American voters are showing more doubt than ever about former President Joe Biden’s decisive 2020 election victory, a shift that may reflect Donald Trump’s years-long effort to challenge the result.
A new Daily Mail/JL Partners poll found that fewer than half of U.S. voters now say they believe Biden won the 2020 presidential election.
In the July survey, only 48 percent of respondents said Biden definitively defeated Trump.
Another 18 percent said they were unsure, while 34 percent said they believed Trump was the true winner of the 2020 race.
No evidence of widespread fraud in the 2020 election has ever been established. Biden won the presidency with 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232 and secured the popular vote by more than seven million ballots. The outcome was certified by every state and repeatedly upheld in court.
The poll nevertheless shows a sharp partisan divide. Nearly three-quarters of Republicans, 70 percent, falsely say Trump won the 2020 election, while just 15 percent acknowledge Biden’s victory.
Among Democrats, 80 percent say Biden won the 2020 election, though one in ten liberals said they believed Trump came out ahead.
Trump renewed his claims in front of television cameras at the White House last Thursday, alleging that China interfered in the 2020 election and that nearly 275,000 noncitizens were listed on U.S. voter rolls.
A majority of US voters do not believe that former President Joe Biden won the 2020 election, according to the latest Daily Mail/JL Partners survey
Joe Biden and former Vice President Kamala Harris on the campaign before the 2020 contest
Since the 2020 election, he has maintained without evidence that he beat Biden, and many of his closest allies have defended that extraordinary claim, despite it having never been legally proven.
Flanked by his closest Cabinet officials and top White House aides last week, Trump stopped short of claiming that China’s influence changed the outcome of the election. He also notably did not announce any consequences for the US rival.
Still, some Republicans were left unconvinced after the President’s primetime address.
‘If it was meant to influence people like me, it didn’t get me there,’ Alaska GOP Senator Lisa Murkowski said after the speech.
Ben Ginsberg, a veteran GOP attorney who worked for President George W Bush’s campaigns, said: ‘What stood out to me is that there’s still no evidence of a result of any election being incorrect. There still were not the documents. There still was not the evidence.’
One Republican House member told the Daily Mail: ‘Just because China got voter data doesn’t mean they stole the election. You can buy that voter data.
‘It’s available for anyone who can pay for it, just for a few thousand dollars state by state. So we weren’t given any evidence after Trump’s speech. If that [Chinese interference] happened, we have real, real problems in this country.’
Just 48 percent of US voters polled in the latest Daily Mail/ JL Partners survey said that Joe Biden won the 2020 election
Trump and his first term Vice President Mike Pence on election night in 2020
In a statement to the Daily Mail, White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said:
‘President Trump is committed to ensuring that Americans have full confidence in the administration of elections, and that includes totally accurate and up-to-date voter rolls free of errors and unlawfully registered non-citizen voters.
‘This campaign pledge from the President is why millions of Americans sent him back to the White House.’
A January 2024 poll from the Washington Post and University of Maryland found that 62 percent of adults believed Biden’s 2020 win was legitimate, down from 69 percent in December 2021. Our new poll shows a clean continuation of that trend.
While many Republican lawmakers initially backed the President’s unfounded ‘stolen election’ claims in 2020, many turned against Trump in the aftermath of the deadly January 6 riots at the US Capitol.
