Poll: 46 percent say Trump should concede 'right away'

A plurality of voters believe President Donald Trump should immediately admit defeat to President-elect Joe Biden, according to a new POLITICO/Morning Consult poll, while just under half of Republican respondents said Trump should concede the 2020 election if he cannot eventually produce evidence to support his baseless claims of widespread voter fraud.

The poll, published Tuesday, reports that 46 percent of registered voters think Trump should concede to Biden “right away.” That total includes 72 percent of Democrats surveyed, 43 percent of independents surveyed and 17 percent of Republicans surveyed.

Another 32 percent of registered voters say Trump should concede the election “eventually if he is unable to back up” his mass fraud claims. In favor of that position are 21 percent of Democratic respondents, 34 percent of independent respondents and 45 percent of Republican respondents.

But 12 percent of registered voters polled believe Trump should refuse to concede to Biden “no matter what” — including 3 percent of Democrats polled, 8 percent of independents polled and 27 percent of Republicans polled — while 9 percent of registered voters surveyed say they do not know or have no opinion.

The results of the survey come two weeks after Election Day, as Trump continues to mount legal challenges to election results in several swing states and repeats his unsubstantiated allegations that he was cheated out of a second term.

Despite Trump’s defiance, congressional Republicans have shown some signs of accepting the election’s outcome in recent days, with a few of the party’s lawmakers acknowledging Biden as the winner and a group of high-ranking GOP senators arguing that the president-elect should be provided intelligence briefings.

Compared to the previous version of the POLITICO/Morning Consult poll published last week, however, roughly the same majority of Republican respondents do not have confidence that the election was conducted properly.

Last week’s survey showed that 60 percent of registered voters thought the election was “free and fair,” and 34 percent of registered voters thought it was not — including 70 percent of Republicans polled.

Those numbers remain mostly unchanged in the latest survey, with 62 percent of registered voters saying the election was “free and fair,” 33 percent of registered voters saying it was not, and 67 percent of Republicans polled saying it was not.

The POLITICO/Morning Consult poll was conducted Nov. 13-16, surveying 1,994 registered voters with a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 2 percentage points.

Morning Consult is a global data intelligence company, delivering insights on what people think in real time by surveying tens of thousands across the globe every single day. More details on the poll and its methodology can be found in these two documents: Toplines | Crosstabs