would ignore it.
- How many non violent anti-democratic actions would this group support? There weren’t that many people standing in between a Trump Presidency this election; if that changes, there are going to be a lot of people who will not care if he takes charge anti-democratically (whilst obviously shouting about freedom the whole time)