Trump’s 2020 election lie has become an article of faith for his supporters

For anyone else running for public office, a laundry list of criminal charges after attempting to overthrow an election would be a liability.

For Donald Trump and his vehement followers, the court cases don’t show accountability – they show a conspiracy against their leader, one worthy of doubling down their support.

Trump’s commanding victory in Iowa on Monday, and polling that shows the majority of Iowa Republicans do not believe the 2020 election was legitimate, show how the former president has successfully transformed efforts to hold him accountable for anti-democratic actions into something to rally his supporters around.

President Joe Biden has centered his early campaigning around the threat Trump poses to US democracy. In turn, Trump has called Biden the “true threat to democracy”. The role-reversal seems to be working with his supporters.

An NBC News entrance poll found a resounding 90% of Trump voters didn’t believe Biden legitimately won the election in 2020. A much lower 40% of Ron DeSantis don’t believe Biden won. For Nikki Haley, just 19% held that belief.

“On the one hand, the turnout for the 2024 Iowa caucuses was much lower than past caucuses, so these results certainly skew higher than what we would find in a nationally representative sample because those who turned out are conservative (89%) or very conservative (52%),” said Sara Mitchell, a political science professor at the University of Iowa, citing an entrance poll by ABC News. “On the other hand, Trump’s rhetoric about the ‘big lie’ has reduced Republican confidence in election outcomes generally.”

Indeed, national polls show Republicans hold deep skepticism over the legitimacy of Biden’s win. Just 31% of Republicans nationally believe Biden’s election