More than 40% of Americans still do not believe that Joe Biden legitimately won the 2020 presidential election despite no evidence of widespread voter fraud, according to a new Axios-Momentive poll.
The poll, released on the eve of the first anniversary of the attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob, found that 55% of those surveyed believe Biden won the election. That figure has barely changed since Axios’s poll from 2020, published shortly before the insurrection. That poll, published in 2020, found 58% said that they accepted Biden as the legitimate winner of the presidential election.
Despite Biden’s inauguration, the attack on the Capitol and the multiple investigations that have debunked the lies pushed by the former president that the election was stolen, the poll suggests that the same level of doubt persists.
“It’s dispiriting to see that this shocking thing we all witnessed last year hasn’t changed people’s perceptions,” Laura Wronski, senior manager for research science at Momentive, told Axios.
A majority of Americans also said they are expecting a repeat of the deadly 6 January attack in the next few years.
The polls, conducted from 1 to 5 January of this year, surveyed nearly 2,700 adults, and found nearly 57% – about half of Republicans and seven in 10 Democrats – believe that events similar to the attack are likely to occur again.
In addition, nearly two-thirds or 63% said that the 6 January attack has at least temporarily changed the way they think about their democratic government. A third said that those changes are temporary. Nearly as many, 31%, said that those changes are permanent.
About 37% of those surveyed said they had lost faith in American democracy (48% of Republicans and 28% of Democrats), while 10% said they had never had faith in the system. Forty-nine percent said they did have faith.
Fifty-eight per cent of Americans said they supported the investigative work of the House select committee investigating the riot. Eighty-eight percent of Democrats support the inquiry, compared with 58% of independents and 32% of Republicans.
Just slightly more than half of American adults, 51%, said individuals associated with the insurrection should face criminal penalties if they refuse to comply with subpoenas.
Republicans have also been revealed to be three or four more times as likely as Democrats to say voter fraud is a problem in their state, despite such claims being thoroughly debunked.
Wronski said she believes the results of the poll shows either “Biden hasn’t done enough” to push back against disinformation, or “it shows that he never had a chance”.
She added: “The partisan division is still the story.”