Most voters think former President Donald Trump will not concede if he loses the 2024 presidential election, according to a new CNN poll conducted by SSRS, with a sizable minority of his backers saying losing candidates have no obligation to do so. And should legal challenges related to the election find their way to the Supreme Court, a majority of all voters has little or no confidence in the high court to make the right decisions.
Overall, just 30% of registered voters think Trump will accept the results of the election and concede if he loses, while 73% say that Vice President Kamala Harris would accept an election loss.
Most registered voters (54%) believe that Harris would concede if she lost and that Trump would not, while 18% say that both candidates would do so, 15% that neither of them would, and only 11% that Harris would not concede but Trump would.
Homing in on each candidate’s supporters, a near-universal 97% of Harris supporters expect her to concede if she loses, while a much smaller 57% majority of Trump’s supporters believe he would acknowledge a loss.
That 57% represents an uptick from July, when just half of Trump’s supporters thought he would concede a loss – a shift that comes even as his campaign has laid the groundwork to weaken confidence in America’s election system and claim victory regardless of the results in November.
Harris supporters are broadly unified in their perceptions of what the candidates would do: More than 9 in 10 Harris supporters say that she would concede, but that Trump would not (92%).
Most Trump supporters think both candidates would handle the situation the same way, but they’re split over which way that would be: Thirty-three percent say both would concede, 26% that neither would. About a quarter (24%) of Trump backers say the former president would concede while Harris would not, and just 15% that Trump would not concede while Harris would.
In general, the vast majority of American voters support the basic principle that candidates have an obligation to accept the results of elections, with 88% saying that losing candidates have an obligation to concede once the results are certified in every state and 12% saying they do not. But that rises to 20% among registered voters who support Trump, compared with only 3% who feel that way among Harris supporters.
A 56% majority of registered voters say they have just some or no trust in the Supreme Court to make the right decisions on any legal cases relating to the 2024 election, little changed from January. There’s a substantial political split, with Trump supporters roughly twice as likely as Harris supporters to express at least a moderate amount of trust in the court, 61% to 31%.
Trust in the court lags among younger voters, with just 8% of voters younger than 35 saying they have a great deal of trust in the court to make decisions on the 2024 election, compared with 21% among voters ages 65 or older. Black voters (9% a great deal of trust), Democrats (4%) and liberal voters (5%) also express minimal trust in the court.
The CNN Poll was conducted by SSRS online and by telephone October 20-23, 2024, among 1,704 registered voters nationwide drawn from a probability-based panel. Likely voters include all registered voters in the poll weighted for their predicted likelihood of voting in this year’s election. Results for the full sample of registered voters have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.2 percentage points; it is 3.1 for likely voters, and larger for subgroups.
CNN’s Edward Wu contributed to this report.
