Trust fall: Trump’s win or loss will further damage our elections • Kansas Reflector

The Rule said, “Don’t talk about politics at the dinner table.”

It wasn’t polite to mention deficit spending, because, well … The Rule. And not immigration. Or racism. Or abortion. Or inflation.

And according to The Rule, you certainly shouldn’t bring up the candidates. You weren’t to mention how you didn’t trust the Democrat, or how you didn’t agree with the Republican.

The Rule told us this talk was too divisive. Instead, just tell your dinner guests that you voted, because, even if we couldn’t agree on policy or candidates, we agreed to trust the elections.

How old-fashioned.

Today, merely mentioning the election — mail-in ballots, early voting, election fraud, poll workers — is just as likely to kick up a fight as a debate about the choice between Democrat or Republican, red or blue, pro-life or pro-choice.

At its core, the 2024 presidential election next week will shine a spotlight on our confidence in democratic election results. Will we trust the announced winners? A partisan divide on basic election logistics suggests that we could be in for a roiling debate, not just at our national dinner table, but here in Kansas as well.

A report on the political attitudes of Kansans published this week by the Docking Institute at Fort Hays State University surveyed hundreds of voters statewide.

It happily noted, “Respondents had high confidence with the election results in Kansas. About sixty percent (60.5%) of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that they were confident that the reported winners of the elections in Kansas are actually the candidates that most Kansas voted for.”

Is 60.5% a number that should make us confident?

The fact that anyone reads this polling result as positive news is itself discouraging. To that same question, 10.4% said they disagree or strongly disagree. The same number said they “don’t know.”

This is not “high confidence” in elections. Those “disagree” and “don’t know” percentages, even if wildly off, represent tens of thousands of Kansans that might believe the wrong candidate — their candidate — unfairly lost.

How have those confidence percentages changed during the past few years? Not much. While it’s positive news that Kansans aren’t doubting their elections more each year, we might also worry that this doubt is becoming part of the political identity of Kansans.

Kansans are worried about problems that either don’t exist or problems so rare that they are difficult to document:

• 15.3% believe that illegal immigrants were voting in Kansas elections in large numbers.
• 11.6% believe that voter fraud routinely decides the winners of elections in Kansas.
• Sizeable numbers believed ballot drop boxes should be banned (23.5%) and vote by mail should be abolished (23%).

Call it Kansas election skepticism.

The scare-mongering of Kris Kobach might have successfully entrenched this anxiety about elections into Kansans. His deceptive hyperventilation about voter fraud played out in the courts, in his grasps for national office and in his run for governor. His constant squawks about voter fraud and election integrity may have nudged our statewide attitudes toward suspicion, along with Trump’s more recent shoves on the national stage.

How much is this a Kansas belief and how much is this a Republican belief? That’s difficult to tease out from the survey. All we can see is that 34.1% identified as some kind of “conservative,” while 23.5% identified somewhere along the range of “liberal.”

To answer this question, we need to check national partisan attitudes.

In a report issued last month, Gallup surveyed nationally on the issue of “votes cast by people who, by law, are not eligible to vote.” A wide majority of Republicans (74%)  identified this as a “major problem,” while only 14% of Democrats saw it that way. Other surveys found similar partisan divides.

According to the Pew Research Center, Democrats (90%) are 33 percentage points more likely to forecast this election as being run and administered very or somewhat well than Republicans (57%). Trump supporters are less trusting than Harris supporters of election basics such as vote counting, poll workers and election officials. The divide on mail-in ballots is the widest: 85% of Harris supporters are confident in them as opposed to 38% of Trump supporters.

An area of skeptical overlap? Only 8% of all respondents to the Pew poll said they are highly confident in the Supreme Court’s neutrality, if it needed to issue an election decision (2% for Harris supporters; 14% for Trump supporters).

That kind of animosity — whether from one political party or both — toward the basic function of voting is an existential threat to democracy. As some of Trump’s advisers whispered to his deaf ear in 2020, it’s vital to American democracy that the loser trusts both the counts and the courts, and steps aside.

Clearly, Trump’s false claims about voting have fueled Republican doubts about elections. Look no further than Kansas Speaks: It didn’t start asking about election confidence until the 2022 fall survey, in the wake of Trump’s fraudulent clinging to office.

The Rule about dinner table politics was a domestic rule about courtesy. Respect the people who sit across the table from you — enough to not clutter the table with politics.

A Trump biographer and the new movie about Trump’s rise detail another version of The Rule. Along with two other tenets, Trump learned this lesson from the ruthless New York lawyer Roy Cohn. This version of The Rule? “Claim victory and never admit defeat.”

Trump’s dogged insistence that he won — that he always wins — is his personal version of what MIT election experts call the “loser’s regret phenomenon.”

Researchers with their Election Data + Science Lab have documented this effect over decades and across countries. When voters watch their preferred candidate lose, they express less confidence in the election process. Logically, there is a “winner’s effect,” calculated by tracking how much more confident people become in elections after their candidate wins.

When combined, these effects can be substantial. Simply put in one of their studies, “Winners are consistently more trusting of the vote count than losers.” In this way, the reaction of Trump and his followers was at once predictable and extreme, as they searched for votes in Georgia, waged losing court battles and ultimately stormed the Capitol.

Four days from the election, we are caught in a dilemma of election confidence. If voters elect Trump as president next week, he will have four more years in power to damage confidence in our elections. During his first term, he used the bully pulpit to cast doubt about voting machines, poll workers and election commissions. We should expect more of the same from a second Trump term. We should expect election confidence to slide, even with the winner’s effect. Republicans might be buoyed, but Democrats will doubt, with everyone soured by Trump’s deep distrust of elections.

Conversely, if Trump loses, he is likely to fight the election results. The Rule of “never admitting defeat” means a wave of loser’s regret, fueled by Trump’s childish insistence that he must win. His supporters are likely to feel that sting and doubt returns in upcoming elections.

Either way, Trump and his enablers have been and likely will continue to be an accelerant of election doubt, fueling unbounded and unfounded skepticism. Four years from now, political scientists likely will still be polling doubting Kansans who will be thinking of Trump’s lies and parroting them around the kitchen table to anyone who will listen — even if it ruins family dinner.

In this way and many others, the bonfires that Trump and his operatives lit within our elections will still be burning, regardless of who wins next week.

Eric Thomas teaches visual journalism and photojournalism at the William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.