Are Republicans Trolling Pollsters?

Anytime you are met with poll or survey results, remember that the Lizardman’s Constant is 4%.

So with that in mind, an Ipsos poll finds that only 27% of Republicans (pg. 8) believe that Biden legitimately won the 2020 election. 21% of Republicans don’t know if it’s true or false, but 52% believed it was a false statement.

So are Republicans just fucking with pollsters or does a significant majority genuinely believe the election fraud claims?

I think there's certainly some true believers, but for the most part it's most likely motivated reasoning and tribalism. My evidence for this assertion is how quickly people like Lou Dobbs and American Thinker capitulated when they received defamation letters from Dominion Voting Systems. Lying is fine when it's free, but not when you're looking down the barrel of an unusually robust multi-million dollar defamation lawsuit.

For the rest of the claims, there's a lot of motte-and-baileying going on, and this is most emblematic by the slippery term "irregularities". It can mean basically anything you want. You can just say the election had "irregularities" and that's technically true, and you give yourself a ton of leeway to fill in the blanks later. At the bare minimum scenario, a fair and free election that saw voting demographics shift because of completely legal mail-in ballot changes can still be labeled as an example of "irregularities".

I agree with that if you actually honest to god believe the election was stolen in the literal sense by trucking Biden ballots into convention centers, or dumping Trump ballots into creeks, or using algorithms to inject ballots in the middle of the night, or etc etc you should rationally want to storm the Capitol because that's the best casus belli I can imagine to launch a revolution in a country heralded as a bastion of democracy. Some people did on January 6th, and I have to admire the intellectual consistency they displayed. But unfortunately, the people most susceptible to believing the election was stolen despite no judge agreeing with them appear to also positively correlate with incompetence when it comes to launching a revolution.