Terry Jones of Issues and Insights highlights bad news for the next major election cycle.
Will the 2024 election be fair, or marred by systematic cheating? Based on how Americans feel about recent elections and the coming presidential contest, most are confident the election will be fair. But there’s a huge political gap on the issue between Democrats on one side, and Republicans and independents on the other, the latest I&I/TIPP Poll shows.
First, the good news: 65% of the 1,223 registered voters queried in the national online I&I/TIPP Poll, which was taken from Aug. 30-Sept. 1, called themselves either “very confident” (42%) or “somewhat confident” (23%) that the 2024 election “will be conducted fairly and accurately.”
The bad news: 28% of Americans expressed being either “not very confident” (17%) or “not at all confident” (11%). So more than a quarter of the electorate harbors doubts about the legitimacy of the coming presidential election. The poll has a 2.9 percentage-point margin of error.
Further muddying the picture, the major parties and political affiliations appear far apart when it comes to questions of election fairness.
Among Democrats, 89% believe the 2024 elections will be fair and above board. That compares to just 42% of Republicans and 58% of independents. Conversely, a mere 7% of Democrats thought the elections would have fairness issues, compared to 51% of Republicans and 32% of independents.
By party, the responses have a margin of error of +/-4.1 percentage points for Democrats, +/-4.4 percentage points for Republicans, and +/-5.9 percentage points for independents.
We asked the same general question about the previous two elections, in 2020 and 2022, as well. The answers stayed mainly within the margins of error: For the 2020 election, the responses came back 61% “confident” vs. 34% “not confident,” while for 2022 it came out 65% to 26%.
