It’s always a bit hard to know what to make of polls of such wild questions. But Yahoo Finance used SurveyMonkey to poll all voters and particularly Republicans about whether or not they think it’s okay for Russia to help the Republican party in US elections. Trumpers have long been edging their way toward a “collusion is awesome” defense for some time. They’re in luck. Republicans are basically already there. Here are the numbers.
Looking toward the 2018 midterm, 11% of Republicans say it’s “appropriate” for Russia to help the GOP maintain control of Congress. Another 29% say it’s “not appropriate but wouldn’t be a big deal.” So fully 40% of Republicans, according to this poll, either think Russian election is assistance is actually great or at least aren’t going to lose any sleep over it.
Here are results about 2016 …
As you can see, only a quarter of Republicans (26%) think it happened and that it’s a problem. 31% think it’s great or not a problem. I don’t really take at face value when people say they don’t think Russia tried to meddle in the 2016 election. I think that’s more a statement of defiance, a de facto ‘I don’t care’, than a statement of factual belief. So overwhelmingly, Republicans either don’t care or simply refuse to believe any evidence at all.
What’s also notable is that Republicans seem more supportive of Russian interference going forward than they do in retrospect. As the write-up explains, this difference may be an artifact of the different structure of the questions about 2018. For 2018, the poll asked partisans of each party whether it would be okay if Russia helped their party win. Here are the results.
