Less than half of Americans believe midterms will be counted fairly after Trump rants - poll

President Donald Trump’s scaremongering over November’s midterms appears to have been effective, with just 45 percent of Americans saying they expect the elections to be conducted fairly, according to a new poll.

Fifty-five percent of respondents to YouGov’s latest survey answered “no” or “not sure” when asked if they believed the vote would be carried out without interference from bad actors.

Those answers were consistent among Democrats, Republicans and independents alike, with 20 percent of followers of the two main parties saying they expected foul play, as did 24 percent of unaffiliated voters.

Thirty-one percent of Democrats, 32 percent of Republicans and 39 percent of independents said they were unsure.

The mood of cynicism comes after six years of complaints from Trump about the alleged vulnerability of U.S. elections to fraud, claims he began to make after losing the 2020 presidential vote to Joe Biden and which culminated in the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021, when a mob of his supporters attempted to stop lawmakers certifying the results.

Trump has never been able to prove his insistence that Biden’s resounding victory was achieved by a sinister Democratic conspiracy and lost multiple court cases at the time disputing results from the states, a period in which his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, leading the charge, found himself an international figure of fun.

The president’s campaign to sow distrust about election integrity has nevertheless continued unabated.

He has pressured Republicans into passing his SAVE America Act – doing so again in his midterms convention speech Tuesday – which has stalled in the Senate amid concerns that it threatens to disenfranchise millions of U.S. citizens, who lack the documentation it demands they produce before being allowed to cast a ballot.

He has also repeatedly warned that mail-in voting is vulnerable to tampering – despite he and his family submitting absentee ballots themselves in Florida without issue.

Trump issued an executive order to restrict the practice in March, only for it to be blocked in court over concerns that it violated the Constitution, which hands responsibility for administering elections to the states and Congress.

North Carolina recently became the first state to begin sending out mail ballots as the legal wrangling continues, leaving many voters understandably confused about where they stand just weeks before they go to the polls.

The president’s warnings about mail-in voting appear to have resonated with Republicans, however, only 33 percent of whom told YouGov the practice should be allowed, compared to 91 percent of Democrats and 62 percent of independents.

The poll found that only 18 percent of conservatives voted by mail in the 2024 presidential election, compared to 33 percent of Democrats and 23 percent of independents.

Looking ahead to November, just 14 percent of Republicans said they will vote by mail this time, with only 18 percent of Democrats and 13 percent of independents making the same pledge, suggesting a distrust of the process or of Trump himself.

Trump has further undermined public confidence by taking such steps as sending out the FBI to seize mail ballots from the 2020 election to Georgia and encouraging red state Republicans to redraw their congressional maps to boost the GOP’s chances of claiming more seats in the House of Representatives.

He has also refused to rule out the prospect of federal troops being sent to supervise polling stations, a move ostensibly made to ensure the process runs smoothly but one that risks creating a climate of fear and intimidation that could cause people to stay away.

Most dramatically, Trump delivered a televised primetime address from the Oval Office in July in which he pushed unproven claims about foreign meddling in the 2020 vote and a “deep state” plot to assist it, remarks so unverified some mainstream networks declined to even broadcast them.

YouGov’s survey is not the only recent research to reveal a feeling of suspicion and unease abiding, with Gallup reporting last week that 90 percent of people it interviewed said they considered the U.S. government corrupt deep into Trump’s second term.