CNN senior data reporter Harry Enten said Monday that voters did not care much about the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot during the 2024 presidential election.
The number of American voters believing President-elect Donald Trump should be ineligible to re-enter office because of the events at the U.S. Capitol dropped from 56% to 47% over the past four years, Enten said. A large shift of Americans further changed their minds on whether Trump was responsible for the events that took place, decreasing from 48% in January 2021 to 37% in December 2023.
“If you go back four years ago, Trump’s role on January 6, 2021 should make him ineligible to be president, the clear majority of voters said yes, 56%, and that was including removal from office,” Enten said. “But of course Donald Trump won the presidency, and part of the reason why was because views on Trump completely shifted, including Trump’s role on January 6, 2021 … by 2023 [and] 2024, it was just 47%. So we saw this drop of about 9 points and that of course makes all the difference in the world, going from a majority to short of a majority. And of course, Trump won the vast, vast, vast majority of the other 53% that his role on January 6 would make him ineligible for the presidency.”
Other than Americans shifting their views on whether Trump bore responsibility, voters simply stopped caring about the riot that occurred that day ahead of the 2024 election. By the election, just 5% of Americans and 2% of Republicans believed the riot was their main memory of Trump’s first term.
“People, simply put, didn’t care as much about the attack on the Capitol,” Enten continued. “Look at this, ‘January 6th is your biggest memory of Trump’s first term.’ By the time of 2024, look at this. It was just 5%, just 5% of Americans, and among Republicans it was just 2%. So the bottomline is, fewer Americans faulted Donald Trump, thought he was greatly responsible for the January 6 attack, and more than that, when it went in the rear view mirror, far fewer folks thought that it was their number one memory.”
President Joe Biden’s administration and the liberal media simultaneously warned that Trump would be an existential threat to democracy if he reentered office largely due to the Capitol riot. Shortly before the election, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre cited the riot as evidence that Trump is a “fascist” and is a threat to the nation during an Oct. 23 briefing.
The Biden campaign alleged in a June ad that Trump was an “instigator of an insurrection” and is “pledging to pardon the extremists who tried to overthrow our government,” though a poll published by The Hill found that more undecided swing-state voters trusted Trump over Biden to better handle threats to American democracy.
Congress is set to certify the electoral votes that handed Trump a victory Monday afternoon. Nearly all Republican voters, 94%, believe the votes in the 2024 election were counted accurately, a 63-point increase from the number of voters who held this view about the voting count in 2020, Enten said.
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