60% of GOP voters think election was stolen; 50% think 1/6 riot was non-violent or done by leftists

[Person Man]

Jan. 6 was largely a non-violent protest, that is a statement of fact

Pollsters asking people what they "believe" at a given moment (as opposed to more overt behavior, like voting intention) is designed to generate results like this.  Much to Atlas' surprise, most normal people do not spend their free time racking their brains about the causes and effects of events like 1/6.  Calling it a non-violent protest or the handiwork of left-wing agitators isn't really a statement of positive belief that an individual has arrived at after assessing some level of (dis)information, it's used only to signal which "team" the respondent plays for (and this is the inherent danger of NYT and WaPo continuing to give QAnon so much unearned attention; the more mainstream liberals turn it into a partisan bludgeon, the more defense of it will become a rallying cry for run-of-the-mill Republicans - it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.)

That sentence alone makes Republicans look far worse, petty, and downright stupid than anything I've ever typed about them. Congrats.

But Democrats do it too, as lfromnj pointed out above, over two-thirds of Democrats believe that Russia tampered with vote tallies to get Donald Trump elected in 2016* - a belief that is just as indisputably misaligned with the facts as believing the Jan. 6 riots were mostly the work of BLM or antifa



My axiom holds for both the left and right:  if media, in their all-consuming quest to garner clicks/views and drive narratives of division - amplify certain stories beyond what is reasonable (i.e., Russian interference, QAnon, etc.) then partisans will come to traffick in them regardless of their factual standing. 

*this is, FWIW, a lie that top Democrats like Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi pushed just as brazenly as Trump did his claims of election interference after 2020

Can we stay on subject?

[Person Man]

Did they? Did they consistently claim for months that Russia actually *changed vote tallies*?

Of course they didn't. Del Tachi is "carrying water" right now.

The Russians did a lot of their dirty tricks on their own by stealing emails from Trump's opponents and giving them to anarchists to publish them in a way that would give the opposition campaign continuous negative news coverage. They did not actually physically change a single vote once they were cast. Trump's campaign tried to hire Russian intelligence for opposition research and Trump at least constructively knew about it but the Trump Campaign wasn't able to directly hire the Russians to do what they did on their own anyway.



So no. I don't believe 2016 was stolen but I do believe what happened afterwards was appropriate.