X

Six in 10 Trump Voters Believe Millions of Votes Were Cast Illegally, but Just One in 10 Thinks Russia Hacked Election

Pizzagate? They Believe That’s True Too…

A brand new poll from The Economist and YouGov has found a surprisingly strong majority of Republicans believe some of the craziest and totally false things they’ve heard, as long as it come from or supports Donald Trump.

For instance, more than six in 10 Trump supporters (62%) believe the lie Trump told, saying “millions” of votes were cast illegally in the 2016 election. Millions. This has been proven false and there is literally zero evidence to support such a claim, but Trump said it so naturally conservatives believe it. Sadly, one in four Democrats agree.

It gets worse.

Eight out of ten Trump voters do not believe that Russia hacked the DNC’s and Clinton campaign chair John Podesta’s emails, despite all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies stating they did. 87 percent of Democrats agree with the CIA.

Those hacked and leaked emails, according to fake news websites, claim, supposedly, that Hillary Clinton and John Podesta are running an underground child pornography, pedophilia, and human trafficking operation from the basement of a Washington, D.C. Pizzeria, the so-called “pizzagate” story – which is false. Totally false. 

Yet almost half – 46 percent – of Republican voters believe it to be true. 

Sadly, YouGov reports that lies believed often stay “true” inside believers’ minds.

Once a story is believed, it also seems to stay believed,” YouGov reports. “Donald Trump may have proclaimed that President Obama was born in the United States (having doubted that for years), but half of his supporters still think that it is at least probably true that the President was born in Kenya.  And in the U.S. as a whole, a majority believes that in 2003, when the United States invaded Iraq, Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that the U.S. never found.”

 

To comment on this article and other NCRM content, visit our Facebook page.

Image by Gage Skidmore via Flickr and a CC license

Related Post