2020 election still being questioned

 William Sullivan:

With only a few days left until the 2022 midterms, Newsweek laments a new poll by Redfield and Wilton Strategies showing that 40 percent of Americans still believe that the 2020 presidential election was "rigged or stolen."

This is presented as a shocking revelation about the number of Americans who still buy into the "Big Lie," despite its "being proven false," according to the article.

Newsweek buries this particular poll's more interesting observations.  For example, only 36 percent of respondents disagree that the 2020 election was rigged or stolen.  Of that group, more than one in three find it "understandable" that others might believe that the election was rigged or stolen.  Another 15 percent of respondents neither agreed nor disagreed, and 8 percent signified that they "didn't know."

One way to characterize these data is the manner in which Newsweek does, which is to suggest that a horrifying 40 percent of Americans believe in what a bipartisan mainstream media blitz has promoted as "the Big Lie" for nearly two years. 

A far more accurate way to characterize these data, though, is to recognize that there are more Americans confident that the election was rigged than there are Americans who are confident that it was all on the up and up. 

That already paints a different picture of the prevalence of these supposedly fringe "election deniers."  And when we factor in those who believe that the election was not rigged, but understand why Americans are skeptical based upon the facts they've observed, we find that over three in four Americans (or 75.2 percent, given Newsweek's numbers) think the election was rigged, understand why other Americans think the election was rigged, don't know whether or not the election was rigged, or refused to take a position on the subject of a rigged election while talking to a pollster.

In other words, fewer than one in four Americans is confident that the election was legitimate and is completely flummoxed as to how anyone could question its integrity.  That's a remarkable figure, standing athwart the message being delivered by the senile occupant of the Oval Office, who routinely argues that anyone who questions that election's integrity is not only a fringe radical, but an enemy of democracy and a potential insurrectionist.

We Americans aren't buying that narrative because it's obviously not true.  We saw it with our own eyes.  And in case we didn't see it, we were told by the conspirators who bragged about rigging the election while they did their victory lap.

...

There is much more.

Many believe the rules were changed in the 2020 election to make it easier to manipulate the results, and the way the counting was stopped and then restarted leads many to think that is what happened.