Poll: Half of Republicans would support postponing 2020 election

After years of baseless conspiracy theories aimed at scaring Republican voters into thinking voter fraud was a real problem (it wasn’t) and that it would steal their elections, a new poll reveals the predictable results:

Claims of large-scale voter fraud are not true, but that has not stopped a substantial number of Republicans from believing them. But how far would Republicans be willing to follow the president to stop what they perceive as rampant fraud? Our recent survey suggests that the answer is quite far: About half of Republicans say they would support postponing the 2020 presidential election until the country can fix this problem.

[…]

Moreover, 52 percent said that they would support postponing the 2020 election, and 56 percent said they would do so if both Trump and Republicans in Congress proposed this.

Not surprisingly, beliefs about the 2016 election and voter fraud were correlated with support for postponement. People who believed that Trump won the popular vote, that there were millions of illegal votes in 2016, or that voter fraud is not rare were more likely to support postponing the election. This support was also more prevalent among Republicans who were younger, were less educated, had less factual knowledge of politics and strongly identified with the party.

That a significant fraction of the electorate might be fine with the sitting president upending the Constitution to remain sitting a while longer, and all because of their mostly self-fed diet of “illegal votes” bullshit, is already damning enough. But it’s all the richer when you remember that these are the same people who’ve spent the last several years peddling equally baseless fears that President Obama might do the very same thing. Right Wing Watch lays it out:

WorldNetDaily, the website that was the chief driver of the racist “birther” myth, also had a sideline in stories about ways that Obama might manage to stay in office beyond his second term. One WND story speculated that Obama “planned” riots in Baltimore as a step toward instituting martial law, forming a “national police force” and postponing the 2016 elections. Another warned that Obama might use the Ebola virus to create chaos in the country, declare martial law, and cancel the election. WND’s editor, Joseph Farah, repeatedly warned that Obama might find a way to stay in office whether Trump or Hillary Clinton won the election.

When WND asked Ben Carson, then considering his own run for president, “Who would stop Obama from remaining in office past his second term?,” Carson played along.

Alan Keyes, who was Obama’s Republican opponent in the 2004 Illinois Senate race, warned that Obama might use a nuclear war as a pretext to stay in office. Televangelist Jim Bakker and radio hosts Michael Savage, Alex Jones and Rush Limbaugh also expressed their concerns about a third Obama term. Paid email blasts went out to the subscribers of several conservative websites warning of some unspecified event that “could propel Obama to a near-unprecedented third term.” In early 2015, a spokesman for the Family Research Council assured worried callers to the group’s radio program that there was “a whole host of people lined up ready to help make sure” that Obama would leave office in 2017, adding that a third Obama term was “a concern” of his as well.

The militia group Oath Keepers repeatedly warned of efforts to cancel the 2016 election if attempts to elect Clinton by nefarious means started to fail.

How times have changed.

Indeed. After all, preventing Obama from staying on past the end of his second term (something he never showed the slightest interest in) was crucial in order to safeguard democracy and the republic itself from his evil commie ways, or something. But when it comes to Trump, suddenly term limits are more malleable if it means rooting out nonexistent voter fraud. Apparently, toying with the 22^nd Amendment is only worth opposing if it might be done by a Democratic president who doesn’t want to do it. Or something.

Really, there’s a lot of “or somethings” when it comes to Republicans these days. It’s as if their focus was as muddled as are their principles.