7 in 10 doubt Trump would accept GOP losses in midterms: Survey

A new poll shows that most Americans surveyed doubt President Trump will accept the midterm election results if Republicans sustain losses in Congress and lose their majority.

The Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll found that 70 percent of respondents are not confident Trump will accept the results, including 36 percent of Republicans, 77 percent of independents and 94 percent of Democrats.

There’s confidence among 28 percent of respondents that Trump will accept the midterm results. Sixty-three percent of Republicans are confident Trump will accept the results, as are 21 percent of independents, while 6 percent of Democrats are confident he will accept the results.

Democratic leaders are largely considered likely to approve of the results, according to 61 percent of respondents to the poll. The majority of Democrats, at 88 percent, are confident their party leaders will accept the results if they sustain losses, as are 58 percent of independents. Pollsters found that 36 percent of Republicans think Democratic leaders will accept election losses.

A majority of Democrats polled, at 70 percent, and 67 percent of Republicans say they are confident, however, that the elections will be fair and accurate.

The poll also shows that 60 percent of all respondents are somewhat or very confident that the midterms will be conducted fairly; 51 percent of independents say they are confident compared to the 47 percent who say they are not.

Pollsters found that GOP confidence leading into the midterms is higher than their outlook on the 2024 election, when 49 percent said the votes would be counted accurately. After the election, 77 percent of Republicans said there was no evidence of voter fraud and nearly all said Trump’s victory was legitimate, according to a Washington Post-University of Maryland poll at the time.

Trump has frequently criticized the legitimacy of U.S. elections. He doubted his loss in the Iowa Republican presidential caucus to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) in 2016, accusing the senator of cheating and calling for a recount . These doubts continued, leading up to his unfounded claims of voter fraud following his loss to former President Biden in 2020.

The Justice Department (DOJ) has sought to investigate the president’s claims, recently charging 28 California voters who are allegedly not U.S. citizens. The crimes include fraudulently registering to vote in U.S. elections, with the majority of the 28 voting with “illegal and fraudulently obtained ballots,” the DOJ said on Monday.

The DOJ sued California on Thursday after providing state and local election officials with a USB drive containing voter roll citizenship data, giving the state 48 hours to compare 20,000 names the Department of Homeland Security flagged as non-U.S. citizens with its own data rolls. DOJ officials warned California officials of criminal charges if they did not include the names of those alleged non-citizens.

“They will all go to jail for a long period of time!!!” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post last Friday, sharing a copy of a letter the DOJ sent to the Los Angeles County Counsel’s Office.

The Post-ABC News-Ipsos survey was conducted Oct. 9-13 and included 2,545 respondents. The margin of error is 2 percentage points.