WASHINGTON (AP) – About three-quarters of voters who supported Republican candidates in Georgia’s Senate qualifiers say President-elect Joe Biden was not legitimately elected in November, according to AP VoteCast, a poll conducted on voters in the contests in the Senate of high participation on Tuesday.
The voter survey measured the extent to which President Donald Trump’s false allegations of fraud and misconduct with state Republicans have resonated. It comes as more than 100 Republicans in Congress have said they will launch an extraordinary challenge to Biden’s victory on Wednesday, a decision that sharply splits the party.
Although courts, state officials, and the Justice Department found no evidence of widespread election fraud, about 9 out of 10 Republican advocates said they did not have much confidence that the votes in the November presidential contest would be counted accurately. . Half said they did not trust the vote count at all. It’s about five times more than Republicans said in November that they didn’t have confidence that the votes would be counted accurately.
AP VoteCast polled more than 3,600 voters in the election to determine which party will control the U.S. Senate. The poll points to a partisan divergence that has only worsened since November and suggests Biden may have difficulty uniting the nation as it fights a resurgent pandemic and a weakened economy.
While about eight out of ten Republican voters approve of how Trump handled the election results, Democratic voters hardly approve. Most Democrats are very confident that votes will be counted accurately.
If Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock won in Georgia, his party would occupy 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, win, the Republican Party would have a narrow Senate majority to challenge Biden and the Democrats who ran the House of Representatives.
About 6 out of 10 Georgia voters said Senate control was the most important factor in their election. However, Republican supporters were more likely to prioritize a Senate majority than Democratic supporters.
With Biden winning Georgia by just 11,779 votes in November, races in the Senate are likely to be decided by turnout. Democratic areas performed well in the early ballots, suggesting Republicans needed a strong demonstration of supporters to vote Tuesday.
The democratic exit operation seems to have been broader. About 6 out of 10 Georgia voters said they were contacted on behalf of Democratic candidates before the election, compared to about half who were reached on behalf of Republicans.
The election came after Congress and Trump approved additional $ 900 billion in aid to an economy that was still disengaged from the coronavirus outbreak. The spending package included extended unemployment benefits, $ 600 in direct payments to people earning up to $ 75,000 a year, and $ 284 billion to help smaller employers meet their payrolls.
Nearly two-thirds of all Georgia voters were pessimistic about the future of the nation. While Democrats ’attitudes have only improved slightly, Republican views on the country have changed dramatically.
In November, about three-quarters of Republican voters in Georgia considered the nation on the right track. Now, about 7 out of 10 say the country is going the wrong way.
A large majority of Georgia voters (7 out of 10) say Congress is doing too little to help the financial situation of the United States and small businesses in response to the pandemic. This view was defended by a majority of Democratic and Republican voters, although about a quarter of Loeffler and Perdue voters said Congress provided the right amount of attendance.
Candidates ’experience was a source 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 led by civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr.
Republican Loeffler was appointed to the Senate in 2019 after a career in the financial sector, having amassed an estimated family fortune of approximately $ 500 million, largely from her husband’s position as head of the company that owns the New York Stock Exchange and other financial resources. markets.
Voters are closely divided on whether Ossoff, Warnock or Loeffler each have “the right experience to effectively serve as a senator,” while about two-thirds say Perdue does. Perdue was elected to the Senate in 2014, but the term of the former general manager of Dollar General expired on Sunday.
Both Republican candidates have been the subject of scrutiny over the broad stock business in office. The majority of voters, 56%, say they are very or somewhat concerned about allegations that Perdue and Loeffler were engaged in the negotiation of privileged reports. This includes about 2 out of 10 of your own sponsors.
Meanwhile, Democrats were called “radicals” and “socialists” by their Republican Party rivals. The poll found that voters were a little more likely to consider Democratic candidates “too extreme” in their political views. About half say Warnock and Ossoff are, compared to about 4 out of 10 for Perdue and Loeffler.
Among Republican voters, Loeffler and Perdue’s association with Trump was considered favorable. About eight out of ten of his sponsors said Republican Party candidates supported Trump the right amount.
___
AP VoteCast is a poll conducted by NORC on the U.S. electorate at the University of Chicago for Fox News and The Associated Press. The poll of 3,792 voters in Georgia was conducted over eight days, ending the polls closing. The interviews were conducted in English. The survey combines a random sample of registered voters extracted from the state voter file and self-identified registered voters selected from the non-probability online panels. It is estimated that the margin of error of sampling of voters is more or less 2.1 percentage points. More details on the AP VoteCast methodology can be found at https://www.ap.org/votecast.