Millions of Americans believe that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. They think Donald Trump won by a landslide in 2020 and lost only because of widespread voter fraud. Some of the people who hold these views are my relatives, neighbors and professional associates. Because I reject these claims, it can be difficult to talk to those who accept them.

Often, we avoid the topic of politics. But as a political science scholar, I expect that as the 2024 election gets closer, conversations about 2020 will become more common, more important and more unavoidable.

So, what does someone like me, who concludes that the last presidential election was legitimately won by Joe Biden, say to those who think that Trump was the actual winner? Here are a few of the questions I raise in my own conversations about 2020.

I usually begin by asking about polls. Polls and pollsters are often wrong about close elections, and many prominent pollsters tilt toward Democrats. They predicted a Hillary Clinton victory in 2016.

But even those polls and pollsters would be unlikely to have missed a 2020 landslide for Trump – or Biden. Unless, of course, as was the case, the landslide did not exist.

Recent political polling has been less accurate than many people expect. And all polls have margins of error: They provide an imperfect picture of public sentiment in a closely divided nation.

That said, even polls with a sizable margin of error should have been able to find a Trump landslide in 2020 – but they didn’t, because there wasn’t one. The last American presidential landslide, Reagan in 1984, was clearly seen in preelection polling.

If millions of fraudulent votes were cast in 2020, reputable pollsters would have discovered a discrepancy between their data and official election results. This would have been particularly true for the pollsters trusted by Republicans.

Trump himself has often praised the Rasmussen polling organization. But just before Election Day 2020, Rasmussen reported that Trump could win a narrow victory in the Electoral College only if he swept all the toss-up states – a daunting task. Rasmussen found no evidence of a forthcoming Trump landslide and projected that Biden would get 51% of the national popular vote. That’s almost exactly the percentage he received in the official count.

The House Republicans have not convened a special committee to investigate the 2020 election. Such a committee could summon witnesses, hold high-profile hearings and issue a detailed report. It could explain to the American people exactly what happened in the presidential election, how the election was stolen and who was responsible. If the evidence collected justified it, they could make criminal referrals to the Justice Department. The Democrats did all of these things in connection to the events of Jan. 6, 2021.

...continued