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More than 50% of Republicans believe Donald Trump is 'rightful' US President
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More than 50% of Republicans believe Donald Trump is 'rightful' US President

THE MAJORITY of Republican voters believe that Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election and that he should rightfully still be in the White House, according to a new poll.

Data from a survey ran by Reuters-Ipsos shows that 53% believe that the results of the election were impacted by illegal voting and fraud, and that Mr Trump is the 'true president', in spite of Joe Biden's victory.

Perhaps surprisingly, some 3% of Democrats also said that they believed Trump was the 'true president'.

More than 2000 people took part in the survey, which was a mix of Democrat, Republican and Independent voters, and overall, 75% of respondents said they believed Mr Biden was the rightful president - although considerably more Democrats (909) took part than Republicans (754).

But there appears to still be a large section of Republican voters who are convinced that foul play affected the results of the election, some six months on.

Nearly two-thirds (61%) of them think the 2020 vote was 'stolen' from Trump, despite there being no concrete evidence to prove anything, while 56% of Republicans said they thought 'illegal voting' or 'election rigging' had taken place.

In the run up to the election, Mr Trump claimed that there would be election tampering, and even before the polls closed he began making claims that the election was being stolen, infamously tweeting "STOP THE COUNT" late in the day on November 3.

The election was plagued by suggestions that mail-in ballots would cause widespread problems, including making votes easier to be tampered with, and just 30% of Republicans said they felt confident that mail-in ballots were accurately counted, compared with 86% of Democrats.

Trump's continued insistence that the election was 'rigged' ultimately led to the Capitol riots on January 6 which left five people dead, including one police officer, after Trump supporters stormed the Capitol building in an attempt to stop Congress certifying Mt Biden's victory.

On the subject, the poll shows that 65% of Republicans say that they either 'somewhat disagree' or 'strongly disagree' that Mr Trump was at least partly to blame for the riot.

In contrast, 86% of Democrats felt he was responsible for the violence, while 61% of independents felts the same.