According to a Morning Consult poll from January of last year, some 35 percent of Americans, including 68 percent of Republicans, believe the claims of Donald Trump and his allies that the 2020 election was "rigged" by a campaign of mass voter fraud. Writing in The Atlantic this Monday, Republican strategist Sarah Longwell tried to analyze why so many Americans buy into Trump's "Big Lie."
"For many of Trump’s voters, the belief that the election was stolen is not a fully formed thought. It’s more of an attitude, or a tribal pose," writes Longwell, who is the publisher of The Bulwark. "They know something nefarious occurred but can’t easily explain how or why. What’s more, they’re mystified and sometimes angry that other people don’t feel the same."
Longwell quotes a woman from Wisconsin who told her, “I can’t really put my finger on it, but something just doesn’t feel right" -- as well as a man from Pennsylvania who said, “Something about it just didn’t seem right.” Another man from Arizona had similar feelings about 2020: “It didn’t smell right.”
The outlandishness of the claims that bolster people's feelings about the 2020 election make the conspiracy theories even more durable, Longwell claims. "Regardless of plausibility, the more questions that are raised, the more mistrustful Trump voters are of the official results."
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As Longwell points out, any attempts to dissuade Big Lie believers of their conspiracy theories usually backfire. "When you tell Trump voters that the election wasn’t stolen, some of them tally that as evidence that it was stolen. A woman from Arizona told me, 'I think what convinced me more that the election was fixed was how vehemently they have said it wasn’t.'"
"These voters aren’t bad or unintelligent people. The problem is that the Big Lie is embedded in their daily life."
Read the full article over at The Atlantic.
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