Trump supporters in denial

On the one hand, this article by William Saletan at Slate gives cause for some optimism about the majority of the American population not being nuts:

Donald Trump might be in denial about who won the 2020 election, but his pollsters aren’t. Two of them have performed autopsies on his defeat, and those autopsies are now public. One of his pollsters, John McLaughlin, published an analysis in Newsmax in November. Another report, written by consultant Tony Fabrizio, was posted on Monday by Politico. Neither pollster blames the former president, but their numbers tell the story: Trump destroyed himself.

The autopsies identified two reasons why Trump should have won. First, based on self-identification, the 2020 electorate was significantly more Republican than the 2016 electorate. Second, public satisfaction with the economy favored the incumbent. Both pollsters found that people who voted in 2020 thought Trump would handle the economy better than Joe Biden would. McLaughlin’s analysis, based on his post-election survey of people who voted in 2020, noted that 61 percent of these voters said they were better off than they had been four years earlier. Despite this, Trump managed to lose one-third of the 61 percent. “Fully 20% of all voters thought they were better off today than four years ago and did not vote for President Trump,” McLaughlin wrote.

Fabrizio analyzed exit polls from 10 battleground states Trump had won in 2016. Florida, Iowa, North Carolina, Ohio, and Texas stayed with Trump in 2020; Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin flipped to Biden. Collectively, in the 10 states, Fabrizio computed a “massive swing” against Trump among independents (by 17 to 19 percentage points) and a similar shift among college-educated white voters (by 14 to 18 points). Likewise, in his national sample, McLaughlin found that Biden won moderates, 62 percent to 36 percent.

Trump repelled these voters, even those who were happy with the economy. In McLaughlin’s national sample, Biden was viewed more favorably than Trump. Among voters who disliked both candidates, the pollster noted, “dislike of Trump was more dominant.” Three-quarters of Biden voters cited character or personality traits as reasons for their voting decisions, and the reasons they gave were “mostly anti-Trump,” McLaughlin wrote. Seven percent of respondents said they had voted mostly “against Biden,” but 19 percent said they had voted mostly “against Trump.”

Fabrizio found similar results. In the battleground states, voters said by a four-point margin that Biden wasn’t “honest and trustworthy.” Trump’s deficit on the same question was much bigger: 14 to 18 points. The exit polls also indicated that Trump inspired millions of new voters to turn out, either in person or by mail, to get rid of him. Fabrizio noted that collectively, in the five states that flipped to Biden, Trump outpolled Biden among people who had voted in 2016. What killed Trump were the new voters. Biden won them by 14 points in the five decisive states.

On the other hand - it's depressing to know that the Trump cultist base is still in complete denial that their cult leader is unpopular and that this alone accounts for his loss.

I would guess that this is not going to be cured until top GOP figures bite the bullet and start telling the base, that they fear, some home truths.

The extent of the GOP takeover by the cultists in denial is discussed in this article from Daily Kos, which starts:

It’s becoming much clearer why Republicans in Congress are so reluctant to acknowledge factual reality—such as the reality that Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election fairly, or that Donald Trump incited a mob that attacked Congress and ransacked the U.S. Capitol—and have doubled down on their embrace of anti-democratic disinformation that fueled the insurrection. If the Republicans dare admit any of it is real, they risk the insane wrath of the millions of GOP voters out there who have wholly swallowed all that false Trumpian propaganda.

That’s become especially self-evident among Republicans at the state and local levels throughout the country in the weeks since the Jan. 6 riot. As Hunter recently explained, the GOP at the ground level not only has fully embraced the conspiracist rot that Trump promoted after he lost, but it also has become even more openly extreme than it was before the election. Liz Cheney is now finding that out.

It ends with the point that (sorry) I keep coming back to, but it is so obviously true:

This is what Barack Obama adroitly describes as America’s “epistemological crisis.” It will not stop happening as long as there are news organs that traffic in falsehoods as a profit model, and who devote 24 hours a day, seven days a week of broadcast time to using those lies to coach half of the nation on how and why to hate the other half—and politicians gleefully profiting from it as well.