The problem with all this, of course, is that the former president has been very consistent in falsely claiming that he won the 2020 election, and in casting doubt on the legitimacy of US elections ahead of the 2024 contest.
During his first debate against Harris, Trump again refused to acknowledge that he lost the 2020 election, walking back his comments in a podcast interview earlier this month in which he said he "lost by a whisker." And despite facing criminal charges for pressuring election officials to overturn the results in 2020, Trump has not indicated that he will accept the results in November.
"We have to have good elections. Our elections are bad," he said during the debate.
Trump has also threatened to prosecute "those people that CHEATED" in the 2024 election and subject them to long-term prison sentences if he wins.
His running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-OH), also said in a podcast appearance this month that he wouldn't have certified the results of the 2020 election if he had been in Congress at the time. "I would have asked the states to submit alternative slates of electors and ask the country to have a debate," he said.
Trump's long-running insistence that he won in 2020 appears to be having an effect over time, with several surveys measuring greater buy-in of his lies about the election from voters today than in the past. A December Washington Post/University of Maryland poll found that 36 percent of US adults did not believe Biden was legitimately elected, compared to 29 percent two years prior. And in a Pew Research poll conducted earlier this month, 27 percent of US adults said that Trump did nothing wrong in trying to overturn the election results, up from 23 percent in April.
