Approximately one-third of American adults say President Joe Biden was illegitimately elected to his office in 2020, a new poll has found.
Released Tuesday, the Washington Post/University of Maryland survey gauged changing opinions on the Jan. 6, 2021, breach of the U.S. Capitol building.
The poll found that, as of mid-December, 62% of U.S. adults say they believe Biden was elected legitimately, a 7-point drop from the 69% who said this when a similar survey was taken in December 2021.
Among those who said the 2020 election results were legitimate, Republicans saw the steepest drop, at 31% in 2023, compared to 39% in the 2021 poll.
A full 91% of Democrats say Biden was legitimately elected, down slightly from the 94% who said this two years earlier. The share of independents who say the Democrat incumbent was legitimately elected also fell from 2021, with 66% saying he was now, versus 72% who said so then.
When asked where they primarily get their information about politics and government, 13% of survey respondents said Fox News, followed by 12% who said local TV, 8% who said CNN, and 7% who said Facebook. Just 2% said they got their information from Newsmax, One America News Network, The Daily Wire, or the Daily Caller.
The poll also found that a third of Americans say there is solid evidence for widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election.
The survey comes as Donald Trump continues to dominate the GOP primary field, retaining a gaping double-digit lead over his challengers for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, despite four criminal indictments. In two of the cases, prosecutors allege that the former president attempted to overturn the results of the 2020 election in order to remain in power.
In the face of more than 60 failed lawsuits and numerous election audits, Trump has continued to maintain that he was the actual winner of the 2020 election.
Then-Attorney General Bill Barr rejected Trump’s oft-repeated claims of widespread election fraud in the weeks following the 2020 presidential election.
“To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have affected a different outcome in the election,” he said, in a direct contradiction of his boss’ assertions.
The poll was conducted Dec. 14-18 and surveyed 1,024 U.S. adults. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 4.1 percentage points.