Donald Trump’s supporters are apparently worried that the old voter-registration organization ACORN will descend on the polls this year and steal the election from Trump. The only problem? The group doesn’t exist anymore.
From the Public Policy Polling crosstabs:
69% of Trump voters think that if Hillary Clinton wins the election it will be because it was rigged, to only 16% who think it would be because she got more vote[s] than Trump. More specifically 40% of Trump voters think that ACORN (which hasn’t existed in years) will steal the election for Clinton. That shows the long staying power of GOP conspiracy theories.
ACORN was a voter registration organization that fell victim to selectively-edited videos purporting to show the group engaging in fraud. Even though most of the claims were baseless the group, which employed people to turn out the vote, shut its doors for good in 2010.
This is not the only blatantly wrong information that a plurality of Trump supporters believe, according to this poll. 41 percent of Trump supporters believe Clinton is the literal devil, and 12 percent of them “aren’t sure one way or the other.” Some 47 percent of Trump supporters also say they saw the video showing money being delivered to Iran, even though Trump admitted no such video exists. Also 48 percent believe Captain Humayun Khan’s death, which occurred when Bush was President, was the fault of Barack Obama, a state senator at the time, and Hillary Clinton, then the Senator from New York.
This is likely to get worse, because Trump is continually pushing his narrative that the election is rigged against him, deploying his love of conspiracy theories. “Trump has regularly claimed that voter fraud is rampant in America, baselessly charging that Republicans were defeated in 2012 due to voter fraud and calling for a “revolution” to protest President Obama’s victory,” according to the Huffington Post.
Last week, we brought you a story in which neuroscientists tried to explain why Trump and his supporters may behave this way, even when what they believe is demonstrably untrue. Let us know what you think in the comments below.
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