A quarter of Republicans say Trump shouldn’t concede ‘no matter what,’ polls finds
Most Republicans don’t think President Donald Trump should concede the election to President-elect Joe Biden “right away,” a poll found.
And a quarter of Republicans-leaning voters say the president shouldn’t concede at all — regardless of what happens.
The Politico/Morning Consult poll of 1,994 registered voters found 46% of respondents overall think the president should concede victory “right away,” while 32% said he should do so if he can’t “back up his claims of widespread fraud” and 12% said he shouldn’t concede “no matter what.”
Trump has refused to concede to Biden — projected the winner of the presidential election by The Associated Press on Nov. 7 — and has continued to lodge unfounded claims that the election was fraudulent in an attempt to cast doubt on its outcome.
Biden has won 290 Electoral College votes to Trump’s 232, according to the AP, with Georgia yet to be called.
Elections officials representing both parties from across the country have said there’s been no evidence of voter fraud or “other irregularities” that would have affected the election results, The New York Times reports.
But Trump’s campaign has filed numerous lawsuits about the election results in multiple battleground states. The legal challenges have largely failed to hold up in court and haven’t “come close to proving a multi-state failure” that would shift the results and give Trump a second term, The AP reports.
The poll, conducted Nov. 13-16 with a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points, found opinions on concession were largely divided along partisan lines.
While 72% of Democratic or Democratic-leaning voters said Trump should concede “right away,” 16% of Republican or Republican-leaning voters said the same.
Of Republicans who don’t think the president should concede to Biden now, 48% said he should do so if he can’t back up his claims about fraud — and 25% said he shouldn’t concede “no matter what.”
Twenty percent and 3% of Democrats answered the same, respectively.
Trump has reportedly told his allies he has no plans to concede to Biden. Concession isn’t legally required, and though a refusal to do so would break a long-standing norm in American elections, it wouldn’t have an impact on finalizing election results or prevent Biden from taking office on Jan. 20, 2021.
But the president’s administration is slow-walking the transition of power, preventing Biden and his team from accessing important information — including on national security and the coronavirus pandemic — as well as government office space and funding usually made available to the president-elect, McClatchy News previously reported.
The transfer of power process won’t be green-lighted until Emily Murphy, the Trump-appointed administrator of the General Services Administration, formally recognizes Biden as the president-elect. And the stalling of that process “poses a serious risk to the U.S.,” John Podesta, co-chairperson of former President Barack Obama’s transition team, told NPR.
The president-elect’s transition team, however, has moved forward with assembling White House staff — last week naming Ron Klain as chief of staff, and this week naming several senior staff positions. Biden is expected to continue filling roles and naming cabinet members in the coming weeks.
This story was originally published November 18, 2020 at 7:16 AM with the headline "A quarter of Republicans say Trump shouldn’t concede ‘no matter what,’ polls finds."
