It really is rich how the circle jerk has seized on propaganda here.
I’m not sure who you’re talking about when you say “circle jerk,” but I’m not part of any liberal lefty group. If I could stomach the state of the party right now, I’d probably be more likely to vote GOP than Democrat. However, I simply see what is repeated again and again by members of the MAGA movement and its leadership.
They are not parsing the subtlety of whether “legitimate” means 100% in conformance with every rule at every level. They are repeating, transparently and openly, that Pres Biden was not legitimately elected, that Donald Trump should be the president, that the vote was stolen, etc. They’re not walking a fine line. They’re way over the line and down in the abyss.
You can try to pretend that the respondents to these often repeated questions, and the people who choose to speak on the topic unprompted, are just concerned with minor irregularities here and there, but that is simply not reflective of reality.
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About half of Americans continue to feel that it is at least somewhat likely that elected officials will successfully overturn the results of a US election if their party does not win (50%). That view has been fairly stable since CNN began polling on the question in summer 2021. There has been an uptick in the share of political independents who feel that it’s at least somewhat likely, though, from 42% who felt that way last summer to 53% now.
From the above, I conclude that 50% of Democrats think our elections are illegitimate.
Congratulations, the exact propaganda trick I described earlier has worked. The MAGA wing of the GOP has repeated its accusations of stolen elections so many times, and it has placed MAGA adherents in so many key positions, and those adherents have repeated the lies and talked about ways to skirt around election laws or change them so that the vote can be disregarded so many times,…that other people have now had to concede that our electoral processes are at risk.
After the next cycle, if we see that the votes are counted and the results tallied, and the winners take office, confidence in our processes will return. If we see the votes counted, and the results tallied, and then a MAGA appointee or elected official do an end-run around those results to put someone else in office, then people will continue to feel that our electoral processes are at risk or broken.
The difference is that this belief will be based on actual plain evidence of wrongdoing, instead of based on disproven and baseless accusations hurled as part of a massive propaganda machine.