Poll: Most of the Elite Are Okay With Cheating to Win Elections

Pollster Scott Rasmussen described it as “the most terrifying poll result I’ve ever seen.” It was a simple survey that he put into the field covering an issue that has been an ongoing subject of hot debate at least since 2020. He asked voters if they would rather have their candidate lose an election by playing fair or win by cheating. Overall, the good news was that “only” seven percent of respondents said that they would rather win by cheating. But when you dig into the cross tabs and look at the demographics, a frightening reality emerges. Those who counted themselves in the top one percent of earners (in other words, “the elite”) demonstrated a much higher willingness to cheat rather than lose a race fair and square. That group of people comprise some of the largest political donors and they overwhelmingly vote Democratic. (Issues & Insights)

Earlier this year, pollster Scott Rasmussen asked voters a simple question: “Would you rather have your candidate win by cheating or lose by playing fair?”

The answers he got back were, as he put it in a Daily Signal podcast last week, “the most terrifying poll result I’ve ever seen.”

Among all Americans, just 7% said they would want their candidate to win by cheating. As Rasmussen put it, he’d rather see that number lower, but that’s not bad.

But more than a third of the elite 1% he surveyed would condone cheating.

The prospective cheaters earn more than $150,000 per year and primarily live in larger urban areas. Unlike most of the rest of the country, more than one-third of them were okay with election fraud if it delivered a victory. And among those who self-identified as being “politically obsessed” (meaning they talk about politics on an almost daily basis), a stunning 69% said they would be okay with cheating in the election.

That wasn’t the end of the bad news when it came to this elite group of activists. More than half said there is “too much individual freedom in America.” More than two-thirds said they were “in favor of rationing energy and food” to combat climate change. (Of course, these are the people who will still be able to afford to eat whatever they wish.) The same two-thirds margin said that they would prefer teachers and education officials to determine what is taught to children rather than their parents. 

I would call these results shocking if we didn’t already know that there were people like this out there. Look no further than the results of the latest Bridgeport Connecticut mayoral elections (plural because they had to redo them because of widespread voter fraud). It’s almost certainly not the wealthy themselves stuffing the ballot boxes and filling out fraudulent registrations. But their wealth would allow them to enlist the help of others who would be willing to do the dirty work. 

If you think that these sorts of attacks on the electoral system only happen in Bridgeport, upstate New York, and New Orleans, you’re simply fooling yourself. Those are just the places where people managed to get caught. This survey is telling us something that we already knew, or at least we should have known. There is a certain percentage of the population that is willing to cheat during elections if it improves their party’s chances of winning. And the easier you make it to cheat, the more likely it will be that someone will show up and try. Massive levels of mail-in voting and remote ballot drop boxes facilitate such efforts. Looking at the demographics in Rasmusson’s poll, we probably shouldn’t be surprised that the vast majority of those types of “voting reform” efforts are seen in blue states.