Nearly half of Americans believe the lie that Trump won in 2024 by a larger popular vote margin than Biden did in 2020.
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The stunning ignorance of American voters is one of Donald Trump’s greatest strengths… and a testament to the effectiveness of a right-wing propaganda network that conditions (primarily) conservatives as to what they should think.
We pointed this out repeatedly prior to the election, when polling indicated that voters were absolutely clueless about the actual state of the economy.
Unsurprisingly, things have not gotten better since then, which does not bode well for the ability of Americans to accurately assess how well Trump’s second term in office is going.
Because if he and his allies can get away with lies that anybody with an Internet connection could disprove within 10 seconds, then his actual performance does not even matter.
For example, a Constitution-hating lawmaker like Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN) would not even have to introduce legislation trying to clear the way for giving Trump a third term in office.
Why go through the trouble of passing that when you can just tell Americans that the president’s long-lost twin, Ronald J. Trump, had been located and decided to run for office himself in 2028?
Here is what we are talking about: In November, Trump (Donald, not Ronald) and his Republicans won an election that was, by almost any measure, pretty close.
Yes, he swept all seven swing states and therefore won the Electoral College by a solid 312-226, which was slightly better than Joe Biden did in 2020 (306-232). However, if a total of just 115,000 of his supporters in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin had voted for Kamala Harris, then she would have prevailed.
In other words, it was fairly tight, especially compared to blowouts like Ronald Reagan’s 1984 win in which he secured 525 out of 538 Electoral College votes.
For the first time in three tries, Trump also won the popular vote but failed to crack 50 percent. In the end, he bested Harris by 2.3 million votes, or about 1.5 percent.
That’s not the smallest margin of victory ever (after all, Trump lost the popular vote by nearly three million votes in 2016 but prevailed in the Electoral College), but it’s fairly close, certainly compared to the shellacking he got in 2020. Back then, Biden trounced him by more than 7 million votes.
In other words, Biden’s margin of victory was three times as large as Trump’s.
So why is Trump running around claiming that he won a “landslide” victory and has earned an overwhelming mandate from the American people?
Because, apparently, they will just believe him.
A poll from Friday shows that 49 percent of Americans think that Trump won in 2024 by a larger popular vote margin than Biden did in 2020, as opposed to 28 percent who knew the correct answer.
The only group that got this very simple question right was Democrats. Every other group of Americans, whether segmented by gender, political orientation, age, race, or region, erroneously believed that it was Trump.
This election just happened, and this is an easily verifiable fact. And, still, by a large margin, Americans apparently felt that Trump proclaiming that he won by a landslide superseded reality.
There is a lot of talk out there about how it’s important not to blame GOP voters or the fact that they believe a charlatan, but it’s tough not to when this poll shows that only 10 percent of them were able to answer this question correctly.
There is simply no way to have a real debate on anything with people who are so ignorant or who refuse to believe any truth that they do not like.
This poll is just a preview of what’s to come over the next four years, especially because Republicans have learned this lesson from Trump.
They know that they can get away with just about anything as long as they lie loudly enough about it.
In his Navigating the Insanity columns, Klaus Marre provides the kind of hard-hitting, thought-provoking, and often humorous analysis you won’t find anywhere else.
