Confidence in US Elections After the Big Lie

• Published date: 01 March 2024
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/10659129231206179
• Author: Shaun Bowler,Todd Donovan
• Date: 01 March 2024
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Political Research Quarterly

2024, Vol. 77(1) 283–296

© The Author(s) 2023

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DOI: 10.1177/10659129231206179

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Conf‌idence in US Elections After the Big

Lie

Shaun Bowler

1

and Todd Donovan

2



Abstract

This paper examines how individual-level partisanship and state-level factors affect perceptions of electora l integrity in

the United States. We f‌ind that evaluations of the integrity of the 2020 US presidential election national outcome were

only modestly conditioned by the quality of election administration in a person’s state. Perceptions of electoral legitimacy

were much more substantially conditioned by motivated reasoning associated with a person’s partisanship, the partisan

context Republicans resided in, and Republican partisans’residence in a swing-state where f‌inal results from 2020 were

delayed due to late-counted ballots. Overall, estimated effects of the quality of election administration on conf‌idence in

elections are null or modest. Partisan factors associated with Donald Trump’s“Big Lie”about the 2020 US presidential

election were the strongest forces predicting lack of conf‌idence in US elections and perceptions that election off‌icials

were altering results. These factors were not evident in 2016. We discuss how these f‌indings may ref‌lect a fundamental

alteration of attitudes among Republican voters and elites about the legitimacy of democratic elections in the US, rather

than ref‌lecting cyclical variation in partisan conf‌idence associated with which party won the past election.

Keywords

electoral integrity, conf‌idence in elections, public opinion, Donald Trump

Introduction

The 2000 Bush versus Gore presidential election, with its

f‌iasco over vote counting in Florida (Atkeson and

Saunders 2007), helped to usher in a series of reforms

of electoral administration within the United States (e.g.,

Hale and Slaton 2008;Wise 2001). Yet, despite the many

innovations and reforms in the conduct of US elections

since 2000, false allegations from Republicans of

absentee/mail voting fraud and of off‌icial misconduct in

processing ballots were prominent features of the 2020 US

presidential election. Partisanship colored views on US

elections prior to Donald Trump (Ansolabehere and

Persily 2008;Bowler and Donovan 2016), but trends in

opinions presented below suggest that Trump’s“Big

Lie”—falsely alleging election fraud in 2020 (Jacobson

2021)—may have heightened partisan polarization in

attitudes about US elections after his defeat. One question

of interest we seek to address is whether those reform

efforts blunted the polarization in views of integrity in

2020.

There is no actual evidence that Trump’s loss in 2020

resulted from anything other than his failure to persuade

suff‌icient numbers of voters in enough states to vote for

him. Despite the many inducements and opportunities

offered by right-wing media and politicians—including

the promise of very large f‌inancial rewards

1

—and scores

of failed court cases, no evidence has been brought for-

ward which shows that Trump’s loss was due to fraud

(Canon and Sherman 2021). Moreover, as repeated

studies show, it is not just that the 2020 US presidential

election was unusually clean (e.g., Eggers et al. 2021;

Funke et al. 2020). There is very little evidence indeed of

any kind of systematic fraud in the thousands of elections

held in the US—state, local, or federal (e.g., Alvarez et al.

2009;Minnite 2011).

Despite this pattern of clean elections, partisans—

particularly Trump and his Republican allies—cast

doubt on the conduct of elections, especially ones that

they lose. These heightened national partisan divisions in

1

University of California, Riverside, CA, USA

2

Western Washington University, Bellingham, WA, USA

Corresponding Author:

Todd Donovan, Department of Political Science, Western Washington

University, MS 9082, Bellingham, WA 98225, USA.

Email: Todd.Donovan@wwu.edu