Trump voters grapple with Biden’s victory
For weeks Trump has been on a mission to convince his loyal base his victory was stolen and the contest was rigged.
WASHINGTON >> Robert Reed says he will always believe the 2020 election was stolen from President Donald Trump. The retired police officer-turned-construction worker believes fraud marred the vote, no matter how many courts rejected that claim. Still, a day after the Electoral College made Joe Biden’s win official, the ardent Trump supporter from the suburbs of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, was ready to move on.
“I think it’s pretty much over,” Reed said of Trump’s ongoing quest to overturn the results of the election. “I trust the Electoral College.”
For weeks, Trump has been on a mission to convince his loyal base that his victory was stolen and the contest was rigged. With help from conservative media, polls show he’s had considerable success. But now that the Electoral College has formalized Biden’s win and Republican officials, including Senate Leader Mitch McConnell, are finally acknowledging Biden as president- elect, many Trump voters across the country seem to be doing the same.
Interviews with voters, along with fresh surveys of Republicans, suggest their unfounded doubts about the integrity of the vote remain. But there is far less consensus on what should be done about it and whether to carry that resentment forward.
For some, like Reed, the Electoral College vote was the clear end of a process. Others have vowed to continue to protest with demonstrations like the one that turned violent in Washington, D.C., over the weekend. And some said they hoped GOP leaders would press for more investigations to put the doubts Trump sowed to rest. They are people like Scott Adams, a retiree and Trump voter living in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, who said he accepts Biden’s victory — but “with reservations.”
Adams said he’s heard too much discussion about irregularities in the vote count on Fox News Channel and conservative talk radio to trust the election’s outcome and doesn’t feel he’ll ever know the true margin of victory. (Biden won the Electoral College by a vote of 306 to 232.)
But Adams doesn’t think the election was rigged enough to change the outcome, even if he believes it was “rigged enough that it should be questioned more.” He’d like to see more investigations.
Republicans across the country — from local officials to governors to Attorney General William Barr — have said repeatedly there is no evidence mass voter fraud affected the outcome. Trump and his allies brought a flurry of lawsuits, but nearly all have been dismissed by judges. The Supreme Court, which includes three Trump-nominated justices, denied requests to hear a pair of cases aimed at invalidating the outcome of the election in key battleground states.
Still, coming to terms with this pile of evidence has been difficult for many Trump voters. They expressed disbelief that Trump could have lost, given the huge crowds he drew to his rallies. Some said their suspicions were heightened by the mainstream media’s reluctance to air Trump’s baseless claims. And they repeatedly pointed to the slowerthan-usual vote count as evidence something had gone awry.
“Something’s not right here,” said Reed, 61, who lives in East Lampeter Township.
The explanation is well known — in many states, an influx of mail-in ballots, overwhelmingly cast by Democrats, were tallied later than ballots cast in person. Still, Reed said he thought the courts should have spent more time investigating.
“I’ll always believe that it was stolen from him. I’ll really never be able to have peace of mind that it wasn’t,” he said.
Others were less willing to go along.
“I don’t trust that result. I think that the election was a fraud. I think the election was stolen. I don’t know how anybody could not think that. All you have to do is look at the results,” said Katherine Negrete, 55, a teacher living in Peoria, Arizona.
Negrete is among those who holds out hope that Trump can win if the Supreme Court intervenes (there is no indication that will happen) or Congress chooses to accept an “alternative slate” of Trump electors from several states. Election experts have said that scheme has no legal pathway and Republican Senate leaders have discouraged it.
Still, Negrete said, “hopefully Congress will do the right thing” and she expressed frustration with dwindling options.
“I don’t know what we can do about that. If we don’t have the courts that stand up for us,” she said. “If we don’t have an attorney general that will stand up and say, ‘This was wrong and we need to investigate it.’ What are we supposed to do? Do we need to fight brother against brother? It’s