The Damage of Trump’s Voter-Fraud Allegations Can’t Be Undone

Read: Why Americans might not trust the election results

Trump has made some of his most incendiary claims on Twitter, and the social-media site drew his fury for appending to his tweets extremely mild language offering readers a fact-check. But that approach, the new research suggests, may not be much help here.

To test the effect of statements such as Trump’s, an interdisciplinary team of researchers showed research subjects statements from Trump and other GOP politicians and commentators alleging fraud in elections, either in small or great amounts. The results were distressing, if not altogether surprising: Republicans, as well as independents, saw their faith in the election system decrease. (Views among Democrats did not meaningfully change.) The effect was especially pronounced when subjects were split between approving or disapproving of Trump.

Then the researchers showed some subjects a different set of tweets that fact-checked the politicians’ claims. (They showed tweets, not articles, hoping to replicate the condition in which a voter might encounter claims in both directions on social media.) As fact-checking has expanded in the past few years, some research has shown that it can be effective in correcting voters’ misapprehensions. But in this case, the fact-checks didn’t create a measurable reduction in the damage to voter confidence. It’s not entirely clear why not, though Nyhan speculates that fact-checks, while effective at shifting voters’ beliefs about specific points, may be less effective at changing attitudes, such as confidence in elections.

At least two previous studies have examined the question of Republican faith in elections in the Trump era. A 2018 study found that, despite Trump’s rhetoric, GOP confidence didn’t decrease before the 2016 election—and Democratic faith actually increased in comparison with 2012, perhaps because Hillary Clinton and other prominent Democrats counteracted Trump’s sowing of doubt. Another study found that after his victory, Republican partisans felt better about election integrity: “Many Trump voters concluded that illegal voting was not only less consequential (Trump won, after all) but also less prevalent than they had thought.”

This is an established concept in political science: the winner effect. After a candidate wins, voters in his or her party tend to see an increase in confidence in elections (while those who support the loser may see a drop).

But the current moment in American politics makes the stakes higher than the normal seesaw pattern of partisan confidence. Following the hotly contested and flawed 2000 presidential election in Florida, Democratic confidence was lower than Republican. After George W. Bush won reelection in 2004, GOP voters “were already about 85% likely to be very confident in the accuracy of the election, and thus did not have a lot of room to increase,” Michael Sances and Charles Stewart found in 2014. But since then, a dramatic shift has taken place:

Across the decade, aggregate confidence in the country’s vote declined about 30 percentage points. However, this overall decline is due almost entirely to a forty-point decline among Republicans during this period. The biggest change occurred between 2004 and 2008, which saw a shift, from Republicans being more confident in the nationwide vote count, to Democrats expressing more confidence.

In part, this stretch saw a string of Democratic victories: 2006, 2008, and 2012 (interrupted by off-year Republican wins in 2010 and 2014). But it also saw a concerted effort by conservative activists to sow doubt about the integrity of election systems. Figures such as Kris Kobach, Hans von Spakovsky, and J. Christian Adams have alleged widespread fraud, in different forms: out-of-state voters, double voters, noncitizen voters. (They have repeatedly failed to produce evidence to back up their claims.)