New Poll on Republicans Reveals Just How Likely Another January 6 Is

A new report by the World Justice Project, an international group that assesses the rule of law in different countries, includes some startling findings regarding the 2024 U.S. presidential election.

Nearly half of Republican respondents, 46 percent, “said they would not accept election results as legitimate if the other party’s candidate won.” In addition, 14.2 percent said they would “take action to overturn election results,” though “the type of action—whether legal or illegal—was not specified in the survey question.”

The numbers were lower for Democrats: 27 percent said they would not accept the election results if the other party’s candidate won, and 10.6 percent said they would take action to overturn them.

Republican respondents expressed significantly less faith than Democrats in electoral processes, results, and authorities. They lacked confidence, for example, in the trustworthiness of election officials and the legitimacy of vote counts. On a few electoral issues, namely voting rights, Democratic respondents’ concerns tended to exceed those of Republicans.

Overall, the report—for which 1,046 U.S. households were interviewed just over a month before Joe Biden bowed out of the presidential race—found that around one-third of respondents would not accept the legitimacy of the upcoming election results if their candidate lost. Commenting on the report, the executive director of the World Justice Project, Elizabeth Andersen, told USA Today that the survey results seem “like a recipe for potential conflict in the aftermath of the election.”

Indeed, the findings about Republicans’ unwillingness to accept the 2024 election results, in particular, conjure grim memories of Trump’s efforts to overturn the last election, which culminated in the violence of January 6, 2021. And they’re hardly surprising, given Trump’s constant claims to his supporters, in this election cycle and throughout his political career, that electoral defeat is only possible in the event of foul play by his political opponents.