WASHINGTON (AP) – About three quarters of voters who supported Republican candidates in the second round of the Georgia Senate say President-elect Joe Biden was not legitimately elected in November, according to AP VoteCast, a poll of voters in the contests. high-risk in the Senate on Tuesday.
The voter poll measured how deeply President Donald Trump’s false allegations of fraud and misconduct reverberated among Republicans in the state. More than 100 Republicans in Congress said they would pose an extraordinary challenge to Biden’s victory on Wednesday, a decision that severely divides the party.
Although courts, state officials and the Justice Department found no evidence of widespread electoral fraud, about 9 out of 10 Republican supporters said they were not confident that the votes in the November presidential race were accurately counted. Half said they had no confidence in the vote count. This is almost five times as many Republicans who said in November they were not confident that votes would be counted accurately.
AP VoteCast interviewed more than 3,600 voters in the runoff elections that will determine which party will control the US Senate. The research points to a party division that has only worsened since November and suggests that Biden may have difficulty repairing the nation as it struggles with a resurgent pandemic and a weakened economy.
While about 8 out of 10 Republican voters approve of the way Trump handled election results, Democratic voters disapprove almost universally. Most Democrats are very confident that votes have been accurately counted.
If Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock win in Georgia, their party will have half of the 100 Senate seats, with Vice President-elect Kamala Harris as the tiebreaker. But if their respective opponents, David Perdue and Senator Kelly Loeffler, triumph, the Republican Party would have a small majority in the Senate to challenge Biden and the Democrats who run the House of Representatives.
About 6 out of 10 voters in Georgia said that Senate control was the most important factor in their choice. However, Republican supporters were more likely to prioritize maintaining the majority in the Senate than Democratic supporters.
With Biden beating Georgia by just 11,779 votes in November, Senate contests are likely to be decided by turnout. Democratic areas performed strongly in the early polls, suggesting that Republicans needed a strong display of supporters to vote on Tuesday.
The Democratic operation to take the vote appears to have been broader. About 6 out of 10 voters in Georgia said they were contacted on behalf of Democratic candidates before the election, compared with almost half of those contacted on behalf of Republicans.
The election came after Congress and Trump approved an additional $ 900 billion in aid for an economy still hampered by the coronavirus outbreak. The spending package included expanded unemployment benefits, $ 600 in direct payments to individuals who earn up to $ 75,000 annually and $ 284 billion to help smaller employers meet their payrolls.
About 7 out of 10 voters in Georgia say that Congress is doing very little to help the financial situation of individual Americans and small businesses in response to the pandemic. That view was held by most Democratic and Republican voters, although about a quarter of Loeffler and Perdue’s voters say that Congress is providing the right amount of assistance.
The candidates’ experience was the subject of debate in both campaigns. Neither Ossoff, a 33-year-old media executive, nor Warnock, 51, the senior pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church, a congregation that was once led by civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr., held public office.
Republican Loeffler was appointed to the Senate in 2019 after a career in the financial sector, having accumulated an estimated family fortune of about $ 500 million largely with her husband’s position as president of the Intercontinental Exchange.
Voters are intimately divided over whether Ossoff, Warnock or Loeffler each have “the right experience to serve effectively as a senator”, while about two-thirds say that Perdue does. Perdue was elected to the Senate in 2014, but the term of the former Dollar General CEO ended Sunday.
The two Republican candidates faced scrutiny for extensive negotiations over shares in office. The majority of voters, 56%, say they are very or a little concerned about the allegations that Perdue and Loeffler were involved in privileged stock negotiations. This includes about 2 out of 10 of your own sponsors.
Democrats, for their part, have been labeled “radicals” and “socialists” by their Republican rivals. The poll revealed that voters were slightly more likely to see Democratic candidates as “too extreme” in their political views. About half say that Warnock and Ossoff are, compared to about 4 out of 10 for Perdue and Loeffler.
___
AP VoteCast is an American voter poll conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago for Fox News and The Associated Press. The poll of 3,732 voters in Georgia was conducted for eight days, concluding with the polls closing. The interviews were conducted in English. The survey combines a random sample of registered voters from the state’s voter registration file and registered voters who identify themselves, selected from online non-probability panels. The sampling error margin for voters is estimated to be about 2.1 percentage points. Find more details about the AP VoteCast methodology at https://www.ap.org/votecast.