Many have speculated about why Republican elected officials went along with President Trump’s efforts to convince Americans that the 2020 election was riddled with fraud.
Our research suggests that a big piece of the puzzle is the GOP base. Republican voters tell pollsters they believe Trump when he says there is fraud. Partisans, we’ve found, are motivated to believe that the other party cheated and are skeptical about claims that their party cheated. Evidence has nothing to do with it.
The court of public opinion was unlikely to check the president’s efforts to undermine the election because of a common mental twist: People discount bad news about groups with which they identify, thus blinding themselves to bad behavior by their own. Humans in a variety of circumstances engage in such motivated reasoning.
Our new research found another such circumstance: Americans are far better at identifying attempts to rig elections when the party doing the rigging is not their own.
Women of color won record numbers of congressional seats. How will they legislate?
Here’s how we did our research
This fall, we fielded a survey experiment designed to measure reactions to different partisan efforts to steal elections. Using Qualtrics Panels, we fielded our experiment to a national sample of about 1,363 Democrats and Republicans from Oct. 23 to Nov. 3, with a weighted total, independents excluded. Though not a probability sample, quotas and raking weights ensure age, region, gender, race and education match census estimates of the same.
Survey respondents were randomly assigned to assess one of the following six scenarios:
- {‘type’: ‘text’, ‘content’: ‘A news organization reveals that state Democratic officials installed additional voting machines at polling places that serve college-age voters — who tend to vote Democratic.’, ‘_id’: ‘TU3ZAVUB45GH7KIUDHINFOFR6E’, ‘additional_properties’: {‘comments’: [], ‘inline_comments’: []}, ‘block_properties’: {}}
- {‘type’: ‘text’, ‘content’: ‘A news organization reveals that state Democratic officials removed voting machines at polling places that serve older voters — who tend to vote Republican.’, ‘_id’: ‘ODUAJORO7BG4RJ5AOIZ3AQGHL4’, ‘additional_properties’: {‘comments’: [], ‘inline_comments’: []}, ‘block_properties’: {}}
- {‘type’: ‘text’, ‘content’: ‘A news organization reveals that state Democratic officials moved voting machines from polling places that serve older voters — who tend to vote Republican — to polling places that serve college-age voters — who tend to vote Democratic.’, ‘_id’: ‘XOFA7GDDZFHMBA3GRIPWUKFUZQ’, ‘additional_properties’: {‘comments’: [], ‘inline_comments’: []}, ‘block_properties’: {}}
- {‘type’: ‘text’, ‘content’: ‘A news organization reveals that state Republican officials installed additional voting machines at polling places that serve older voters — who tend to vote Republican.’, ‘_id’: ‘FZ6QBAFZF5BYBJ6P7WQNUOVN5E’, ‘additional_properties’: {‘comments’: [], ‘inline_comments’: []}, ‘block_properties’: {}}
- {‘type’: ‘text’, ‘content’: ‘A news organization reveals that state Republican officials removed voting machines at polling places that serve college-age voters — who tend to vote Democratic.’, ‘_id’: ‘EXWWYM7L5BBZJIIDTG2GWL53KE’, ‘additional_properties’: {‘comments’: [], ‘inline_comments’: []}, ‘block_properties’: {}}
- {‘type’: ‘text’, ‘content’: ‘A news organization reveals that state Republican officials moved voting machines from polling places that serve college-age voters — who tend to vote Democratic — to polling places that serve older voters — who tend to vote Republican.’, ‘_id’: ‘CIFHBGVO5FA3DOX2A7X2IHIEFM’, ‘additional_properties’: {‘comments’: [], ‘inline_comments’: []}, ‘block_properties’: {}}
After being asked to consider one of the above scenarios, they were asked, “Would you characterize the Republican/Democratic [as appropriate] officials’ efforts as trying to steal the election?”
Biden’s win shows that suburbs are the new swing constituency
Most partisans recognize efforts to steal the election — but significant proportions disagree
The astute reader will see that the alleged Democratic and Republican tactics are precisely the same. Across these scenarios, between 55 to 68 percent of partisans identify these tactics as attempts to steal elections. Adding voting machines seems to offend fewer people than removing machines; in the former, those who see this as an effort to cheat drops into the 50s compared with the 60s for the latter.
Still, large numbers of our respondents fail to see a problem with the scenarios. For observers who see these tactics as antidemocratic, something seems amiss.
The problem, it turns out, is inability to see bad behavior for what it is when one’s own party is behaving badly. We find that almost all respondents identify these as efforts to steal the election when the other party is doing it. Smaller proportions recognize this as such — and in some cases, majorities approve — when their own party misbehaves.
As you can see in the graph below, more Republicans condemn Democrats’ misbehavior than when it’s their own party shifting the polling machines. Meanwhile, more Democrats condemn Republicans’ misbehavior than when Democrats are doing the same thing.
What does this mean for the 2020 election?
As is often true in team competitions, partisans are much better at identifying their opponents’ antidemocratic behavior than when one of their own is trying to steal an election. In fact, in some of the scenarios we studied, large majorities fail to recognize their own party’s efforts to rig elections, while being outraged if the other party is doing the same. The result is that partisans cancel each other out, for very tepid public opinion responses to dirty politics.
We can see, then, why a democratic society was not outraged by Trump’s attempts to overturn a democratic election. Republican officials had little to fear in the court of public opinion because their supporters are motivated to believe, or at least state in polls, that Democrats cheated, even without any evidence. But were the parties reversed, we’d probably see a similar lack of outrage from Democrats.
Had Hillary Clinton failed to concede, and had Barack Obama thwarted the transition four years ago — at a time when Trump’s winning margins were razor thin and U.S. intelligence services argued that evidence of Russian interference was strong — public opinion would probably have been the mirror image of what we see today.
Don’t miss any of TMC’s smart analysis! Sign up for our newsletter.
Ryan L. Claassen is professor of political science at Kent State University.
Michael J. Ensley is associate professor of political science at Kent State University.
John Barry Ryan is associate professor of political science at Stony Brook University.