A majority of voters in swing states do not believe Donald Trump will accept defeat if he loses next week’s presidential election and fear that his supporters will turn to violence in an attempt to install him in power, a new poll suggests.
The survey, conducted by George Mason University and the Washington Post, found that far fewer voters harboured similar fears about Kamala Harris.
The findings highlight the rising tensions ahead of next Tuesday’s election. The campaign has featured two failed assassination attempts on Trump, the ex-president and Republican nominee who has raised the rhetorical temperature by casting his domestic opponents as “the enemy from within” and threatened to seek retribution against them.
Harris, the Democratic nominee, has increasingly depicted the contest as being about democracy itself, while publicly agreeing with the portrayal by others, including Trump’s former White House chief of staff John Kelly, of her opponent as a “fascist”.
More than 5,000 voters in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Georgia, Nevada and Arizona – battleground states broadly deemed as key to winning the election – participated in the poll in the first two weeks of October, as campaigning intensified.
Some 57% reported feeling very or somewhat concerned that Trump’s supporters would resort to violence if he loses. Two-thirds believe he will not accept the result if Harris wins.
By contrast, only 31% feared violence in the event of a Harris victory, while two in three voters were confident she would accept defeat.
The figures reflect the contrasting public stances of the candidates towards the electoral process. While Harris had declared she has confidence, Trump has stoked baseless claims about voter fraud, while suggesting he could only lose if there was cheating.
He has also given deliberately vague responses to questions about whether he would accept the result, saying he would do so if the poll was “free and fair”.
His posture has fuelled fears of a reprise of his refusal to accept his 2020 loss to Joe Biden, when he tried to stop the certification of the results in Congress and inspired a violent mob to attack the US Capitol.
In a somewhat contradictory finding, the survey found that Trump outscored Harris, 43% to 40%, on which candidate was trusted more to protect democracy.
Mark Rozell, dean of George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government, said that particular result “boggles my mind”.
“Consider what happened on January 6,” he told the Washington Post. “Trump’s refusal to accept the outcome of a presidential election, the outgoing president refused to participate in the inauguration of the incoming president. And yet, there was no clear majority saying that Mr. Trump is a bigger threat to democracy than his opponent.”
While 45% of swing state voters believed Trump would try to rule as a dictator – compared with 19% for Harris – a large majority, 81% (including 73% of Harris supporters), voiced optimism that Congress or the US supreme court would prevent this from happening.
Trump has previously said he would act as a dictator “only on day one”, while the supreme court – which has a rightwing majority of 6-3 thanks to Trump installing three very conservative judges when he was president – ruled in June that presidents have extensive immunity from prosecution for criminal acts conducted in the course of their duties.
Constitutional scholars and historians have told the Guardian that Trump’s vows to pursue his enemies – including a call this week for Jack Smith, the special prosecutor investigating Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election, to be “thrown out of the country” – and threats to use the military against domestic opponents represent a departure from democratic norms and the rule of law.
Rozell called the overall survey results “discouraging”.
“It tells us we’ve lost a lot in a very short period of time, that we cannot assume that people will accept the legitimacy of the outcome of an election, and that a peaceful transfer of power is something that just automatically happens here,” he said.
