Most Americans are confident that next month’s midterm elections will be conducted fairly, but 7 in 10 lack confidence that President Donald Trump will accept the results if Republicans lose, according to a poll by The Washington Post, ABC News and Ipsos.
The doubts extend into Trump’s own party. Thirty-six percent of Republicans say they are not confident Trump would accept GOP losses, along with 77 percent of independents and 94 percent of Democrats. Yet Democrats and Republicans agree nearly identically on whether the elections will be fair and accurate: 70 percent of Democrats and 67 percent of Republicans say they are confident.
Trump has spent years casting doubt on elections. Asked by NBC News in February whether he would trust the results if Republicans lost Congress, he said, “I will if the elections are honest.”
Court reviews and independent studies have found little evidence of significant problems or widespread fraud in elections. For years, Trump has hammered on false claims that he won in 2020 and insisted without evidence that he received more votes in 2016 than official results show.
“He has to throw dirt on it if it doesn’t come out his way, period,” said Jonnie Smith, 69, a human resources manager from Johnson City, Tennessee, who typically votes for Republicans but opposes Trump. “He’s shown us that every time he loses.”
Under the Constitution, states administer elections and the president has no direct role in running them. But Trump has said he wants to “nationalize the voting” and “take over” elections. In a January interview with the New York Times, he said he regretted not having troops take possession of voting machines after he lost in 2020. Local election officials told The Post in recent weeks that they are preparing for the possibility of seized ballots and federal agents at the polls.
The Post-ABC-Ipsos poll shows more Americans expect Republicans to lose the House than to keep it, but that expectation is not universal. Thirty-five percent predict that Democrats will win control, while 16 percent expect Republicans to hold on. Twenty-eight percent call the race for the House a toss-up, and 21 percent are unsure.
Gary Podbielski, 67, a retired information technology manager in the Houston area, typically votes for Republicans but plans to vote for Democrats this year. He said there’s no way Trump will accept results he doesn’t like.
“He’ll fight it,” Podbielski said. “He’ll say something stupid.”
Americans are more confident that Democratic Party leaders would accept a loss, with 61 percent saying they were very or somewhat confident. That view split along party lines: 88 percent of Democrats are confident, compared with 36 percent of Republicans. Among independents, 58 percent are confident Democratic leaders would accept a loss.
Trump has tried to change how elections are run before any votes are counted. His administration has hobbled federal agencies meant to safeguard voting, and he tried to restrict mail voting until the Supreme Court blocked him. He has drummed up fears about voting by noncitizens and foreign attempts to interfere with elections.
In the poll, 6 in 10 Americans said they were somewhat or very confident that the midterms would be conducted fairly. Independents were less sure, with 51 percent expressing confidence and 47 percent a lack of confidence.
“I always do feel that the elections are fair,” said Patty Nelson, a 58-year-old executive assistant in Jonesboro, Arkansas, who voted for Trump two years ago but plans to sit the midterms out. “I feel like we have a [voting] system in America that works.”
Sixty-five percent of Americans say they are confident votes will be counted accurately, essentially unchanged from 66 percent shortly before the 2022 midterms, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll at the time. Democrats are more confident than Republicans in the latest survey, 76 percent to 68 percent. Fifty-five percent of independents are confident.
Republican confidence is much higher today than on the eve of the 2024 election, when an ABC News-Ipsos poll found 49 percent were confident that votes would be counted accurately. After the election, nearly all Republicans said Trump’s win was legitimate and 77 percent said there was no solid evidence of voter fraud, according to a Post-UMD poll.
In the latest poll, undecided voters and those who didn’t plan to vote have the least confidence in Democrats to accept a loss, at 37 percent, with 16 percent confident in Trump to do the same.
Jennifer Fenderson, a 41-year-old nurse in Leesburg, Florida, voted for Trump in 2024 but has not decided whom to back in this year’s races for governor and Senate. She considers voting important even though she has doubts about how elections are conducted, she said.
“They’re never fair when it comes down to voting,” she said. “We just vote, but I don’t know if our vote really matters or not — or if they already have who they want selected.”
The Post-ABC-Ipsos poll was conducted online Oct. 9-13 among 2,545 U.S. adults nationwide reached through the Ipsos KnowledgePanel, an ongoing panel of U.S. households recruited by mail using random sampling methods. Overall results have a margin of error of plus or minus two percentage points; the error margin is plus or minus 2.8 points for the half-sample questions asked of 1,271-1,274 U.S. adults about their perceptions of the fairness of the midterms. The sample was weighted to match population demographics, 2024 turnout/vote choice and political partisanship.
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