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Good news, patriots! American voters have finally found something they can agree about: Their candidate is going to win in November. That’s according to a new survey by Bright Line Watch, a group of researchers who, since 2017, have been tracking the state of American democracy and potential threats to it. The survey finds some hopeful news about Americans’ faith in elections, but it also offers stark warning signs about threats to democracy that could arise if there’s a huge mismatch between voters’ expectations and the ultimate winner of the election.

The new survey asked about 2,700 people how they plan to vote in the presidential election. As with most polls, the results revealed a close race, with 46 percent of respondents saying they’d vote for Trump, while 49 percent will pull the lever for Vice President Kamala Harris. The researchers weren’t interested in only the horse race, though. They wanted to explore likely voters’ expectations for the election outcome. That’s because they have found that, as was the case in 2020, unexpected results tend to drive fraud and malfeasance around elections and mistrust in the integrity of the system.

The survey found that nearly 90 percent of both Republicans and Democrats expect their candidate to prevail in November. Sizable minorities also believe their candidate will win in a blowout. Nearly 40 percent of Republicans and more than a quarter of Democrats believe that their candidate will win by “quite a lot.” That disparity between outcomes and expectations, particularly among the most partisan media consumers, can make voters on the losing side vulnerable to the sorts of misinformation and conspiracy theories spread by Trump and his supporters’ 2020 “Stop the Steal” campaign that laid the groundwork for the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol.

“You can absolutely imagine something similar”........

© Mother Jones