Will Trump and Harris concede election if they lose? What Americans said in new poll
Most Americans believe former President Donald Trump will not concede the 2024 election if he loses, according to a new poll, which comes just days before Election Day.
In the latest CNN/SSRS poll, 69% of respondents said that, should Trump lose, he will not “accept the results and concede once the votes have been certified.”
Less than one-third of respondents, 30%, said they believed the former president would concede in this scenario.
In contrast, 73% said they believed Vice President Kamala Harris would acknowledge and accept her own defeat, while 26% said she would not do so.
The vast majority of respondents, 88%, also said that, once the states have certified their votes, the loser of the election has a responsibility to concede. A small share, 12%, said the loser does not have this obligation.
Conducted between Oct. 20 and 23, the poll sampled 1,704 U.S. adults and has a margin of error of 3.18 percentage points.
The poll also asked respondents for their opinions on the U.S. Supreme Court and the role it could play in the 2024 election.
Forty-four percent said they had a great deal or a moderate amount of trust in the court to “make the right decisions on any legal cases” related to the election.
Thirty-one percent of respondents said they had just some trust, and 25% said they had none at all.
The poll echoes the findings of an October Pew Research Center survey in which 74% of respondents said Trump would not concede if he loses. Seventy-two percent said they believed Harris would concede if she loses.
Trump — who is neck-and-neck with Harris in most polls — has baselessly cast doubt on the integrity of the upcoming election and has declined to say outright whether he would accept the outcome.
“If everything’s honest, I’ll gladly accept the results. I don’t change on that,” Trump said in May, according to CNN. “If it’s not, you have to fight for the right of the country.”
Harris has called the former president a threat to democracy and said he would seek “unchecked power in his second term.”
Trump has also falsely claimed he won the 2020 election against President Joe Biden and has been criminally indicted for allegedly attempting to overturn the results.
This story was originally published October 28, 2024 at 12:45 PM with the headline "Will Trump and Harris concede election if they lose? What Americans said in new poll."