With just days until election day, former President Donald Trump and the Republican Party’s closing message is that any Democratic win will be the result of cheating — and new polling shows their voters believe them.
In recent months, Trump and the Republicans have promoted “Swamp the Vote,” a website that calls for Trump supporters to do their part to “guarantee we win by more than the Margin of Fraud” by voting early. The site is paid for by the Republican National Committee.
“We need ALL HANDS ON DECK to defeat Kamala Harris and the far left liberals big money fraud machine,” it declares. “We must SWAMP THEM WITH VOTES to guarantee our victory is TOO BIG TO RIG.”
A video embedded in the website features Trump saying, “Keep your eyes open, because these people want to cheat, and they do cheat, and frankly, it’s the only thing they do well.”
“The way you win is to swamp them,” Trump adds in the video. “If we swamp them, they can’t cheat. It just doesn’t work out.”
Only 57% of Trump supporters said they believe this November’s elections will be run and administered somewhat or very well, according to polling of registered voters that the Pew Research Center released Thursday — compared to 90% of Harris supporters. Forty-two percent of Trump supporters believed the elections would be run “not too well” or “not at all well.”
Both groups had high confidence in election administrators in 2018, Pew’s historical data shows, but a dramatic split between the Democratic and Republican candidate supporters developed in 2020 and has only grown wider since.
There was a similar split in confidence that mail-in and absentee ballots will be counted as voters intended, with 85% of Harris supporters confident the counts will be accurate compared to 38% of Trump supporters.
Voters were also split, though less dramatically, on how confident they were that in-person votes will be counted accurately, that state election officials and local poll workers will do a good job and that U.S. election systems are secure against cyberattacks.
Trump supporters were also far less confident than Harris supporters that there would be a clear winner of the election after all votes are counted — just 58% believed that would be the case, compared to 85% of Harris supporters.
Notably, Trump supporters were more likely to say that the Supreme Court would be “politically neutral” in decisions regarding legal challenges to the presidential election, with 34% extremely or very confident, versus just 6% for Harris supporters. The court currently leans conservative, with six justices appointed by Republican presidents — including three Trump appointees — and three justices appointed by Democrats.
The Pew poll reflected a survey of 4,025 registered voters from Sept. 30 to Oct. 6, 2024, either online or by phone, and weighted to represent population demographics, partisan affiliation, education and other factors. Respondents were members of Pew’s American Trends Panel, described as “a group of people recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses who have agreed to take surveys regularly.”
Trump has never unconditionally said he would accept the election results.
In June, during his CNN debate with President Joe Biden, he refused to say outright that he’d accept the results of the election after all legal challenges are exhausted. Instead, after several prods from moderator Dana Bash, Trump said, “If it’s a fair and legal and good election, absolutely,” before regurgitating his lies about the 2020 election: “I would have much rather accepted these, but the fraud and everything else was ridiculous.”
Last month, asked if he would certify the election should Harris win, House Speaker Mike Johnson replied, “Well of course — if we have a free, fair and safe election, we’re going to follow the Constitution. Absolutely.”
As outlets including Politifact, The Washington Post and Axios have documented, Trump has spent months emphasising the same lie he told in 2020: that the only way he will lose is if the election is rigged. (He used the same line in 2016.)
In August, he said at a North Carolina rally that “we have all the votes we’ll need” but that Democrats “are going to cheat like hell to win the election because they have no bounds.”
Last month, he said that if “there was no cheating — if God came down from on high and said ‘I’m going to be your vote tabulator for this election,’ I would leave this podium right now.” He separately told the Fraternal Order of Police, “Watch for the voter fraud, because we win without voter fraud, we win so easily.”
“We have to have a landslide because they cheat so damn much,” he added.
On Truth Social, he baselessly accused Democrats of using military and overseas ballots to cheat — rhetoric that the Republican Party has backed up with lawsuits targeting those voters.
Perhaps the one exception to Trump’s rhetoric about stolen elections came Monday, when he was asked if he’d seen any “incidents of cheating that lead you to believe that this election will not be fair.” Trump replied by saying, “I haven’t.”
“Unfortunately, I know the other side, and they are not good.”
