46 percent of voters say Trump should concede immediately: poll

A plurality of voters say President Trump should concede the presidential race to President-elect Joe Biden, according to a new Politico/Morning Consult poll released Tuesday. 

Forty-six percent of registered voters surveyed said Trump should concede “right away,” while another 32 percent said he should concede if he is “unable to back up his claims of widespread fraud.” Just 12 percent said the president should not concede “no matter what,” and 9 percent didn’t know or had no opinion. 

The results of the poll are sharply split along partisan lines, with 72 percent of Democrats saying Trump should concede right away compared to just 17 percent of Republicans. Nearly half (45 percent) of Republicans said Trump should only concede if he can’t back up his voter fraud claims, and a full quarter of registered GOP voters say Trump should not concede no matter what. 

The results of the survey come two weeks after the Nov. 3 election. 

Trump has refused to concede that he lost the race, and he and the Republican Party have flooded battleground states with lawsuits looking to overturn the election results, though the vast majority of those suits have been rebuffed by state and federal courts, and congressional Republicans have begun to show signs of recognizing that Biden will begin his term in January. 

GOP officials in a number of the states being contested by Trump are among those who have have defended the processes in their states. It Georgia, that’s led to battles among Republican office-holders.

Biden is projected to win 306 Electoral College votes to Trump’s 232 electoral votes. He has a more than 5 million-vote lead in the popular vote.

Trump would likely need to flip at least three states to change the outcome. He is behind by tens of thousands of votes in the states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

The Politico/Morning Consult poll surveyed 1,994 registered voters from Nov. 13-16 and has a margin of error of 2 points.

This story was updated at 12:19 p.m.